Meet Phoenix, The Street Kid. You're more likely to discover who Phoenix really is through his friends. The Snake Angel. The Dark Kid. Gavroche. Tyson. Maxwell. The Wolf Kid. Brian. The Black Queen. The Lion Cub. Blitz. You're more likely to uncover Phoenix's secrets through his enemy and antagonist, The Bad Guy. Phoenix is a real person. He exists in real life, he exists in a fictional world; he exists on the page and he exists in your mind. He is alone in his mind, alone in the words of his saddened soul, but he seeks rebirth as fiercely as he seeks his White Death: as fiercely as he allows himself to be born, to die, to reborn, to redeath. Phoenix doesn't know what is real and what is not. His brain is split between reality as it is and reality as he desperately needs it to be. Through it all, he can only see one white hot path: a path that leads into the sun, the endlessly beautiful sunset at the edge of all eternity. All of this comes at a price. The things he must do destroy him. He must overcome his constant desire for suicide, the eventual surrender to his White Death, a cold and empty space of existence that would be as sterile as the purity of intention but as deadly as shadow. He must force himself to beat the Mountain of Pain, he must force himself to Reach beyond the existence that he sees on the surface plane, even at the expense of his mind. He must overcome The Bad Guy's mental trickery and torturing wizardry to eventually disappear in the shadows of the darkening road and to stand completely still in time as a blazing sun, and to learn the painful and harsh truth that his head is sick, confused, sickly, and misguided by phantoms of thought, mere mind chimeras. In short, he must free himself by allowing himself to exist in chains, in spiritual bondage. The Street Kid is a novel that infuses a very specific and methodical narrative strategy to mimic how Phoenix, both the person and the character, one and the same in all reality, really thinks. In addition to stream of consciousness writing in the actual text, of disconnected thoughts forming a beautifully unbridled free association and deep expression, Phoenix's thoughts interrupt the flow of this stream of consciousness narrative. Deeply informed by experimental literature, the bildungsroman, and the power of beautiful books and beautiful works of literature in general, The Street Kid seeks to open your heart to the powers that exist in the mind, in the universe, to allow your ideal to become a reality, even if the catch is that you can never actually face that reality. It seeks to inspire all to hold onto your childhood as you acculturate to the metaphysical space of spiritual awakening and growth. Take the journey with The Street Kid. Humble yourself to the labor of walking mile after mile in a thankless existence. Homeless yourself in an existential drift. Hate yourself as passionately as you love yourself, and let go of your sense of clarity to embrace the confusions of doubt and uncertainty. Maybe there your path will brighten and reveal itself in full blazing clarity, like a Phoenix spreading his fiery wings for the first time. And don't worry: Phoenix will spread his wings with you.
About the Author: Phoenix (aka Stephan Heard) is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, and serious thinker. He has written eight full-length novels (including The Street Kid and Contorted Royal), five poetry collections (including the previously published Characters), an experimental novella, the previously published Silent Noise, the previously published Death's Mirror, one short novel, three plays, an informal philosophical treatise, another philosophical treatise, and two short story collections, among other writings. The Street Kid is Phoenix's fictional autobiography, or "autofiction," in line with writers such as Proust and Knausgaard. The events in the text were filtered through a fictional lens to both dramatize and add credence to Phoenix's often bizarre and fantastical/spiritual experiences, to make the experience more realist and yet also more powerful. Phoenix is a kid because kids are innocence. Homelessness is used as a metaphor for psychological and spiritual displacement, and yet the beauty of the metaphor allows for themes such as perseverance and determination to make themselves apparent. You will no doubt never meet anyone like The Street Kid, where fantasy and reality, delusion and rationality, blur to strange and profound effects.