Tombstoned: Appendix B
Sundae Mourning: The Unlikely Inspiration for Duvall’s ‘Tombstoned’
Some writers are inspired by the thrill of new love. Some painters, the art in a common face. Musicians, the beat of our hearts.
The mysterious muse.
For Wyatt Duvall that inspiration was “Two Girls One Cup,” the infamous viral video that shocked the online world and unleashed the reaction video era.
In Duvall’s “Tombstoned,” the tile-inspired devices in Peru Nikalas’s apartment catastrophically malfunction, drowning the world in our most debased desires.
It is also a new reality of superheroes, dark elves, and dancing cybernetic chimpanzees.
And given that this global phenomenon was unleashed by two Pomeranians, it makes a certain sense that the world from that point on would, as Duvall writes, “smell like asshole.”
It’s not a sophisticated joke. Perhaps not even a good one.
But what if this wasn’t a joke?
What if it was a declaration?
A promise from the author to take us on a journey into the abyss, the figurative asshole of our collective minds.
In “Tombstoned” Duvall charts a journey fraught with danger, but also transcendence: the act of rising up by falling down, face first into feces.
Once completed, the reader emerges from the mire with a better understanding of who we are and the common bond we all share:
“Everybody poops.”
To quote the immortal words of Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi.
It’s a refrain that permeates the entirety of “Tombstoned,” a work which is, “120 Days of Sodom” notwithstanding, more infatuated with the anus than any other work of art.
The name of the fictional city in “Tombstoned” even denotes the ass of the world: Hellsboro, a.k.a. “Hell’s Burrow,” the hole from which all shit flows.
And that hole is our home.
In the case of PiscesBaby69, the hole is the center of who he is: the bowels from which he expels putrid hot air thoughts and declarations.
More often than not, it’s just Duvall’s go-to way to get readers to laugh or squirm.
Early drafts of “Tombstoned” feature far more instances in which Duvall leaned on the scatological to elicit a laugh, make a point, or simply to close out a scene.
Over the course of numerous revisions, Duvall toned down the many references to defecation and the sphincter.
In fact, he softened the work to such a degree readers of the current draft of “Tombstoned” will be surprised by what they find in the earlier piece: a work so riddled with potty humor the pages are little more than streams of diarrhetic invective.
In fact, they are so foul one might be tempted to place their nose to the page and see if the words themselves smell.
Most notably, the now-excised Chapter VIII which consisted of all the euphemisms for “shit” that Duvall could find, while the rarely seen, “Intermission,” is, in essence, 50 brown sequential pages.
While much of those earlier drafts would have added little to the final version of “Tombstoned,” many fans of the book take comfort knowing just how far Duvall was willing to go into the abyss, the great asshole of the world, to comment upon the age in which we occasionally live.
— Clay Templeton
(Published in The Pacific Press, December 11, 2022)