The Nix

We return to Summer, 2011. Samuel’s editor, Guy Periwinkle, calls him from Disney World. Guy relishes to the immersive interactive theme park with its relentlessly update message that the world is sunnier than we suspect “How can a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?” (335). Periwinkle presses Samuel to get the book into print to capitalize on his mother’s notoriety. He is as well curious about Samuel’s decade-long writer’ block.

Samuel narrates the story of his block as a Choose Your Own Adventure narrative in which the character Samuel chooses one step at a time to become entangled in his infatuation with Bethany. Bethany, a violinist, attends Julliard in New York City while Samuel matriculates at the University of Illinois as a creative writing major. Samuel endures her departure, seeing in this the kind of tragic experience necessary to become a writer: “It gives you a rich inner life fantasizing about all the ways you might not have screwed it up” (344).

However, his apprentice stories avoid directly investigating his obsession. Samuel’s decidedly lurid story that recreates the poisoning of a school headmaster, however, intrigues his professor. It is only in writing the story that Samuel, searching for

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