A literary Easter Egg is traditionally thought of as secret allusions and hidden messages, sometimes inside jokes, authors place in books and stories for readers. Sometimes Easter Egging is the whole point of a story, like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The cover of the paperback edition of Sound Effect Infinity is a rather blatant little egg present for any reader in the know about acid rock music history.
Sound Effect Infinity is full of very weird, sometimes indirect “Easter Eggs” for readers who like to think they know about the topics the book deals with: altered states of consciousness, Club 27, CIA MK-Ultra mysteries, loud guitar music, ICBM missile silos, the songwriting process, the mechanics of telepathy, outer space escape, mixed race identity in America, and the solution to questions about mind-control on every level imaginable.
Of course, all the arts are loaded with Easter Egg puzzles and references. Creator types are simply having fun sometimes. But Easter Eggs are also a way to honor audiences and readers even if people don’t easily get what we’re doing. Heck, literary critics and analysts make their living connecting dots and using the rules they think matter to elucidate deeper meaning and/or failures by authors in their stories–or even in our personal lives.
The second sentence of Sound Effect Infinity is the first Easter Egg offered to readers. I grew up wondering about a whole bunch of wild and crazy things (as per above). Many of us grew up like that back there in the ’60s and ’70s. We knew the answers were out there. We just needed to pay attention. Once we stopped paying attention, we stopped thinking intelligently.
The weird thing is that we didn’t just cease being intelligent about human psychology, CIA experimentation, and the power of music, we stopped thinking any of that stuff mattered. There’s a moment in the great Baby Boomer classic The Big Chill where Tom Berenger’s character, Sam, says to Kevin Kline’s character, Harold: “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” They’re talking about the fact that they’ve both made a lot of money after their early years as political activists.
The promulgation of that line during the fall of 1983 is in many ways the moment when the counter-culture tribe that I belong to became a somewhat dubious and even cynical proposition for many. In some ways, then, the whole, sordid, lunatic-derived Sound Effect Infinity story turns out to be an Easter Egg response to that dubiousness and cynicism. I only figured out what I was doing once I finally decided the book was ready for publication. Hopefully astute readers will be smarter than me and pick up on the hidden and not so hidden meanings in the book.
You can write to howdy@flatbranchpress.com and give us your thoughts. We promise to respond.
Thanks for reading.