What is Homunculus?
First Reader Review:
"Toward the end of Homunculus, there's an interesting passage where author Matt St. Amand talks about a Sam Cooke concert and how the performer successfully built up the suspense and anticipation and worked the crowd into a frenzy by building crescendo. The same thing could be said of St. Amand's ability to build to a punchline. The author knows how to craft a joke, but he also knows how to take that bit of 'funny' into higher levels until he has the reader not just smiling, not just smiling and nodding, but smiling, nodding, and outright laughing.
"He takes risks here, such as the bit where he interviews himself, but the risks inevitably pay off. The Xavier Lipshitz passages alone are worth the price of purchase, but there's plenty of other assorted skits and strangeness going on in here to keep even the most fickle of readers entertained.
"Highly recommended!"
—Susan DiPlacido, author of 24/7 and Trattoria
According to Cameron Preston
"the alchemist Paracelsus once proposed that he had created a false human being through his science.
Called a 'homunculus,' this
creature stood no more than 12 inches tall and does the work usually associated with a golem. However, after a short time, the
homunculus was known to turn on it's creator and run away. The recipe consisted of a bag of bones, sperm, skin fragments and hair from
any animal you wanted it to be a hybrid of. This was to be laid in the ground surrounded by horse manure for forty days, at which point
the embryo would form. This supposed beast relied upon the theories of spontaneous generation."
That's
what a collection of short stories is—an entity pasted together in a sometimes haphazard manner,
born of hubris and ego, and an obsessive (possibly unhealthy) belief and reliance on some form of magic. The idea, above, of an humunculus turning
on its creator is a wonderful image, and quite appropriate in the literary sense, as well. Characters, plots, dialogue sometimes
get away from writers—good writers—and take on lives of their own, apart from anything the author might have
originally conceived. For instance, my character Xavier Lipshitz has completely gotten away from me, conducting his own
correspondence through his own email address, xshitz@yahoo.com. What Xavier writers is often just as surprising to me,
as to anyone else. The responses to what he writes, is usually even more unpredictable.
From the back cover of Homunculus:
Now, after 34 years, here is the book the Vatican banned in 88 countries, the FBI tried to suppress, and every major media outlet in the English speaking world told you did not exist. Available in this limited, unauthorized edition are the stories of Homunculus. These are the ravings of a desert-maddened wanderer grown lunatic on locusts and honey, crazed by these voices that refused to be silenced. Written in the margins of international telephone directories, take-out menus, matchbooks and business cards, Homunculus has been meticulously reconstructed, its hidden codes broken and laid bare. Shield the elderly and the infirm, protect the innocent and nubile.