Journey Through the Riotous Dark: A Campus Romantic Comedy by Gary Marks

Novel. Author: Gary Marks

2010

Genre: Voice-driven literary fiction


Sub-Genre: Campus novel / romantic comedy / suspense

A rebellious college student falls in love with the campus’s most beautiful comedic outcast—only to uncover a secret that reframes every joke, every lie, and every moment of desire.

Read Journey Through the Riotous Dark:

A Rebel, a Comedian and a College Town

Shannon attends a typical college in a typical college town, neither of which he cares to name. He's a wannabe hedonist. He shrugs off his girlfriend's affair with a history teacher because he feels like at his age he's supposed to be too young to care. His cynicism about school and life is hilariously easy to relate to. But the book belongs to Clair.

Clair is a comedic school rebel who makes Shannon laugh, then makes him wonder where the joke is leading, because there’s usually a trap door.

The more Shannon falls in, and falls in love, and insists on knowing her, the more he finds out there is a cost.

Norman—Clair's blunt, profane childhood friend—plays the book’s resident prophet of gloom —the guy who knows how every love story ends. He also knows how theirs will end, because he holds her secret.

In this psychologically intense romantic comedy, everyone assumes that Shannon and Clair's relationship will either follow path A, B, C, or D — until the trap door opens.

Spontaneous Transmission

Allen Ginsberg's improvisational writing classes were built around the philosophy of capturing the "unedited movements of the unconscious mind"—a technique heavily inspired by Jack Kerouac's "spontaneous prose," with its core mantra: "First thought, best thought."

This is the way Marks not only writes songs on piano and guitar, but the way he has produced most of his novels and novellas -- more than twenty in all.

Journey Through the Riotous Dark lets his spontaneous writing run at full throttle, with Marks saying he had no outline, no idea what the characters were going to do, and what was going to happen until the ending showed up.

The plot often moves like a dream from one scene to the next. His imagery, life philosophies, and character development all flow from the belief that not knowing where you’re going artistically can often produce the most honest work.

Journey Through the Riotous Dark races through twists and turns with an ending so unexpected, it not only shocks the reader, it shocked Marks as well.

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