Nerding Day: Christian Magician Action Novels

Two weeks ago we explored the majestic pageantry of insecure Christian magician, Duane Laflin. It was a fascinating look at someone who realized, as they were typing, that they were writing a guide for adding 12-inch Jesus silks to store bought magic tricks, and that might not be anything. We're doing another Duane one, so you might be asking, "Mr. Baby, zany bad boy of the world web, that seemed like a pretty standard below average gospel sorcerer. Why are we talking about him again?" Oh, to be you in five minutes!

Starting in the '80s, Duane self-published a book every few years teaching aspiring Christian magicians how to go to a magic store, buy a trick, follow the directions included with that trick, and then add a 12-inch Jesus silk. I'm making it sound too complicated, but it was, aside from the Christian magician thing, an ordinary side hustle. Then something happened in 2022. Something that turbocharged the writer inside Duane. He became inspired. Maybe his performance schedule slowed down, maybe it had something to do with the launch of ChatGPT, or maybe it had something to do with the launch of ChatGPT, but Duane started pumping out books, let me actually check… 4244.2% faster than before. Here's some of the titles he published in that one year:

Duane was now writing books faster than anyone could read them, which is lucky because no one should and he charges $10 to $30 more than you'd expect. I didn't mention this in the article, but Grand Gospel Magic was forty five dollars. I guess Duane knows it's not a big demographic, so his business plan is to price gouge three elderly self-taught Christian wizards and also me. Because I bought two more of his books, and neither of them were about how to force a Bible lesson into a foam ball. I'm so fucking excited to tell you Duane writes action novels.

At a rate most authors would find suspicious, Christian magician Duane Laflin published a series of action thrillers in 2023, and then four more series of action thrillers in 2023. And a children's book. And some Biblical fiction. Duane is selling vaguely language-like robot hallucinations, illustrating it with unethically sourced AI art, and charging $16 for it. The one for kids teaches "Christian character" which means Duane accidentally wrote a great joke.

To be fair, Duane probably has no idea it's bad to trick people into buying an empty, dishonest, horrible imitation of art. "Empty Dishonest Imitation of Art" is what a Christian magician writes on tax forms. So when Duane learned you could tell a robot, or maybe just a sad woman in Mozambique, to write you a book, he didn't hesitate. He screamed into his phone, "Magician spy! Karate also, no sex, nothing close to sex, book please!" And the robot, or maybe that poor woman, spat out Chance Powers Book One: Chance Powers and The Table of Death. It's not about a table.

The cover for Chance Powers and the Table of Death: Book One in the Chance Powers Adventure Series is a drunk robot's best guess at "clock stuff" and then Duane added the emoji your phone suggests when you type "magic." It's not how I would illustrate a novel about a magician adventurer. It's how I would illustrate a book called I Left My Dreams In An Abandoned Toilet, Sorry I Know There Isn't a Tiny Extra Watch Inside Every Regular Watch But This is What the Robot Drew For Me, The Duane Laflin Story.

The book opens with a photo of The author Duane Laflin performing the amazing Table of Death illusion where we learn Chance Powers, action magician, is based on Duane himself. It's something so beyond obvious and pathetic it's adorable. I unironically love it. A gospel magician told an AI to write a little story about him as James Bond and he showed it to people! He thinks it's cool! Speaking of cool, I think it's wonderful that this book lets us see a robot experience the wonder of magic for the first time:

Chance Powers' adventures seem to take place in a universe where no one has heard of magicians. So when Chance laid down in the Table of Death, his audience must have thought this was some mundane nerd simply choosing to die. And when he doesn't? When he somehow escapes? They cum for eight straight minutes. How did– ?! A miracle? Something more? How could this be!? That man was restrained beneath spikes. Did you see? I mean, that shit was, continued for several more pages, fucking crazy.

It's possible Duane may have written some of this himself, by hand. Only a magician would spend three pages describing the way an audience clapped and never stopped clapping for a magic show, where a thing happened none of them could explain. Guys, do you think it might have been a real miracle? Because the man on the stage in the tuxedo, I don't know what you call him, was restrained beneath spikes and then he suddenly wasn't. I am still applauding, wildly.

The thing about Chance Powers, the "James Bond of magic", is that he knows he intimidates people. It's not because of his job, because he's not a spy or secret agent. He's more of a magician which is a thing too difficult to explain, so you'll have to trust me when I say it's not intimidating. But the way he approaches challenges? His striking good looks? The way he calls himself the "James Bond of magic"? He knows he seems dangerous, and that's why he's trying to form that weird smile… to make you less nervous. Enough of this delicate smiling. Let's get to the action.

As he and I mentioned, Chance Powers, the "James Bond of magic" isn't a spy or a secret agent or a trained fighter. He's an everyday Christian magician with an orange belt. But he does know enough about combat to know the face is the weak point of the gun. So wins the only fist fight in the book, which is mostly about Chance's side-business where he debunks local fortune tellers for money. The mafia is involved, sort of. It doesn't matter, Duane didn't read it either; it's $18.95 on Amazon.

I thought it might be fun to remind ourselves what the real Chance Powers is like. This man, the one botching a child's first magic trick, the one fussing with a sideways Jesus napkin for a full half minute, made himself the star of a spy thriller series. A glaringly fuckless one. I hinted at this earlier, but because of Duane's Christian character, he kept the intimidating, dangerous penis of Chance Powers on a tight leash. After 389 pages, there are only two sex scenes. Here's the first one:

I didn't say the book wasn't horny. It's very, very horny. But it's horny like a 6th grader. Chance Powers is the first grown man hard-fisted spy whose sexual endgame is smelling your hair during a slow dance. His first draft of Chance Powers and the Table of Death was the sentence, "I'm sorry, as an AI language model, I cannot render human intercourse this sexless."

