Craig Clevenger

The Contortionist's Handbook Craig Clevenger

The story of John Dolan Vincent, an abnormally gifted child with a proclivity for mathematics beyond his years. However, he also bears a rare deformity "polydactylism" and his genius is counterbalanced by a near absence of social skills and episodes of severe migraines. As an adult his migraines occur with alarming regularity. And his repeated attempts at self-medication send him over and over to the emergency room. He knows that to visit twice is to be institutionalized as a suicide risk. So, following each trip to the hospital, he draws upon his skills as a petty forger, and reinvents a new identity for himself.