Hot Off The Presses is a moribund creative writing project by a failed book reviewer, who has pivoted to being a failed short story writer. Check out the archive to see a hater cook.

If you are prone to obsessive compulsive behavior, I cannot stress this enough: stay away from self publishing. I can’t say how well Anthony Hopkins portrayed a person with autism in Rain Man, but it’s a spot-on depiction of my relationship with the refresh button when I’m staring at Amazon ad reports. Once I check one book to see if it has any new ratings or reviews, I have to check them all, and I’d better do it an even number of times, unless I want disaster to befall my house for a hundred generations.

One day I was performing a perfectly normal and psychologically healthy task of reading everything Amazon decided to show alongside one of my short stories, when something unusual caught my eye. In the “customers also purchased” section I found Eliot Bedingfield the man with two heads, and now I need to know which of you weirdos did this.

Eliot Bedingfield the man with two heads by Omer Arad is meandering but tight, thoughtful but incomprehensible. It exists solely for the author, yet remains unfinished. In many ways, it reminded me of Rutchit: The Adventure Begins in the way it never apologizes for your inability to make sense of it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Who is, Eliot Bedingfield the man with two heads?

In the near future… OK, I should point out, this is one of those stories that started serialized on Wattpad and evolved into something you can read in one chunk on your Kindle, so some of the world building is not consistent and all I can say about the time is that it’s not the present, and it’s not Discovery season 3 future times either. Eliot Bedingfield is either one person with two heads, or two brothers who share a single body. If that seems to be a weird thing for the story to be ambiguous about, then I’m so sorry. I am so, so sorry but you have to shut up it’s only page 1.

Eliot Bedingfield is/are a man/men who lives in Tel Aviv, a place which definitely, absolutely is going to exist just fine in the near future whydoyouask. He works at a toy factory, where he’s considered so disturbing to people that they make him paint “colored dolls for thinking games and sports activities” in the corner. After a brief spiritual orgasm nightmare and failure by a home robot to fix the shower, the Eliot(s) find their job taken by a sexbot. Now. If your first question was “a what nightmare?” Please proceed to paragraph A. If your first question was “why a sexbot,” please proceed to paragraph B.

A. There are some supernatural elements to the story, but I’ll be damned if I can explain what or why they are.

B. So she can shoot lasers from her tits later. It’s only page 2; please stop looking at me like that.

This kicks off Eliot(’s/s’) odyssey across the futuristic Israeli city, finding love, podcasting, and a flashback from the perspective of, and told by, a bed.

First thing’s first. There’s no prize for being the person who is annoyed by the most things, but allow me a victory lap anyway. I hate it, the way a medium sized town hates other nearby medium sized towns, when people say the setting is a character in the story. Oh, wow, Gladys. So glad you came to book club. What a thought-provoking insight that the place where a story takes place has features, characteristics, and an impact on the events of the story. Tell us more about your son’s “girlfriend who’s a boy.” A good setting will complement a good plot, and a fun setting may be enough reason on its own for me to read a book (looking at you, every queer YA romance set in Corset Times). But it’s not a character, and in a story so well stocked with insane character developments, we don’t need it to be.

I say that, because given… events, you know, current ones, the fact that the story takes place in Israel inevitably loitered in the front of my mind while I read this. Arad’s narrative presents a place defined by the boons and evils of technological progress more than anything else. Characters talk about “the civilized world,” and all the people and things that come from Europe or America. Eliot himself is a Jewish transplant from London. Religion doesn’t come up explicitly until more than halfway through the story, when Eliot says he came to Israel, “the land of tolerance,” to be treated like less of a freak. Since his plan did not work in the slightest, I have no idea if the author expects us to take the phrase “land of tolerance” at face value. This is not the only aspect of Eliot Bedingfield the man with two heads that had me scratching my singular head. Every chapter found a new way to make me wonder “why is this here, what is the artistic message?” Because there definitely is one. Whatever Omer Arad is shouting at me, he is having a great time shouting it.

Which brings me to the prose. English language self and indie publishing is full of ESL authors doing amazing things with a less than perfect grasp of a language which is, to put it charitably, ten pounds of contradictions in a five pound sack. So I’m not accustomed to judge a work by how many wavy blue lines it would have in a Word document. But I need to mention it here, because Omer Arad is the Neil Breen of written English. Through the mistakes, a kind of accidental mastery shines forth, both dazzling my senses and rendering me completely blind. Let me explain.

When a native speaker reads English, the process of what educators call “decoding” is largely automated. You didn’t sound out any words in this sentence, and you probably couldn’t say how many grammatical rules I followed when writing it. But if what I swapped two words? Or misspelled a wrod? This forces your brain to open the cobweb encrusted filing cabinet of third grade reading skills and fish out the folder on “proper spelling and word order.” It breaks automaticity, and brings your whole conscious mind down onto the page. Normally this is a thankless task that just makes me tired after a few pages, but not so when Omer Arad is in charge. Because sprinkled between the “take your sit, please” and “feet fingers” and “a sharp teeth” that force my brain to lean in, are cartoon extendo-boxing gloves in the form of phrases like “coal vomit” and “mixed trash salad.” What does “advanced canyons” mean? My mind would have glossed right over that if I hadn’t been working to parse “the robot wants to crash us.”

Every page of Eliot Bedingfield the man with two heads propelled me to the next, though I cannot say if it was because I was entertained, or because I wanted to know if it was going to suddenly make sense just around the corner. Whichever one of you bought this thing after my sci-fi comedy schlock, I don’t fully understand how you choose books, but please never change. Unfortunately, while I can certainly recommend the book to anyone looking for something different, I must warn you that Arad seems to have lost interest in his work around 2017, and we currently have no conclusion to the story. Perhaps if enough people take an interest, we can persuade him to give us more Eliot Bedington the man with two heads. You can read it on Wattpad, or buy it on Amazon.