Like Blood in Water: Five Mininovels (The Placebo Effect Trilogy #1)

Like Blood in Water is the first volume of Yuriy Tarnawsky's Placebo Effect Trilogy, five mininovels that open a cycle of fifteen across three books. The themes of alienation, abandonment, and fear of death that run through The Future of Giraffes and View of Delft are first sounded here.

The five pieces are concrete and strange. A man accidentally wanders into a session resembling Primal Scream therapy and devotes the rest of his life to screaming. A pianist stops playing because he feels his right hand isn't there. A father searches for a Bible and eats toothpaste in anticipation of his daughter's drowning at a seaside resort called Penal Port. A Luciano Pavarotti look-alike agrees to be killed in a reenactment of the murder of Agamemnon. A man dresses up in a mountain climber's outfit as he goes in for a surgery he has been trying to avoid at all cost. The mininovels work by negative text: gaps of vital information the reader has to supply, bringing personal experience into the story and becoming, with the author, its co-author.

Like Blood in Water was first published by FC2 in 2007 and reissued by JEF in 2013 as part of The Placebo Effect Trilogy, paired with The Future of Giraffes and View of Delft.