OD: Docufictions

OD: Docufictions is a collection of thirteen short fictions built around a single fact: thirteen famous personages who either died of an overdose or were so invested in drugs that the drugs helped kill them. The roster runs Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Bela Lugosi, Aldous Huxley, Freud, Poe, Lead Belly, Sonny Liston, Diane Arbus, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Abbie Hoffman. The title is the abbreviation a coroner writes; the book is what Harold Jaffe does with what comes after.

Docufiction is the form the book runs on: news reports, court records, and other documentary source material treated with minimal but pointed intervention, a transposed line, a rearranged paragraph, a recontextualization that lets the original telling expose its own ideology and pathology. Reviewing this book, Joseph D. Haske located Jaffe's docufictional style closer in spirit to free verse than to standard fiction.