Surreal Prayers

SURREAL PRAYERS: Artisanal Thought Castings
Book One of The Feretory Duology

What happens when a bewildered mind sits down to talk to God — and refuses to lie about the bewilderment?

Surreal Prayers is not devotional literature in any sense your pastor would recognize. It's a collection of religio-surrealist invocations that pray to the autonomic nervous system like a monastery of cells chanting sutras, petition the Lord of All Good Jokes with evidence that includes the narwhal, and beg deliverance from hipsters who discovered your favorite band before you did. One moment you're inside a meditation on forgiveness as "practical navigational tool"; the next you're reading a locker-room postgame prayer that somehow becomes a meditation on cliché itself.

Tony W. Arnold writes like Flannery O'Connor got trapped in a tiki bar with Erich von Däniken and a broken rosary — equal parts reverence, absurdity, and genuine ache. These are prayers for people who find the sacred in pulp paperbacks and extinct cocktails as readily as in scripture; for anyone who has ever tried to have an honest conversation with the universe and gotten only a very strange, very funny silence back.

Irreverent. Unexpectedly moving. Theologically unlicensed. Read with discernment — and a sense of humor.

Not the inspired Word of God. Possibly something almost as useful.