My Free Book Collection

Like C'thulhu, Jack Chick circles the realms of being a pop culture figure, without actually ever entering it. He remains on the fringes, having to be content only with having a vast number of devoted fans. People love his works so much, they purchase his books and leaven them out in random places for total strangers to pick up. This still amazes me. Even when I gave out copies of Resume With Monsters and A Night In The Lonesome October, it was to friends I knew would eventually read them. Perhaps this shows my lack of faith in the written word. If I can buy some copies of A Game Of Thrones cheap enough, surely I can spread the gospel of George R. R. Martin to my fellow man.

Still, I harbored doubts that this was really happening. People might have claimed such things occurred, but much like evolution, gravity, and the final episode of Forever Knight, I had never witnessed a Chick Tract discovery with my own eyes. For all I knew, it might just be a wacky idea that ought to be true. While I knew several people who had one or two laying about, far as I know, they had always been bought, and not found in the wild. Stooping to such methods feels like cheating, but what could they do?

It turns out that my problems were all about my location. After all, why bother to distribute anti-Catholic tracts in an area notably short of Catholics? Now that I live in the lands of ice and snow, I can hunt the books down like pokémon on the shelves of my local Wal-Mart.

The first one I found was placed in front of Taco Bell brand taco shells. It had been translated entirely into Spanish, in a move that smacks of badly targeted marketing. Though my grasp of Spanish has degraded to simply being able to say "Me need bread!," and "Blue," the gist of the book was as follows:

1- People with turbans want to kill you.
2- Buddhists are secretly Muslims.
3- God!

Afterwards, I would occasionally find one page screeds by other authors, usually written in the Comic Sans font and adorned with eerily familiar clip art. But until last week, I had yet to spot another book by the man himself.

This one is called This Was Your Life, and there were at least three copies of it in the juice aisle alone. In it, a man dies, and gets his reward. The ending is about what you'd expect from a comic where the man's first words when he sees an angel are "But you don't understand. Heaven and Hell are here on Earth!- I've always said that!"

In case this foreknowledge might cause the reader interest, almost every sentence ends in an exclamation point. Exceptions are made for questions, and biblical scripture is allowed to keep its periods, which are the product of a more sedate age.

The books still disappoints me, though. I haven't thought about actually starting a collection, but if I were to run across an ultra-rare Chick Track, I might change my mind. Even a copy of Dark Dungeons could cause me to be a wannabe hipster with a collection of dubious irony. But to my disappointment, not only is This Was Your Life! Chick's most popular book, I have the ultra-common Caucasian edition. It reminds me of when I wanted to collect stamps, and then got told all the good ones were already taken.

But this discovery did remind me that the theatre next door to my apartment was putting on a show called Last Chance: The Drama. None of the posters would say what it was about. Only that the show was free, included fog and strobe lights, that it was sponsored by a local church group who were providing free day care for the eight year olds who were not advised to attend. I drew my own conclusions. Still, I was tempted to go. I've missed every show put on in that theatre, including the free movies, the haunted house, and a play of The Little Shop Of Horrors. But there was only one night of the show left, and I had laundry to do.

In the end, laundry won. It wasn't that hard a decision to make once I realized I had run out of clean socks. The next day, I found a one-page tract in the empty space where salmonella-tainted peanut butter once stood. It featured a theatre whose marquee reads, "Now Showing: TOO!" Inside, it features a theatre that shows nothing but people too busy to think about God, and thus to go to his theatre and see the movie about them.

I wonder if this was coincidence, or planned from the very beginning?