Jim Bob's Storage Stories

If Chuck Palahniuk had worn cycling shorts, would you still feel cool at his signings? It’s a question readers in the UK asked themselves when they heard Jim Bob of Carter USM was planning a novel. James Neil Morrison, champion to thousands from the Deleted Generation of Indie (1988 to first Oasis single), achieved the term “wordsmith” in most of his reviews, even the latter ones that looked beyond his music to report “Look at this wordsmith’s hilarious trousers.” Having long since ditched the trousers/loud haircut/recording relationship with a major label, Jim has honed his storytelling through a string of intimate solo gigs (as well as Carter USM reunion nights that fill London like a good royal funeral). So why not try becoming a 100,000-wordsmith? As a rock star who toured the world, had twelve Top 40 singles and once was an accessory to live TV violence, he must have some yarns to spin. In his songs, the intuitive ear for raging vagrants earned him a lifetime of street cred, while his off-stage love for Kurt Vonnegut, elephants, and films with Winona Ryder in meant a steampunk drama must be imminent. Anything could be imminent.

Jim’s first novel is about a former Top 40 rock star, once famed for his distinctive fashion, now bitter at having been through the mill and been pedestrianised back into normalcy. So far, so facepalm. The hero—I think—is called Chris. Surname ungiven, presumed Bob. But it’s at that point that face and palm begin to separate, because Chris is a far cry from the ex-frontman stereotype with wall-mounted discs and a coke habit. Chris is what most blokes would call a carpet—walked on by all and sundry, painfully shy, and with a persecution complex the size of the Large Hadron Collider. He scrapes a living working at a private storage unit—as made famous by hoarders, necrophiliacs, and the film Primer—shooting the shit with a fellow slew of flakes. We have Janie, the receptionist who looks like Juliette Binoche, and who gets a nightly cracked rib from her boyfriend. We have Carl: bearded Asperger’s trolley-pusher who gets his jinks from licking batteries. And we also have a macabre and acerbic sense of humour, sewn by the author into each of his anecdotes about what goes on in the containers…and, more disturbingly, what goes on outside of them. A rival facility by Big Yellow Storage is being opened across the street, and the stress is taking its toll: the class of clientele has slid from professionals to possible bomb-builders, Carl’s gone from licking batteries to biting cathode ray tubes, and Chris—the fool—has gone and fallen in love with the bruised receptionist, fantasising ways her husband might expire. It’s all so bleak it becomes hard to tell whether this is a book by a pop star watching denizens at play, or a book by a nightshift worker spilling the guts on his job. Either way, the odd goings-on sound even odder in Chris’ underdog deadpan, and it’s only through his taking the time to gel with his customers and attempt a bit of bridge-building with his son that he clings to the energy to go on. To not go on. To go on.

Storage Stories is technically Jim’s third debut—one previous biography and a novella inside an inlay card—so to say “third time lucky” seems cliché. Sometimes, though, you’ll turn on the TV and the newsreader will start talking directly to you, and you’ll understand why clichés become popular. This is a warm, sympathetic novel that isn’t afraid to slash the odd blade around, but only if the stabbing can be fleshed via hand-drawn cartoons by a confectioner (those inter-vignette doodles suggest a book for closet Quentin Blake fans). Mostly, though, it’s Jim’s own knack for anecdotes that marks out his novel as an anti-flop, and once things get musical around the second act, he wastes no time in going Swiftian. Firstly, we learn what happened to all the boybands who slipped too quickly from the charts (A1, O-Town, One True Voice, etc): having made the grave mistake of threatening to Write Their Own Material, one-by-one they were wooed into flight cases (on the premise of being smuggled into stadiums for the comeback gig of their lives) and wheeled straight into secure storage, confined to the hangar where the lights don’t work. We also have the true story of Tony from Terrorvision’s karaoke scam in a sequence that’ll make you smile out loud. And lastly, around the time Carl acquires sharp knives and Chris becomes storage manager, we meet a new client: a Mr. Michael Stipe, outwardly denying the fact his parents named him after the singing bald philanthropist. “I was here first,” he insists.

Plot-wise, Storage Stories is something of a triple-jump: it takes brisk little hops from mat to mat, sometimes incorporating Wikipedia pastings to fill a bit of air in between. Sometimes it incorporates more highbrow references, like the Orwellian interrupt halfway through as Chris’ computer starts threatening him in Word. “I’m a PC,” it types ominously one morning, explaining how it nuked its last owner. As things snowball on, the swell of misfortunes becomes ever more harrowing, culminating with wincers like the self-dentistry-with-a-scalpel scene that’ll give you gingivitis nightmares forever (“Tooth number twelve, that’s number twelve, a premolar, a chewing tooth, the wrong tooth, shot across the kitchen and down the back of the fridge. I wanted to shout, stop, you fucking idiot, stop. And then I wanted to at least tell him where the tooth had landed”). As Carl the dismantler is sectioned, Chris descends into passages of white collar time killing, struggling to bond with his distant son while remembering his own dad’s stabbing. “I don’t want to go back to normal,” he says one day, thinking of Janie the battered receptionist. “It was shit there.”

In the film Love Actually, washed-up rocker Billy Mack tells his audience: “Hiya kids. Here is an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don’t buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free!” I don’t think Jim did too many drugs during his time at the top (no way would a dealer ever deliver to that) but he did do a lot of hope, and it was the weekly trampling and dashing of this which drove him to write, write, and re-write this novel. The sensitive monotone and skid row layout he employs recall the outlaw poets he holds dear, which is probably the most honorable compliment you can pay to man who’s his own most savage critic (even his latest songs still lampoon the mugging he suffered six years ago). His voice of tongue-in-cheek despair at the city’s sagging morals plays out through the mouths of his characters, all of whom are treated with the utmost empathy—even when performing surgery on themselves or fucking in pub toilets. If the singer enjoyed writing and linking them it certainly shows: he’s already planning a sophomore. I’d like to think it’ll continue the storage canon, and will focus on online archiving, and all the strange goings-on at Carbonite.com. In the words of his protagonist, “That, Alanis Morissette, would be ironic.”

:: Read excerpts from Storage Stories at storagestories.co.uk