Named One of Vulture‘s Top 5 Humor Books of the Year!
The novelization to the 1992 Gen X movie Slouchers
It is the early 1990s in Seattle … and the MTV video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has just premiered the previous week. Lethargy is in the air. Grunge fashion is all the logy rage. Something is brewing beneath these moist, overcast Seattle skies.
Twenty-two-year-old Willow Montgomery has freshly arrived in town, having just graduated from an elite liberal arts college back east.
Willow soon befriends a motley crew of twenty-somethings who live in the parking lot next to the alternative record store where she works for $5 an hour, a store run by a cantankerous, irritable, grouchy older man (he’s 29) named Skip.
Willow wants to desperately capture the brilliance of her generation on her Fuji DS-100 digicam with 3-power zoom (10-byte, digital flash-memory card, first of its kind), and to have her documentary ultimately broadcast on MTV. What a dream!
In the meantime, she’s dating Toody, part-time bike messenger, part-time lead singer of the grunge band That’s Your Problem.
But there’s a new man in town, “Mr. Straight,” an important businessman who works downtown and who also has eyes for Willow, after having met her while buying a Best Of Aerosmith CD at Skip’s store.
Whom will Willow choose? The Grunger or the Straight? The man who digs this new music called “grunge” or the one who still listens to classic rock? Will she achieve any semblance of happiness? Will she continue to work a minimum McJob for the rest of her life, or can she somehow achieve her artistic goals, as lofty as they might be?
Will the Lost Boys and Girls, as they call themselves, ever leave the parking lot to achieve their own dreams?
Moreover, will the famous inventor of the hacky sack ever arrive at the parking lot in a stretch limousine like he’s promised?
Lastly: Is it true that the world’s most famous MTV VJ, Tabitha, is coming to Seattle to host the first Great MTV Grunge Off competition, to be filmed for live TV, for all the world to see?!
It’s 1992 in Seattle and the world is about to change forever. Or maybe not.
Regardless:
It’s all about the look … it’s all about the collective alienation … it’s all about the deep-seated, delicious apathy …
It’s all about … Slouchers.