From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson by Zack Darsee & Elise Houcek

On the first page of From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson, the “speaker” (Flangan) asks: “Was anything true, in fact?” This question speaks to Flanagan’s existential state as he proceeds to enter some form of a trip that, on my reading, lasts essentially until the fifty-third page (only to begin again, or re-intensify several pages later). 

This question also speaks to the reader’s state as they long to pull some “sense” from the book itself. Billed as a detective novel, Agent Dickinson uses that genre’s archetypes, imagery, and common objects just enough to get away with using the label. Indeed, just as frequently as you read lines as if pulled from a campy detective show with an avant-garde twist (“Girls, they whistle, though whistling not, as awoken were shields with serif S.O.S.’s fonts, calling blue, tangle day, a bluish piercing foreign on disturbance, fostered shield, now, is that signage saying blue? Who is that, substance, Sheriff Raphael, who??”), you get caught in sweeps of online and/or reality show-like language that I have not encountered in “literary space” before:

Are you ready for my birthday party????? A polio boy zooms thru our centerpiece, standoff no, orgasm, he, Excalibur, who arrested, is the polio boy. I am sick! Can I believe love! I could not believe the Excalibur! Hung to forever! Stir me

Here I am now, in Italy. I’m a lady. I have two spots. A hole.

Here I am, now, defaced.

I’m looking around here, superfluous facility on fleek for appearance, widening chutes near the frays, would sooner diet in public Italy than die across pubic ads. Ya! This is fun! I like diva cups!

I’m really trying hard here, now, Agent D. Stop. I just wanna give famous. Guides just wanna give Harley. Quail. Suck for eggnog, for clues, for ergonomic, just give LSD! To myself? Stop. No (giggles). 

Look at:

Trees altogether arousal machines, source-plugs doused in source-spirits, backdrop brand deals, big-ass turnips. Trees, source-spirits mooning trails, teetotaling as spinal monks into blacktop supermarkets, blackmarket supercops, frail chokehold pearl bits in Lightbeing Trillicent’s armpit like if skies were follicle bits. I know! Look is a feeler! He is not sociable nor does journey remit jukebox to eyes, or else! Hahahahahahaha the blouse, like are lesbians perfect, laced or suggestions, is, this time, on fire.

In the ensuing 10 pages, an image of a checkerboard, 3 Instagram reel stills, and a cat with a peapod for a torso, appear, as Flanagan asks questions like “COuld I be dead? If I scramble myself, oiled, in vitriolic kitchen, doth anything rise around bourbon’s beak?” He then proceeds to write out a recipe for bourbon’s beak that includes pinto sheaths, baby doll glasses, the gallbladder of an iPhone, a bile pill, and a “hill sash,” and profess his love for Diane—a character, as in Twin Peaks, who our detective pages frequently but doesn’t meet (at least in the first two seasons).

It was after I stopped trying to really “figure out” what was happening to instead feel the wild emanations of the style that, oddly enough, a storyline began to faintly appear. SPOILER ALERT: The book opens with Flanagan opening a URL from "hothearts" and chatting with the usernames “Heyheyhey69” and “99blueballoons.” Like most archetypical male detectives on TV, it’s unclear whether Flanagan is there to find some… “companionship” in his lonely, partner-less (because he has to work so hard) motel existence, or to do some research into a sordid underground crime syndicate. (Or is it both?) Either way, in the correspondence involving the two aforementioned usernames, we learn of “Lightbeings,” 21 of which are declared to have disappeared some pages later. Whatever happened to the light beings, and what that has to do with Barcloons, is our ostensible mystery. 

With the air of suddenly being on the precipice of something, Flanagan loses it, exclaiming “Where is my email?! Where am I absolutely coming to now?” and descends into the monomaniacal stream that lasts for another 45-plus pages. At one point, “CRIMES” are listed, but this is the “evidence” we get: “Spiritual lurkers arranged in ethernet swill, the brain reformulates its tulip lager into what bottles krill well, are personalities rain? Thick as so-called furious? It was interpretation? Which pegasus shades? Why? A signal, a dripping faberge egg, I lock the house just on porpoise luck it deranges all constants’ face.” 

Then, Flanagan comes to, realizing he was “tricked, blimey” into taking LSD (“who forgot the self, my purpose become elf. Agents surrounded my presentation and I thought I died. Down a tree.”) by Agent Dickinson, who he vows to get back at. Has Flanagan happened onto something hidden, MK Ultra-esque? Is Flanagan himself the subject of an experiment? “Was anything true, in fact?”

Flanagan heads off to another hotel room to ambush Agent D, leading to this exceptionally lucid scene: 

My motel-apartment is strewn with papers. I think of a movie. A movie about chickens on a farm. I think the movie is called Chicken Run. I would like to watch that movie, but I don’t want to be alone. That movie is the dark side of whatever I just saw in Agent D. I need confirmation.

I go to the fencepost. Yes, in fact, there are chickens there. There is a farm on the other side of my motel, turns out. Just next to the casino. Wet dirt. Tons of eyeballs. Or poker tokens.

Do I free them? Or do I just watch. 

I watch.

They are exchanging them. 

The chickens are organizing a game. It appears to be a putt putt tournament, or something like it. A hybrid of poker and minigolf. At this point, I realize my plan has backfired. 

I get naked. I arrange chicken shit in little triangles. Then I run to the center. Then I run into the building. Then I run into the store. Then I run into the metal. Then I run into the cage. Then I run into the water dish. Then I run into a shell. Then I run into myself. Then I run into a snail. Then I run into a well. Then I run into a hell. Then I run up the stairs. Then I run into a silence. Then I run into the board. Then I run into my life’s highlights. Then I run into a granary. Then I run into a door. Then I run into a warehouse. Then I run into—

NEW LIFE AS PERSONAL LOBOTMOY BOY (SPONSINO) OF AGENT D IN THE ELFRAUM

But once in the ELFRAUM, things go (somehow even more) haywire. Between moments of radical acceptance and just giving in to the flow—

Let’s go. I take orders as they come. We dance like hoes and before we’re done I’m eating breakfast. I’m in love with the grandpa clock. It rocks. In my belly, receipts. Socks. Me go in the jacuzzi, time to share. We all get in my underwear.

I pinch elf hoofs into dreamcatchers. I am the creamcatcher. I am the cream.—

Flanagan is arrested. In fact, by the book’s end, Flanagan may have even died, and he looks on at a CIA meeting: “I’ve lost but learned, lived but earnt, burned but turnt, abjured but furred. Perked. I’m begging myself for clary sage. I’m beginning for an early salary, now that Im dead, but have solved nothing.” Graphics like the following ensue

and the book ends with an index (that defines nothing, only pushing the rhythmic syntax further) printed on pages watermarked with images of hay.

The blurbs and general PR surrounding Agent Dickinson frequently speak of the book in terms of a psychedelic trip. Speaking of many of the same substances Flanagan imbibes—albeit not of his own volition (so he says)—Sturgill Simpson sings: “Some say you might go crazy, then again it might make you go sane.” Whereas contact with deeper reality should lead to feelings of health and wholeness in Simpson's reading, Agent Dickinson articulates that state as one of irony, verbosity, and confusion, resulting less in a liberation of the reader’s perspective than, as the website description of the book has it, an intensification of the feeling of “overwhelm of the Media Age.” 

Indeed, the variety of strategies used by Darsee and Houcek—linguistic and otherwise, including writing the book “word-for-word in alternation”—bring this overwhelm into the “book” in a truly novel way, creating a literary object commensurate with a world where contacting reality more likely leads to going insane than to feeling whole. Are we all becoming Agent Flanagan? 

Buy it here.