BadBadBad
by Jesus Angel Garcia
New Pulp Press, 2011
ISBN 978-0982843635, 240 pp., $14.95

Jesus Angel Garcia's BadBadBad challenges everything down to its own title. The first-person narrator, called JAG for short, shares the name of the man who birthed the work, just one of many rule's Garcia bends, asking the reader to question what is allowed, and to recognize how blurry the line is between fiction and life, good and bad.

Cut off from his young son, JAG lands a job mopping the floors of the First Church of the Church before Church. The Pastor's Texan seductress wife takes JAG under her wing and convinces her husband to hire JAG to create the Church's website, including recording sermons and managing the online chat board. By night, JAG transforms into an Internet savior on the hookup site fallenangels, using his fumbling hands to heal other lost souls in front of the backdrop of the Dirty South. Garcia smashes these two worlds together so that they become mirror images of one another, reflecting unseen truths and exposing disturbing similarities

The novel serves as a confession, a haunting love letter to JAG's distant brother and unreachable son as he lays his sins out before the reader. Fumbling and fucking up, JAG blazes forward in search of identity and connection, unable to stop himself even when his actions bring great pain and destruction. The novel attacks weighty issues of faith, identity, judgment, loss, and what we ask of God and man in the dark. It asks how much we are willing to absorb, to stand, in order to find others and ourselves in a life that feels increasingly like walking through a sludge filled fun house.

People come in and out of the novel continuously and effortlessly, asking great things of JAG and the reader alike. To sooth them, to understand them, to condemn or resolve them. The greatest human transactions occur between JAG and the broken women he meets on fallenangels. They are presented, their sins and all, so honestly that the reader may wish to look away:

In the photo she's peering out between the bars of one of the three cribs making rounds at the playpen....She whined for me to take her downstairs to the Petting Zoo, where dozens of glittery folks in various states of undress watched us in silence. She told me to tell her to suck it. 'Suck it Lil_Girl' I said, feeling sick to my stomach (118)

But it is in their honest portrayal that the reader feels resolution. The beauty of the novel is the no apology presentation of the painful and grotesque underbelly of our world, alongside the inelegant beauty of humans struggling to connect within it:

There's a bashful glance between us that could be interpreted as flirting or the hopeful moment before upchucking when you still think you won't....Finally, our lips meet, our eyes blocking out the noise of the world. A golden halo rings our head. We seem innocent, and powerful. I have to admit it's a sweet image (119).

Garcia's fierce presentation of JAG's experiences is also matched by his sharp, economic prose. Every sentence is filled with words that bite and pack a punch, leaving the reader pricked and bruised but wanting more, much like JAG's fellow fallenangels. Garcia gives the reader something exciting to play with, words that feel good and wake up tired tongues. His images are electric and consuming, precisely painting the complex web of politics, pop-culture and human relationships the novel handles:

Cosmic slop and jungle scree, eviscerated gospel, balls-out rock: sliced, diced, shred then broiled with ox tail and country sausage (26).

The novel experiences its pitfalls when Garcia wanders away from scene and plays with long periods of exposition. Like JAG himself, as the novel continues, its structure and identity becomes more and more confused, and we lose the sharp clarity that holds it together. Pages detailing more lost souls start to detract from the heartbeat of the novel—JAG's own desperation. Some gore seems too much, as if the idea is more important than the reality or meaning behind. Headers appear over sections of the novel switching the format to snapshot glimpses into some of JAG's experiences and on-line chats are typed out on the page, without any detailed action. These many switches can confuse until JAG is lost underneath the sludge.

However, this also serves to illuminate the true theme of the novel, that we are all implicated, and that there is no real difference between JAG and Garcia, or JAG and the reader. As a reader, we are not allowed to sit back and observe, instead Garcia forces us to feel the desperation of our cringe-worthy world, and therefore, its beauty as well. This is not a cleaned up presentation of life, it is life as we experience it in the moments of our greatest mistakes: it is confused, brutal, with a clarifying honesty that can shake us to our core

In Garcia's own words BadBadBad's "poetry [is] intoxicating, her frankness almost shocking and, in truth, a little intimidating" (46). Any supposed missteps can also be interpreted as Garcia throwing the reader's rigid expectations of right and wrong back in our faces. If for nothing else, BadBadBad is a worthwhile read in it that it pushes the limits and offers a snapshot of humanity that will burn and excite the reader with its challenges.—Sierra Troy-Regier