My co-worker Jason saw that I was reading The Boy Detective Fails and so loaned me Hairstyles of the Damned.

Hey, that Joe Meno can write. Hairstyles is a year in the life of a high school kid, Halloween 1990 - Halloween 1991. He's a misfit, at the bottom of the social ladder, and music is very important to him. Am I on repeat here?

And in the same way that you might be spooked by odd shadows or strange noises if you watch too many horror movies, I was finding that reading all these high-school-kids-not-fitting-in books was making me nervously reexamine my high school memories to see if I had really been as well-adjusted as I think I was. (I mean, I was a dork, but a relatively happy dork.)