Kris Ellis’ debut novel follows Matt Pearce, OCD sufferer, low-achiever, film fanatic and Jack Kerouac enthusiast, who reaches an existential crossroads. He finds himself looking back on a life thus far of dead-end jobs, binge drinking, encounters with aggressive locals, sessions with therapists, and failed relationships with alluring but ‘head-doing’ young teenage girls.
When one of these relationships, with an abused teenager called S., goes badly wrong, Matt flees the country and undertakes a Greyhound bus journey across the USA, partly to escape from S., partly as a pilgrimage to Kerouac’s final resting place, partly to pitch his draft indie movie script to an unsuspecting Hollywood, but mostly to find himself.
Matt's journey takes him from New York to Los Angeles via stopovers in Boston, Lowell, Chicago and Las Vegas. He travels across a variegated geographical and mental landscape which provides him with edgy encounters and glimpses of an existential NOW amidst flashbacks from his childhood, adolescence in Freetown, formative relationships with Mona, Alice and S., Socratic dialogues with his ‘head doctor’, movie-making ambitions and struggling attempts to write his own life script.
temporoparietal is a candid, semi-documentary teenage beat novel, told through the hand-held camera-pen of its young adult narrator. The story is written in an experimental colloquial style resembling a philosophical, vigorously delivered stand-up comedy routine about being alive and young in the modern world. Author Kris Ellis describes his protagonist’s state of consciousness as existing somewhere between Holden Caulfield and Bill Hicks. Influenced by J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac and Michel Houellebecq, temporoparietal will appeal to readers looking for an edgy, thought-provoking contemporary novel exploring modern youth in search of its soul.
