Art for the Sake of Art (The Multiverse Askew Trilogy Book 1)

Ever wonder what your life would be like if you met yourself from another dimension? Well, neither did Art. But wait! What if yourself from another dimension also turned out to be a god? Yeah, Art wouldn’t care either.

If Art were a candy, he’d be a Whopper. But he’d be one of those weird Whoppers that the factory forgets to fill with malt. For as long as he can remember, he’s felt empty, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t bring himself to feel a single, solitary emotion about anything. Apparently, according to the ridiculous nature of the Multiverse, Art’s complete lack of anything valuable inside has made him a sort of chosen one. And that’s precisely why a mischief god version of himself from an alternate dimension appears on his doorstep one morning, demanding that Art come along on a quest to save the Multiverse. This is a problem for Art, because he has no desire to be a chosen one, especially when it means running off on some absurd adventure. But the mischief god ignores any protest and uses his jump bug Beverly, a nearly two-foot-long mystical cockroach, to whisk Art away to a dimension populated by dwarves in order to acquire a cosmic weapon before a vast evil force can beat them to it. The trouble with this development isn’t that Art particularly dislikes dwarves–he has no feelings about them, really–it’s mainly that these dwarves are attired in Girl Scout uniforms and possessed by the murderous souls of dead dictators.

Meanwhile, Art has left behind the one beacon of positivity in his life, Ginny. Tragically, she has fallen in love with the one man who can never love her back. More tragically, she finds herself kidnapped by the most dreaded of the grotesque dwarves from the aforementioned alternate earth. Most tragically, this dwarf relentlessly pits Ginny against her mate in an effort to beat them to the weapon. The story trades off between Art’s and Ginny’s viewpoints, yielding a tale that satirizes many of the common tropes of science fiction adventure stories.