Dan Rather and Donald Barthelme
Real-life historical figures Rather and Barthelme actually appear in two of the author’s works. The first—arguably his most well-known—was an imaginative hybrid of non-fiction essay and fictional theorizing, “The Frequency.” After this half-serious/half-comical exploration of an alternative theory behind CBS news anchor Dan Rather’s bizarre “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” assault on the streets of New York—in which novelist Donald Barthelme was fingered as the real agency behind the incident—Allman adapted the article into a stage play titled Kenneth, What is the Frequency?
Frederick Pale: The Man in the Poison Hat
A straight-up work of short fiction which also mingled reality with the purely made-up stuff appeared in a magazine much more noted for straight-up non-fiction about purely made-up stuff: Film Comment. “The Frozen Archive” tells the phony story of a first-person narrator who discovers a treasure lode of long-thought-lost film canisters which had lingered in frozen animation beneath a swimming pool turned ice skating rink in a one-time Yukon Gold Rush boomtown. A fake silent travelogue titled “The Lost City of New York” is the centerpiece of the discovery which featured among other thing, “a magnificent marble statue in a courtyard behind Tammany Hall” of a fella named Frederick Pale who slowly lapsed into a bizarre mental state characterized by wild visions which he routinely yelled out loud. Turns out Frederick was being slowly poisoned by his wife, thus his strange title.
Otis Gully
The protagonist of Allman’s first non-YA novel, Otis: On the Occasion of His Foray into the Wilderness of' Civilization. At might be expected from the title, the story of Otis is episodic and picaresque which, of course, forces him into an age-old literary conflict: he is not quite as colorful as the character with whom he interacts. Nevertheless, Otis is the straw that stirs the drink and frothy confection in need of a thick, long straw it is.
Eric and Sedge
Eric and Sedge are two high school football players who make the tragically fateful mistake of deciding to sneak out of training camp in order to party most heartily with their girlfriends. They wind up dumping the girls and getting themselves involved in a drunk-driving accident which ends the season for both of them before it has even begun. Worse: each blames the other. This is a Young Adult novel published under the imprint Flip Side Fiction because both Eric and Sedge get their chance to tell their side of the story by flipping the book over at the midway point of each narrative.
The Bombers
Allman returns to his favorite them of mixing fiction and fact with a play titled Bomber’s Row. The story is based on the historical record that at one time Timothy McVeigh—skinhead perpetrator of the Oklahoma City federal building massacre—the Unabomber and the Islamic mastermind of the first World Trade Center terror attack in the 1990’s were all kept in solitary confinement at the same SuperMax prison. Every prisoner there got just one hour out of their cells a day and the author imagines what a conversation between the three bombers—as well as a jailed Latin American ganglord—might have been like.
