Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish

Mike Kleine was born in Dakar, Senegal in 1988. He is the author of several texts, including Mastodon Farm (Atlatl Press), Arafat Mountain (Atlatl Press) and Kanley Stubrick (We Heard You Like Books). In 2017, he wrote a 100,000-word computer-generated novel in five days for the “Castle Freak Residency”, titled, Lonely Men Club (Inside the Castle), about a time-traveling manifestation of the Zodiac Killer. He wrote the play, The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish (Plays Inverse) which was staged in 2016 as a one-time performance, at Berl's Poetry Shop in Brooklyn, NY. He also co-created the interactive poem, WE R THE WORLD, with author Dan Hoy for the 2019 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, where it won the audience award for Most Bizarre. He then released, Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don't Make A Sound (Trnsfr Books) in 2021—again with author Dan Hoy—a mystery novel starring detectives Daniel and Michael, who must work together to solve a murder on planet Earth. He has released a handful of chaps, burnin' oceans. (surfaces.cx), Karaoke Night at Daisuke's (SLFFCK) and most recently, agbogbloshie (Private Release). He also created a hypertext project about the year 1996, titled, xyzzy (Always Crashing). He currently lives and works in Iowa.

Wild, nonsensical, possibly cursed, and almost certainly unperformable, Mike Kleine's The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish reads like a transcript of Raymond Roussel's deathbed confession or a fever dream taking place somewhere just outside the frame of a David Lynch film. — James Tadd Adcox, author of Does Not LoveAny attempt to stage Mike Kleine's The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish might trigger the apocalypse. Kleine has accomplished something rare with this book: the page itself becomes a kind of theatre, a dadaist take on the drawing room play juxtaposed with lists that would make Rabelais jealous, menacing prophecies, and characters so unstable even their names won't stay in place. — Christian TeBordo, author of ToughlahomaIn The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish, stuff explodes without a sound, morphing into bits of coloured paper. Nothing is where it belongs. Nothing is where you expect it to be. Black men appear out of the sun then disappear a moment later. No one remains who they are for very long. Characters constantly change their names. Stage directions include occurrences that no one can see. You'll come away believing—and even hungering for—the stuff that has always been right there in front of you, stuff that you'll never see or hear or touch or feel, stuff you can only imagine, stuff whose very power lies in its intangibility. — Ken Sparling, author of This Poem Is a HouseImagine a metaphysical domestic drama performed amidst an apocalyptic invasion of mythical beasts, celebrities, bad vibes, and landlocked marine life where God himself is a disgruntled audience member. You don't have to. This is it. — Simon Jacobs, author of SaturnMike Kleine makes you question both the reality of who his characters are in relation to each other and your own sense of truth. In The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish the scope of his world is both epic and historically sweeping and quite small and awkward. The minutia of detail keeps the story on the edge, and the discoveries made in the moment are like just letting go on that one roller coaster that always scared you as a kid, but now, as an adult, you're like—fuck it, why the hell not—this is probably what it's all about anyway. — Trish Harnetiaux, author of How To Get Into Buildings