Overqualified

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 writes the comic A Softer World, which has appeared recently in The Guardian and been profiled in Rolling Stone, and which Publisher's Weekly called, "subtle and dramatic." His self-published first novel, Lockpick Pornography, sold out its print run of 1000 books in just three months. In 2007 he published It's Too Late to Say I'm Sorry, a collection of short stories. The A Softer World website (asofterworld.com) has been online since 2003 and has an average daily readership of 70,000 people worldwide. 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.

Applying for a job is stupid. It is a demeaning, humiliating exercise in learning to grovel in front of faceless strangers. Everyone who has ever sent a job application letter has felt the urge, the temptation to say what they really think. To say something completely insane, or to be brutally honest. With 2007's Overqualified, Joey Comeau acted on those urges and delivered a book collecting his cover letters. "It's sad and fragmented and, in places, funny," the L.A. Times said. "This slender epistolary novel is charming." But even after the dozens of insane, hilarious, and sometimes strangely sad job application letters, he still didn't get the job. So he's at it again. A person needs to work, you know? But he's had to step things up a bit. Were the letters not insane enough? Was he not sad or stupid enough? Did he not threaten to bite as many CEOs as he should have? There's only one way to find out: OVERQUALIFIEDER.