Having first come to Bradley Sands work by a chance collision with a slim book titled Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, (a disjointed collection of prose and other things which almost resemble poems) I had essentially no expectations when it came to Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face. Sands defies even the term “non sequitor” because for one that is too fancy of a word and two implies that there is some reasonable way of categorizing what he does. With this is in mind, I had a hard time figuring out how Sands would construct a novel.
The answer is yes.
The novel moves in the jerky movements of Sands’s shorter prose yet bewilderingly maintains a linear structure throughout. Characters’ homes explode or fly into a McDonald’s franchise competing in a city-wide demolition derby and most of them make it out alive. A man falls out of a 300 story building and survives by having his fall broken by a pile of pigeon leavings. A boy detective is sawed in half by his divorcing parents only to become an even better detective. An overweight ninja has few combat skills other than his “silent but extremely deadly” flatulence. In between all of these outlandish plot progressions the boy detective repeatedly breaks the fourth wall in conversations with Bradley Sands hoping to detect the theme of his novel while insisting this is actually a collection of novellas; the latter vehemently disagrees. Miraculously I was able to read the book in one very comfortable sitting and was actually convinced I had read something that makes sense.
In the midst of all this are not so subtle critiques made about life in general. Think Stephen Colbert style satire meets Jim Carey pre-Eternal Sunshine. In the novel’s middle and …
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