Crazy by Han Nolan

Crazy is a story about a guy who is scared to death that he'll end up insane like his dad.

His dad doesn't work, but can be found pulling his own teeth, attempting to listen to the radio while fully clothed in the bathtub, or running around with an ancient roman helmet on his head and tinfoil on his ears to keep out the Furie's voices.

The Furies, by the way, are Medusa and her two sisters. All three have snakes for hair and can turn a man to stone with a glance.

Every time the boy, whose name is Jason (for Jason and the Argonauts) comes home, he gets asked "Apollo! Any news from the front?" His middle name, by the way, is Apollo.

Did I mention the dad is Greek?

When he was six, his dad buried him alive so the Furies wouldn't get him. He was saved by his mother, but he still gets nightmares, especially since his mother had a stroke and passed away. She was a wedding and nature photographer, and the one who brought most of the money into the house. His father's few books on Greece didn't make much money.

Nowadays, he and his father live in an old house that's always cold because the heating is too expensive. There is almost no furniture, because Jason had to sell it all in order to buy food, which there is very little of at this point. He is a growing teenager and the only real food he gets is from the school lunch program.

He's trying his hardest to take care of his father and keep him out of the mental hospital, while at the same time battling his own mental issues. He has no friends, and trusts no one due to an incident in the fifth grade. Instead of friends, he has an audience and laugh track in his head. Yes, you read that right, an audience and a laugh track. Oh, and you're in there too. The audience is more or less his conscience, his confidence, his insanity, and his common sense, but he named them.

Rather than blend in like he wants to, he keeps acting up in school, getting the teacher's attention. Not in any mean way, he just does stupid stuff, like mess up the dates on all his papers and call Captain Ahab "Cap'n Ahab" when he was writing about Moby Dick.

He got warning after warning and finally his grades dropped and he started flunking everything, and now he's being sent to the school psychologist because the dates he's picking are the same dates as those when his mother got the stroke and died.

Things are not looking up in Jason's point of view. All he wants is to be left alone with his audience and take care of his dad, but now he's expected to share secrets with a group of other kids with family problems.

Overall, it's a good coming of age story, but if I give away any more, you'll have no reason to read it!

 Crazy doesn't belong to me, I'm not Han Nolan, nor am I crazy myself.

-Kj