Tell God I Don’t Exist
by Timmy Reed
Underrated Animals Press, 2013
92 pages / $12.00 buy from Underrated Animals Press

1. The album Shrines by Purity Ring is easily in my top five albums from the past five years. When I hear the lush electronic wooziness of songs like “Fineshrine” I feel like I’m being hugged—enwrapped in a surreal, dreamy blanket of sound.

2. When I read Timmy Reed’s Tell God I Don’t Exist I get a similar sensation.

3. These stories are hazy fever dreams, ecstatic jokes, deviant fairy tales.

4. When describing this collection the word twee comes to mind.

5. Twee is so often taken as derogatory, but this collection is saccharine sweet in a good way.

6. There’s a lot of handholding in these stories.

7. There’s a lot of candy, too:

“We eat licorice shoelaces and wayward mosquitoes, but we mostly eat sweets. We scarf cannolis. We munch crullers. We visit the snowball stand in bare feet and sleep next to pitchers of lemonade. We grow fat on melancholy pastries. We sweat sugar in the sun. We speak, through a saccharine haze, of taking vitamins. We speak in the past tense of the future as if it were part of a childhood dream.”

8. I found this inside my copy of the book:

9. I really hope everyone’s copy comes with a print that tells them that Timmy Reed (in all likelihood) loves them, because it’s true.

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