Aesthetic has to match intention. Hollow Nacelle is an empty casing. There is no definite plot, only beautiful description and action. Almost no passive tense or explanation throughout the whole book. Images that create subtly linking threads out of seeming randomness at first for the reader to make sense of themselves upon completion. Nothing is random, though, every scene has purpose. 

 

The story follows Ash and Champ, two LA band members, desperate to get famous, who eventually sell out a stadium without ever completing a single song. bb, the narrator, creates explanations for this, along with many other occurrences in the story, in his head, which the reader can choose to agree or disagree with. The reader’s choice of reality constitutes which aspects of the story are “hollow” or “containing an engine,” aka legitimate. 

 

In one scene, for example, while Ash goes to the doc to try to score a Valium scrip, bb, alone, imagines the doctor prescribing Ash instead a preloaded Instagram account with hundreds of thousands of followers. When Ash returns, their band, Hollow Nacelle, is famous, with no explanation but for bb’s delusion.

 

As the story progresses, the audience sees “objective” reality doesn’t matter to a paranoiac. Any reader will choose connections, explanations, over random senselessness. 

 

Hollow Nacelle is a poetic dream on fire about hype, social media and fame/celebrity culture, western medicine, phenomenology, and blurred distinctions between the digital and physical mediations of self.

 

 

Slide, don’t run. RIP American Dream. Can’t win with nihilism, so find your way back to your spiritual self. Hollow Nacelle comes for your soul. Curtis Eggleston is a powerhouse vigorously writing and pushing verbal boundaries in relative obscurity and chosen exile. He is the embodiment of the lifer, the rockstar poet, the Rimbaudian. His indomitable spirit finds temporary repose in Hollow Nacelle. Ash, Champ, bb, lov, Cap, all passengers on this deliriously trippy novel’s cosmic vessel, trajectory skittering off the far-out rails of reverie into addled meditations, through improbable leaps of action commensurate with the preposterous distortions of reality whipped together by revelatory lapses, humorous digressions and the old soul’s voice constituting this book’s signature. Eggleston is a pioneer stylist whose narrator drifts from comical riffs on absurdity to shattering pangs of transcendent clarity. You’ve never seen show business like this before. It is writing that engages the reader on incomparably intimate terms, at last rendering accessible the primal emotional connection between an author’s voice and its echo within the reader’s sensorium, the materials of sublimation foreshortened like a snare. This marks a new frontier in fiction, a thunderous and lulling prose poem as a novel that hits its stride with heft and cruises toward entropy, letting go of names, faces, reputations, continuity until all that’s left is you. It is exemplary of Curtis Eggleston’s own journey to the limits of himself, a midsummer oceanic plunge. An exploration of the self as soul refracted in the duplicitous status quo while never relenting to challenge it. It will reverberate through history as either the narrative singularity that swallows all invention in a feat of rigorous manifesto or the advent of new offspring. Eros in a keyed up tempo, Psyche in a desultory trance slurring euphonious seductions. Listen to this song and start a band. A call to arms for the metaphysical expat, the forlorn mounting a cultural reclamation. A cause for evangelism and fervor. A renaissance.