In June of 2007 the Minneapolis Police Department set up an undercover sting operation at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The operation was in response to complaints about men cruising for sex in the men's restroom. An undercover officer took his post sitting upon a toilet in a stall and waited. Thirteen minutes into his shift he noticed a man lingering outside and peeking through the crack of the stall door. The man then entered the stall to the left of the officer's and tapped his foot. (You probably thought that graffiti scrawl on stall walls was just a joke, didn't you!) The man then moved his foot to the edge of his stall and touched the officer's foot. The cop identified himself and told the man he was under arrest. The man protested, saying that he always takes a wide stance on the toilet and the contact was accidental. He was identified as United States Senator Larry Craig from Idaho. When news of the arrest made its way to the press, Craig held a damage control conference where he shrieked in a falsetto voice, "I am not gay! I never have been gay!" His efforts failed and he did not run for re-election. Craig left politics in disgrace and started a consulting firm with his former chief of staff Mike Ware.

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The Valeries is Forrest Muelrath's debut novel. A man is trying to protect his family by burying the exploits between his son and a well-known politician. The man has discovered a porno video on his son's computer—the two performers being his son and the male politician. He's going about it in a very unique way, emailing the politician from his son's email account to let the politician know he is writing a novel about their exploits, copyrighting it, and then not publishing it. This is a maneuver similar to what tabloids, or even "legitimate" media outlets, use to bury a story. Called Catch and Kill, the public sometimes finds out about the stories anyway, such as when The Enquirer allegedly paid Karen McDougal $150K for her story about her affair with Donald Trump and then buried it. (David Pecker, CEO of American Media, parent of The Enquirer, is a friend of Trump. (See also Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow.)) The email account of the man's son is anonymous, he had been using the name Valerie Blackwell. This gives the reader an idea of what might be on the video before we even hear a single word about it. The man keeps himself anonymous, too, by identifying himself to the politician (who uses the false name Jules) only as Mr. Blackwell.

The composing of this email—this letter—goes on over several days, making The Valeries an epistolary novel. In addition to the video, the man also discovered all the email communication between Valerie and Jules and that Valerie had been writing customized erotica stories for Jules. All this is taking a terrible toll on "Mr. Blackwell" and his wife. She's left, she's not answering her phone, and he's not sure where she's gone. "I don't know, maybe the Grand Canyon?" she said when he asked her where she was going. His son has been hospitalized, so he's now alone. It's obvious that as the composing of this email goes on that the writer's mental health is deteriorating. "Mr. Blackwell" is a trained psychologist, a grief counselor working for the state.

Muelrath was at one time an editorial assistant at Lacanian Ink, a magazine that disseminates works by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and features analyses of psychoanalytic theory. In an interview with Manuel Marrero of ExPat Press, Muelrath said that the young therapists he met there often go through some wild stuff: "In some instances more wild than even what I see young artists and writers going through, because the mental health profession often attracts people who are themselves in need of mental health care...Many young therapists go through these extreme ego fluctuations, much like young artists do, which results in some incredibly ridiculous behavior. If you read The Valeries and you find that the grief counselor gets himself into situations you find too extreme to be believable, I could give you real-life examples of quacks with more extreme behavior." Muelrath's experience at Lacanian Ink helped provide source material for The Valeries.

Mr. Blackwell has run into a wall of writer's block:

For the past two days an insufferable nervous energy has tormented my entire being and I have not been able to write. Ever since I pasted the text in which my son advertised himself as a lady prostitute in the pages above, the nightmarish images I have seen on my son’s computer inevitably shatter any other thought that pops into my head. I spent two days attempting to trudge through my manuscript at the pace requisite to its purpose, but each time I returned to my writing desk, I was forced to read what I had last added to the document (my son advertising himself as a lady whore), and the most anguishing sensations would flood my nervous system. Two days attempting to rush through my manuscript, and I could not write a word.

He wants to blame someone for his son's behavior, or at least relieve himself of any responsibility for it: "No, my son was eventually handicapped in another way — emotionally so, in fact quite simply by his mother’s suffocating parenting habits, which left him unable to love and, as if it needs to be said, never learning to fuck a woman properly. With that, it seems my son’s neutered ability to make love to women is eventually what led him to attempt to become one." If this sounds harsh or unfair, he reminds us that he's a trained psychotherapist and "the sexual persona my son has developed over the past two years is a product of extreme narcissistic tendencies bestowed upon him by an overbearing mother." Mr. Blackwell is doing a poor job of bullshitting himself here, but he's desperate after the images that he's seen of his son on the computer—and also the contents of the emails between Valerie and Jules where it is revealed that one of Jules's fantasies is having sex with his own daughter.

Mr. Blackwell also takes time to berate Jules over his politics, such as when he sees Jules on national television speaking of broken young men terrorizing this "great nation" with assault rifles or when Jules campaigns on issues of sex and personal identity and Mr. Blackwell tells him he should knock it off "if for no other reason than the fact that you people are annoying the living hell out of me." Blackwell also tells Jules that all this fussing over identity makes his job as a psychoanalyst more difficult with pathetic patients coming to him demanding to be identified as this or that—which sounds less like narcissistic personality disorder than just common run of the mill attention whoring. He also admits that the writing of this email to Jules relieves him a little bit of his torment.

The Valeries is a strange novel to say the least, I found myself rereading sentences and paragraphs to make sure I had read it right—such as what Mr. Blackwell does with the drugs he found in his son's underwear drawer, or what he said in an unhinged rant to his coworkers at the office. Muelrath's eight years at the editorial desk of Lacanian Ink certainly paid off for him in his debut novel.

The Valeries
by Forrest Muelrath, 168 pages
ExPat Press, $22.00

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.