These Books Will Change Your Life - Crystal Eaters by the Shane Jones and Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours by the Luke B. Goebel.

"A myth is a myth."

This line comes early in Crystal Eaters the touching, mind-fuck of a novel by Shane Jones. While this is an apt description for what both Jones and Luke B. Goebel in Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, his own touching, mind-fuck of novel, are trying to achieve - the former with a sparse, trippy, sci-fi exploration of family, trauma and how we try to convince ourselves what is necessary to our collective and individual survival, and the latter, a trippy, beat rumination - where the words pile and build on one another - on, well, family, and trauma, and what is necessary for survival as well - it is also an apt description for our fanboy need to find these books, absorb them, and learn something more about the authors and the mythic writer qualities we found ourselves ascribing to them beforehand.
 

So, there are the books, and they tell us something about road trips and death and sex and siblings and parents. And throughout there is craft, and words, and they come at us in a rush, pushing until there is no more, and they, and we, are done, books read, myths expanded, energy absorbed. All of which takes us back to a time before all of this, back when we hoped to one day meet writers and engorge ourselves on whatever made them what they were, spinners of story, and word, the things we loved, and love, so very much.