Venus on the Half-Shell Read Online Free

theft of her royalties. Trout was prevented from going on to college by his parents’ long and expensive illnesses, resulting in their deaths a few years after he graduated from high school.
    Trout had three great fears that rode him all his life: a fear of cancer, of rats, and of Doberman pinschers. The first came from watching his parents suffer in their terminal stages. The second came from living in so many basements and tenement houses. The third resulted from several attacks by Doberman pinschers during his vagabondish life. Once, out of a job and starving, he tried to steal a chicken from a farmer’s henhouse but was caught by the watchdog. Another time, he was bitten while delivering circulars.
    Trout’s pessimism and distrust of human beings ensured that he would have no friends and that his three wives would divorce him. It drove his only child, Leo, to run away from home at the age of fourteen. Leo lied about his age and became a U.S. Marine. While in boot camp he wrote his father a denunciatory letter. After that, there was a total lack of word about Leo until two FBI agents visited Kilgore. His son, they told him, had deserted and joined the Viet Cong.
    Trout moved around the States, working at low-paying and menial jobs and writing his science fiction stories in his spare time. After his final divorce, his only companion was a parakeet named Bill. Kilgore talked a lot to Bill. And for forty years Kilgore carried around with him an old steamer trunk. This contained many curious items, including toys from his childhood, the bones of a Bermudian ern, and a mildewed tuxedo he had worn to the senior dance just before graduating.
    Sometime during his lonely odysseys, he fell into the habit of calling mirrors “leaks.” Mirrors were weak points through which leaked visions of universes parallel to ours. Through these four-dimensional windows he could see cosmos occupying the same space as ours. This delusion, if it was a delusion, probably originated from his rejection of our universe. This was, to him, the worst of all possible worlds.
    Our planet was a cement mixer in which Trout had been whirled, tossed, beaten, and ground. By the mid-1960s, his face and body bore all the scars and traumas of his never-ending battle against the most abject poverty, of his unceasing labors in writing his many works, of a neglect by the literary world and, worse, by a neglect from the readers of the genre in which he specialized, science fiction, and of an incessant screwing by his fly-by-night publishers.
    Fred Rosewater, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, picks up a book by Trout. It is Venus on the Half-Shell, and on its paper back is a photograph of Trout. He’s an old man with a bushy black beard, and his face is that of a scarred Jesus who’s been spared the cross but must instead spend the rest of his life in prison.
    Eliot Rosewater, coming out of a mental fog in a sanitarium, sees Trout for the first time. He looks to him like a kindly country undertaker. Trout no longer has a beard; he’s shaved it off so he can get a job.
    Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five , is introduced to Trout’s works by Eliot Rosewater, his wardmate in a veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid, New York. This was in the spring of 1948. In 1964 or thereabouts, Billy Pilgrim runs into Kilgore Trout in Ilium, New York. Trout has a paranoid face, that of a cracked Messiah, and he looks like a prisoner of war, but he has a saving grace, a deep rich voice. He is, as usual, living friendless and despised in a basement. He is barely making a living as a circulation manager for the Ilium Gazette . Cowardly and dangerous, he succeeds in his job only by bullying and cheating the boys who carry the papers. He is astonished and gratified that anyone knows of him. He goes to Pilgrim’s engagement party, where he is lionized for the first time in his life.
    In 1972, according to Breakfast of Champions, Trout is snaggletoothed and has long, tangled, uncombed