Shunpiking Online Vo.3 No.2 Making sense of the world on your own By Patrick Edwards-Daugherty

Lockpick Pornography
by Joey Comeau
Published October, 2005
134 pages
CDN $10
ISBN 0-9739171-0-5

EQUAL PARTS SATIRE AND ADVENTURE, Lockpick Pornography embeds us with an angry underdog. "I'm tired of the moral high ground," he tells his friend as they plot to vandalize symbols of condescending tolerance in social order.

New author and web comic artist Joey Comeau titles his first published novel dangerously, for the salacious creatures that we are, we grip immediately to its juicy second word.

Naturally, however, the story is not pornographic. The knack of porn writers for evocative titles guarantees endless variation without resort to a censor's word. There is sex in Lockpick Pornography, and it is raunchy and queer, but it is not on erotic display - no strip tease, no money shot.

Sex bills double in this work; first as a pastime of the four major characters, second as a theatre in their rebellion against identity. As much as erotic desire does contribute to who these friends are, the four also make it a point to reject sexual tags - whether straight, gay, bisexual, or otherwise. They identify as gender-queer rebels, sex-identity nihilists. They detest the gay scene as much as they do a moral majority represented in the right-wing media personality of Dr. Verge. They mock the scripted behaviour of people in roles whether social or sexual. In one scene, the main character calls down the service-rehearsed manager of a fast food outlet to insist a soft drink has made him gay.

Call it a gender-queer adventure novel, but Lockpick Pornography also tells a coming of age story. Its ark follows the young heroes through their escalating hijinks and the distractions they chase along the way. Sometime anarchists, not even their own plans rule them. They pursue whatever strikes them that moment as mysterious, beautiful, or shocking. As the story climaxes in a sketchy kidnapping, the main character wanders away to follow an atmospheric laser beam to its source.

Outsiders - and angry ones - they are, yet the four retain a childlike sense of wonder toward the world and its secrets. Their jaunts spring out of curiosity and a refusal to remain complacent in the face of the unexplored, the unknown, the off-limits, or the taboo. Even the political motivations of their missions subvert into pure fun, rebellion, and self-discovery.

This returns us to the first word of the title. "Picking locks," as the narrator tells one boy, "is a way of making sense of the world on your own, without people explaining what things are for." In the present Comeau depicts, increasingly forbidden to the young, the poor, and the sexual non-conformist, lockpicks become an outcast's only access to the places and spoils of privilege.

The author published this work, himself, as an outsider. His primary marketing tool has been word of mouth, his friends in the web comic community, and notices at his comic strip, www.asofterworld.com. Denied a student loan, he serialized the first seven chapters through his blog, and earned tuition. His readers bought a sufficient quantity of advance copies to finance a printing run, and he continues to sell the novel online throughout the United States and Canada.

Although a number of independent booksellers in Halifax do carry the novel, like most authors, Comeau has no access to the chain stores that dominate book retail, and has seen disappointing attention from the local "mainstream" media. He intends to perform a series of readings across the continent, and to meet his readers. Traveling light and cheap, he expects to break even, widen his audience, and find adventure off the main road.

Purchase online at http://www.lockpickbook.net/
or in Halifax at: Venus Envy, Bookmark, United Bookstores, Outside the Lines