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Table of Contents
About The Book
“Overqualified's cover letters are like a slap in the face, but the slap is hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and as soon as it’s over you want to tell all your friends about the slap. You know the kind?” — Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics
“Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret as chewed up and spit out by J. G. Ballard.…A book whose melancholy is leavened by a surprising hilarity.” — Paul Di Filippo author of The Steampunk Trilogy and Cosmocopia
Cover letters are all the same. They’re useless. You write the same lies over and over again, listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart, but this is how it's done.
And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don’t know if he’ll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-numbers cover letter, something entirely different comes out.
You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your childhood and your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.
And you send it anyway.
“Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret as chewed up and spit out by J. G. Ballard.…A book whose melancholy is leavened by a surprising hilarity.” — Paul Di Filippo author of The Steampunk Trilogy and Cosmocopia
Cover letters are all the same. They’re useless. You write the same lies over and over again, listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart, but this is how it's done.
And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don’t know if he’ll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-numbers cover letter, something entirely different comes out.
You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your childhood and your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.
And you send it anyway.
Excerpt
Dear Paramount Pictures,
I want to write horror movies. When I was a kid, I was terrified of horror movies. I remember watching Pet Sematary four times before I ever saw more than a flash of the dead guy. I hid underneath a blanket every time anything happened, every time the music came up. I covered my ears.
I liked being scared, though. My grandparents owned a farm, and my brother Adrian and I used to sneak out to the barn in the middle of the night. My grandfather used that barn to store the tractor. It used to be a real barn, though. It was left over from when there had been a farm, not just a vineyard back there. It was old and broken down and perfect for us.
Adrian and I went in there with our flashlights, and there was a room underneath the hayloft. It was small and dark and slick and there were no windows. It was a room where your imagination became full of snorting stomping animals all wet with sweat. Even in the middle of the day, that room was black like horse eyes.
One of us would sit outside and the other would go in, without his flashlight, and see how long he could stand to be alone in that black room. It wasn’t the sort of game that anybody won or lost.
I’ve thought about this a lot, Paramount. I want to write horror movies that scare you, but leave you with the feeling that your brother is right outside the door, waiting, flashlight in hand.
Only, when you call out, there’s no answer. And the barn is empty, like your stomach.
Joey Comeau
I want to write horror movies. When I was a kid, I was terrified of horror movies. I remember watching Pet Sematary four times before I ever saw more than a flash of the dead guy. I hid underneath a blanket every time anything happened, every time the music came up. I covered my ears.
I liked being scared, though. My grandparents owned a farm, and my brother Adrian and I used to sneak out to the barn in the middle of the night. My grandfather used that barn to store the tractor. It used to be a real barn, though. It was left over from when there had been a farm, not just a vineyard back there. It was old and broken down and perfect for us.
Adrian and I went in there with our flashlights, and there was a room underneath the hayloft. It was small and dark and slick and there were no windows. It was a room where your imagination became full of snorting stomping animals all wet with sweat. Even in the middle of the day, that room was black like horse eyes.
One of us would sit outside and the other would go in, without his flashlight, and see how long he could stand to be alone in that black room. It wasn’t the sort of game that anybody won or lost.
I’ve thought about this a lot, Paramount. I want to write horror movies that scare you, but leave you with the feeling that your brother is right outside the door, waiting, flashlight in hand.
Only, when you call out, there’s no answer. And the barn is empty, like your stomach.
Joey Comeau
Product Details
- Publisher: ECW Press (April 15, 2009)
- Length: 96 pages
- ISBN13: 9781550228588
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Raves and Reviews
“Joey Comeau has made the unreadable not just readable, but beguiling in its digressions and personal revelations.” — Eye Weekly
“Each letter rapidly digresses into something more akin to a diary entry than a professional missive. There is speculation as to humanity’s future, reminiscences from the narrator’s childhood, confessions of vulnerability and of sexual desire, all punctuated by vitriolic humour and unsettling instances of violence. There is much frustration in these letters — born of capitalism’s absurdities and of personal calamities — but there is also humour, compassion, and joy.” — Quill & Quire
“One of the season’s most remarkable books.” — Macleans.ca
“There have been spoof letter-writing books in the past, like ‘The Lazlo Letters’ by Don Novello (a.k.a. Father Guido Sarducci) and several that followed. While the protagonist in ‘Overqualified’ is just as unhinged as his predecessors, he’s significantly less giddy. A real story unfolds in these pages, about a departed brother and the sibling left behind. It’s sad and fragmented and, in places, funny. This slender epistolary novel is charming.” — Los Angeles Times
“A collection of wry, clever and demoniacal job-application letters, teeming with knife-edged malice and stomach-tearing hilarity.…Overqualified successfully deludes the fear of the faceless corporate entity by empowering the faceless applicant who has nothing to lose except securing a job he or she probably doesn’t want. If Comeau’s rebel-yell manifesto catches on like old Prometheus’s gift did all those years ago, human resources will never be the same again.” — Globe and Mail
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Overqualified Trade Paperback 9781550228588
