Lone Voices

The author of this obscure work poses an important question, one that remains unanswered almost 50 years after his book was published. Why, indeed, Must Husbands Be So Dumb?

Unfortunately you are unlikely to learn any answers from reading this work. If anything you are likely to be more confused than you were previously. Before you have even opened it you will be wondering What The Hell Is Wayne Groves Barrows Going On About?

The Human Puppet is the sad story of a disintegrated mind: a woman convinced that she is being controlled by hypnotic forces emanating from one of her work colleagues. The disturbing fact that while in this clearly delusional state she was employed as a hospital nurse gives her narrative a most peculiar character, one in which her paranoid fantasies are interwoven with the icky mundanities of caring for the ill and infirm.

Since the nineteenth century a number of writers have questioned whether William Shakespeare actually wrote the works attributed to him, for one reason or another finding it hard to believe that the humble, practical, Stratford man could have authored plays and poems of such towering genius. (As is well known, all great works are created by university-educated, upper-class types).

My interest in the man who called himself Frank Nimrod began when I chanced on an item listed in an online catalogue, a book called Solved Riddles: Elementary Mass, Material Mass, Momentum-Energy-Continuity. Seeing that it was self-published, I ordered it immediately: self-published science books with strange titles I find irresistible. I didn't realise it would start me on a new mission: to collect the works of one of the oddest authors I've encountered.

Solved Riddles

(The Author, San Francisco, 1964. Stapled loose sheets. 68pp.)