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The Magic Building

by Tuck White

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THE MAGIC BUILDING

Written in Mountain West America between 2015-2016, the three pieces that make up THE MAGIC BUILDING attest to Tuck White's breathtaking imagination, light and dark humor, and his ability to evoke a visceral kaleidoscope of human emotion that is at once absurd and innate. In the first piece, a short story, a man wakes one morning to find that suddenly everyone wants to cook him up and eat him. The next is a drama in which two friends notice they have an attic wherein lies the secret to why we weep; and finally we read the notebooks of two people living in a magic apartment building who bring a cat back from the dead with help from a young girl and a group of witches. It is a delightful book and one that is sure to be treasured throughout the ages.


SLEEPY GEORGE

A novel about a delightfully chubby, daydreaming young man who can't help but fall asleep wherever he goes and keeps getting into trouble because of it. Sleeping while on the bus, he misses his stop and arrives late at night in the town of San Marcus. It’s the middle of winter and he only has a few dollars in his pocket. Finding a late-night diner, he decides it's just the place to sit around and enjoy a hot cup of coffee. He does just that, but when the diner closes and he’s forced out into the cold again, he quickly finds that the only place to protect himself from the icy wind is behind a dirty dumpster. It is there he makes his bed. The next morning an erratic diner worker named Ivan finds him sleeping there and then gets him involved in his crazy antics. An adventure is then pursued and love is found along the way. But when Ivan asks him to deliver a love letter to an ex-girlfriend, George’s simple life of sleepy pleasure is turned upside down as the letter falls into the hands of Genny, his one true love, who thinks that he has written the letter for her. But thanks to his wizardly friend Leo, who gives George a magical rock that at once protects him from the horrors of the world while simultaneously giving him nice memories to cherish, he is able to overcome whatever his crazy mother and even the police come at him with to win the heart of his one true love, even if she is engaged to be wed.



chthonic press, issue 1


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Tucker White—aka “Tuck White” or “Rubber Tucky,” to existing fans—is a difficult person to read, though not in an ominous, brooding or sketchy way. White is hard to read because his humor is layered so deeply with sarcasm, inside jokes (with himself) and “sincere insincerity,” as he puts it. The characters and scenarios White concocts in short stories that he writes depict this playfully mischievous side of White, especially in his first self-published book, The Magic Building. In the spring of this year, Tucker White published The Magic Building through his own label, Chthonic Records (the “ch” is silent), which White started with friend John Boula, who is currently in upstate New York, gardening (according to White). The Magic Building is a book consisting of three short stories: “Who’s Hungry? (The Escape Artist),” “What Happened When Ray and Ted Noticed They Had an Attic” and “The Magic Building.”

Tucker White writes his stories at a desk in his room, oftentimes not knowing what the story will be about until he is halfway through. Photo: LmSorensen.net
Tucker White writes his stories at a desk in his room, oftentimes not knowing what the story will be about until he is halfway through. Photo: LmSorensen.net
The first story is the flat-out silliest. Inspired by the prompt of the subtitle, “(The Escape Artist),” “Who’s Hungry” is about a man who woke up to find out that everyone in the world has been overcome with the insatiable need to eat him. White says, “I thought ‘The Escape Artist’ would be a good title for a story … I thought, ‘Ooh, it would be scary to escape from the whole world; the whole world just wants to eat you.’” The second story offers readers the reason why we weep—a secret that is uncovered by two friends when discovered they had an attic with an unexpected roommate—a little girl. “This one was a little more pre-thought. I was sitting in the backyard with my best friend and roommate, Tiffany. I noticed there was an attic up there, and how interesting it would be to go explore that,” White says. “The Magic Building,” the book’s titular story, is last. It tells a story about a man, one whom White previously wrote about in “An Untitled Excerpt.” In this story, the man discovers that he lives in a magic building and brings a cat back to life through an adventure with a young girl and group of witches.

This is the first book that Chthonic Records has put out, with the intention to encourage others to publish their writings through the label as well. Chthonic Records is known for putting out local releases like Baby Pink’s B Sides and local compilation It’s Halloween Time. White has released multiple music albums under the name Hoops through Chthonic, such as Imaginary Epiphanies 2 (a collaboration with Neil A.), Honeysuckles and The Knowledge Mastery Series. White’s voice in his music, writing and artwork is the spokesperson for the surreal, dreamlike world White’s thoughts and ideas live in. “It is hard for me to see definites, like things that are very concrete,” White says. “Things that are more fluid and dreamlike make more sense to me because they can morph into something else immediately without you wanting it to morph into anything else.” Chthonic provides White a comfortable podium to stretch his specific voice, wherever it goes.

The aim for White is not to become the traditional sense of a “writer,” but to sit down and unveil the story hidden in the nooks and crannies of his subconscious by writing through improvisation. White enjoys sitting down and surrendering himself to a blank page, with no plan, no creative constraints, just the desire to write. His intention is—in a way—to journal through the lens of an absurd character in an absurd reality. You can see this for yourself in his stories—each story has a sense of groundless unpredictability and mind-boggling twists and turns. For instance, in “Who’s Hungry,” the story begins by throwing the reader into sympathetic panic for the character running for their life, without information as to why everyone on earth wants to eat the character, and no plan in sight. Providing this first-person narrative to tell this story makes for vivid reading experience, stabilized by hidden jokes and underlying humor.

White’s preceding published works include “The Life of a Great Leader,” published in a zine put together by Brinley Froelich, and “An Untitled Excerpt” published in Moriah Glazier’s zine Open. These stories share the same cadence and tone White excercises in his book, The Magic Building. Each respective story might be set in a different reality, but you can find the same inquisitive setting in each read, making White’s writings a relishable and amusing collection.

You can find White’s book The Magic Building on chthonicrecords.bandcamp.com for an affordable $10. Although, White says, “Whoever wants it could just have it … I ordered a big box of them because there was a big deal, so I bought 30 and I have 10 left.” To find out more about White’s upcoming projects and other art ventures, follow his Instagram @greendayfan_420 or his Instagram for his artwork, @artist.extraordinaire.

-Slug Magazine

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released May 18, 2018

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