The Vanity Routines presents people who, seemingly dead and definitely dead, tired of life but incapable of living, voice their concerns in short stories at once baroque and minimalistic. Gray eminences, they emerge out of night, dread, and legend, to deliver their last lines. Seven exists, and as many broken arias — these are characters for whom vanity has become a constant and dying routine.
      Meet the dare-devil, who contemplates various burial customs floating in a barrel headed toward a water fall. Encounter Larry Lazarus, recalled from death; Miss Clock in vain awaiting her lover; and an anonymous Luciferian tempter, who proposes to consider life a walk on a tight-rope forming a circle. And greet, finally, W. J. M. Bottle, a.k.a. Mister Memory, who, in 1904, sold his brain to a team of physicians in Connecticut; an errant batch of spirits in the process of disengaging themselves from existential restrictions; and Johnny the Baptist, who, presented on a platter, expresses regret over the things he did not accomplish while still alive and kicking.
      Mythical or historical, invented or real, the book’s characters all reason in what D. H. Lawrence once termed “the spirit of disintegration.” The light shed by these texts on human existence is as bleak as the pale cast of after-thought. In a time when everything may be mastered except death, they are bold enough to sing hymns to disappearance. The Vanity Routines offers seven cases of metaphysical slapstick, aimed at those willing to put on a brave face in what remains a fatal affair.