I wrote this about two years ago. I remember that is was inspired by something Professor Elemental said – but whether it was that he very much wanted to read a story with this title, or never wanted to read one, I cannot recall. I don’t always respond well to people going ‘never do this’ if I think it will be funny… it was originally posted to Patreon – many thanks to everyone who helps fun me doing this sort of daftness.
Being a grim and troubling novel, set upon the island of Hopeless Maine. Great mystery surrounds this novel, including the mystery of why the author ever let anyone else read it, and the mystery of what on earth was even going on in the final chapter.
Chapter one: It begins in gore. Our central character is liberated from his mother’s exhausted body by people who know nothing about caesareans, but who once had a drunken conversation about the procedure with Doc Willoughby. Despite the two heads, the child is only given one name.
Chapter two: In which very little happens that is memorable, but we learn that Jim Chevin’s two headed status is likely the consequence of there being too little variety in his gene pool. Things are muttered darkly, but no one comes out with it and says ‘incest’ as it’s clearly more gothic to just imply that.
Chapter three: Jim Chevin grows up feeling angry and misunderstood. He expresses this through inexplicable acts of weirdness towards sea creatures. We assume the author means us to sympathise with his condition but most likely it will just make you feel a bit queasy about whelks.
Chapter four: Jim Chevin graduates to doing fairly sinister things with chickens. He also does peculiar things with feathers that may or may not be a metaphor for his troubled inner life. No one around him cares. The reader probably doesn’t care either and only struggles on because the book hype promised “unspeakable horrors that will literally make you cack yourself.” And who can resist the lure of that kind of marketing?
Chapter five: In which there are unspeakable horrors and you cack yourself.
Chapter six: This chapter seems to have been written carelessly and in haste, perhaps in the assumption that no one would make it beyond the shocking events of chapter five. However, at this point there is, finally, a brief mention of the one eyed goat.
Chapter seven: This chapter is an unexpected climax for the story, pitting man (well, Jim) against nature (the goat) and it seems to belong in an entirely different sort of novel. The sort of novel in which men battle giant otters, angry fish, unreasonable landscapes and so forth. Jim confronts his lifelong nemesis, the one eyed goat. None of the preceding chapters in any way support this plot development. Man and goat are involved in an epic, cliff top battle. The goat plunges to his doom in the sea. In a strange act of continuity, whelks are involved.
Chapter eight: This chapter gives every impression of having been written by someone else entirely – someone who only read the title and not the rest of the book. This author expounds at length on the various moral and philosophical truths we can take from the story of two headed Jim and the death of the one eyed goat. The word ‘pathos’ is used seventeen times in this chapter, while the term ‘over intellectualising’ doesn’t even come up once.
