Books and Brain-busting

I've read a few books in the last few weeks: Philip K. Dick's 'Galactic Pot Healer'; Philip Jose Farmers' 'A Feast Unknown'; Jonathan Carroll's 'Bones of the Moon' and tonight 'Sleeping in Flame'; as well as an assortment of short stories and philosophy. I hope to write about each in time, but 'Sleeping in Flame' has left me just a little annoyed(?). It has the feel of something developed as it is written, with all the unpredictability and fun that that implies, but also a lack of discipline and superficiality. There's a great mind at work, but doing what exactly? It's like having Faulkner write a script for 'American Pie'. The ending, the very ending, is so typically Carroll, and is appropriate on one level, but it's one that serves to trivialize everything that has gone before. Although the Magic Realists have been mixing fantasy and reality for ages, Carroll does it in such a 'full on', indiscriminate way, that the very nature of his fiction becomes the subject of his fiction. It's post-modernism on acid. And I've kind of come down rather abruptly. I'll write about it all again when I've gotten my mind back.