About

When you hit rock bottom, sink your fingers in the earth and scratch around a little Be sure it's actually rock you've hit, that there isn't a floor beneath the floor to which you've fallen here's almost always a greater distance you could drop.

Austen Bandy thought his life had cratered ut that was before his brain injury and the seizures painter without patron or public, Austen's unsold grotesques line the walls of his bungalow like a barricade in reverse.

At least Emily likes his work ut Emily is long gone, and with her Austen's inspiration Since his divorce, Austen measures his days in integers: zero clients, one friend, twelve-packs of beer.

Is life has collapsed into two dimensions: he travels a line that begins at his house and ends at the shabby apparel store where he works, printing stock images on T-shirts for fewer and fewer customers, deviating from this path only when the booze runs dry After Austen stumbles in a liquor store parking lot, hitting rock bottom turns horrifically literal e wakes in the hospital to find his head heavily bandaged and his temporal lobe on the fritz But it isn't the intubation that bothers him, or the doctors exuding strictly professional concern, or even the seizures themselves o, its a shimmer: a shimmer of pure silver, sentient and motile, that only he can see At first this liquid apparition, an artifact of Austen's accident, surely, only teases the corner of his vision, a trick of the light ut then it appears in dark places, too: his morning coffee, the impasto of his paintings, the holes in his head The thing is implacable, insistent, and then violent efore long Austen is a haunted, hunted man, never sure when hell next be invaded, never sure what it is that invades him or why Reality, once sturdy, is now crazed with nightmares ream and reality flow together, and perception itself cant be trusted Is what Austen sees even real, or is it just a figment of his bad, bruised brain athe Koja's Bad Brains is a novel about the madness of inspiration and the ecstasy of art Its about the dark recesses from which ideas arise and the danger of going into those places n a fractured syntax that makes Austen's possession palpably real, Koja posits that the only thing worse than losing ones creativity is squandering its gifts.

Edition Details

• Limited to 500 signed copies.
• Signed by Kathe Koja and David Ho.
• Artwork by David Ho, including dustjacket, frontispiece, endpapers, and interior illustrations.
• Top-edge stain.
• Ribbon marker, head and tail bands, bound in Brillianta black cloth.
• Smyth-sewn binding.
• Book size 5¼ × 8¾ inches.
• Number of pages: 304.