So raise a glass to the paranoid, the grandiose, the delusional, the obsessive. Raise a glass to the author who replied to your polite rejection email with a 10,000-word treatise on how you are a pawn of the psychic vampires. They are annoying, exhausting, and often wrong.
Of course, there is a dark side. Not every nut job is a Burroughs or a Pound. Many are just bigots with word processors. The line between “outsider visionary” and “hateful crank” is thin and bloody. The manifesto of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski ( Industrial Society and Its Future ), is a perfectly logical, brilliantly argued, utterly insane text. It is also a blueprint for murder. The literary world has a hard time with this. We want our crazies to be lovable, like crying about the Dharma Bums. We don’t want them building bombs.
But without them, we’d only have books that make sense. And who wants to live in a world that makes sense? J. S. Latham is a critic and recovering literary journalist. He owns a first edition of “The Atrocity Exhibition” and is currently 400 pages into a self-published novel about time-traveling bees. nut jobs author
But the true Nut Jobs Author does not live in the past. They are publishing right now, on obscure presses or Amazon Kindle Direct, sending screeds to literary magazines that delete them unread.
Because the Nut Jobs Author offers something that the well-adjusted novelist cannot: certainty in the face of chaos . The sane novelist asks questions. The nut job provides answers. Ugly, beautiful, terrifying, stupid answers. When the world feels random—when politics is a farce and the news is a horror show—there is a perverse comfort in diving into a fully realized alternate reality, even a psychotic one. So raise a glass to the paranoid, the
The distinction, perhaps, lies in humor and self-awareness. The great Nut Jobs Author usually retains a sliver of the trickster. They know, on some level, that they are performing madness. Burroughs was grimly funny. Pynchon hides from cameras. Even Pound, in his later years, recanted his fascism. The dangerous nut job has no humor. The great nut job is a court jester with a knife.
In the hushed, orderly halls of literary culture, the term “nut job” is an insult. In the smoky backrooms of cult fandom, it is a badge of honor. The Nut Jobs Author is the figure who has broken through the polite constraints of genre, sanity, and plausibility, dragging the reader into a labyrinth built from equal parts genius and delusion. They are the paranoid, the messianic, the fabulists who have come to believe their own metaphors. And literature is better—stranger, fiercer, more alive—because of them. Of course, there is a dark side
To understand the species, we must break it down. There are three primary archetypes of the Nut Jobs Author.