The next love scene comes in the final chapter after a very clothed stripper dances back into a cake at a mafia birthday party. I know some of that sounds a bit wrong; we need to be understanding of how robots are not good at writing books and Christian magicians are not good at anything.

This is maximum Chance Powers. Something sexy or action-packed seems like it might happen, and then a standing man says, "I am a magician. My name is Chance Powers." If you used AI to organize your financial worksheets, it would generate a more exciting story than Duane Laflin. And if you kept the receipt from a single jar of mayonnaise, it would be three times as erotic. Speaking of erotic, here comes the sex part.

Chance Powers and the stripper (who is a not-stripper in disguise, but it's hard to be sure) duck back into the secret trapdoor in the cake while the mafia just goes crazy shooting at it. It's during this laughably certain death, trapped in an inescapable cake compartment, where it occurs to them they could use this opportunity to fool around. There's only one problem…

… they're a little bit too close to kiss! See, Duane knows how to kiss, everybody. He knows how to do it! He knows the first step is turning your head to the side because otherwise your noses get in the way of the mouth kissing, which again, Duane knows how to do! And Duane's not entirely wrong. Anyone who's led a full life knows how hard it is to fuck a magician in a stripper cake. But anyone who isn't Duane Laflin knows it's a terrible way to end a book. Fuck Chance Powers. The Chance Powers book series is the vanity project of a lazy virgin who hates himself. Duane Laflin's Chance Powers book series is the darkest, dumbest possible answer to "What Will AI Mean for Book Publishing?"

The article isn't over, though. Because unlike Duane Laflin, I have the storytelling and dong skills to build to a climax. Weiner 2600, initiate preliminary startup sequence.

Weiner 2600, display laflin_books01.webm and laflin_books02.webm and isolate for clown. Repeat: isolate for clown.

That's right. Duane Laflin isn't a mere Christian magician. He's sometimes a Chrisitian clown magician. And by fuck, you'd better know exactly what that means: AI-generated, author-inserted CLOWNCOP. The Party is Over! is book one of one in The Detective Was a Clown series. Let's fucking do it.

I forgot to mention the clown cop is also a historical firearms trick shot competitor. It will not be relevant. I don't want to spoil anything, but Duane never thought of a way to work "highly skilled with a gun" into his detective story. The book jacket tells readers, almost as a warning, it will contain romance, and then explains the entire plot resolution. These are -precisely- the words a woman would use to describe a book her grandson, age 9, wrote all by himself. I don't know what we're still doing out here looking at this book jacket, let's get inside this masterpiece.

The Party is Over is a breathtaking achievement in loser energy. Detective Donald Stallworth is driven to clowning by divorce, and moonlights as the children's entertainer Dondumb the Clown. He knows it sucks. He knows the other cops are disgusted by him. Because when Duane Laflin prompted this language model to write him a clowncop novel, he accidentally imbued it with all his insecurities. The book is haunted by self-doubt. Duane had to delete at least five chapters where Detective Clown Dondumb sat in his garage with the engine running, wondering how many lonely hours it takes to die.

Our first clowncop adventure comes when Dondumb walks past a group of high school bullies and one of them threatens to take off his pants. The danger-honed senses of the detective kick in and he quickly mopes, "This sex crime is funnier than me, I deserve all of this." This all happened, by the way. I just now realized it was important to make that clear. This is a real book. You can buy it for $14.99. This gospel clown magician generated an AI novel about a clown detective and the first, second, and third thing the clown does is get very sad.

But back to the book. This sudden attack by the youths gives Dondumb the excuse he needed to take some time and reflect on his horrible self and life.

You include hat when you measure clown, which makes Dondumb over seven feet of clown. In many ways, he is a terrifying monster, so he uses this to his advantage and snarls at the children. It has no effect, but some of that may be because robot authors do not understand fear. What they do understand are the gun regulations regarding off-duty police clowns. And here's a fair warning to crime: there fucking aren't any.

Off-duty officers are allowed to carry whatever gun they want, if they so choose, and the mayor never thought to make an exception for clown. Dondumb is still being attacked by the children, by the way. This is just fun backstory to explain why Dondumb isn't carrying a Glock 19, the gun you'd expect a clown detective to have. Instead, he carries a tiny 1866 Remington Derringer, and now that the reader understands it is perfectly acceptable within St Louis police department regulations for him to do so, he pulls it out. Ready for action at divorced clown speed.

With his weapon in hand, the children laugh at him again. The children laugh at the sad clown's tiny gun. But also, importantly and insanely, the detective is still using his clown voice. I'd argue this could be scarier than a normal voice in some clown showdowns, but the author seems to have gone out of its way to clarify this is not one of those times. "My voice still squeaky" is not how you describe a clown using a scary clown voice. That's how a cop clown tries to deescalate a pants robbery with tactical pee.

It's a clever misdirect. Our clown has a secret weapon all clowns have– a pocket suitably sized to contain a rubber chicken but actually containing a second gun.

"No one suspects the clown is armed," explains the clown who has been holding a gun as they take out another gun. We are now stuck in a classic showdown where everyone pulls out increasingly large weapons. It's what's known regionally as a Mexican Crocodile Dundee or a St Louis Rubber Chicken Pocket. With clown pants at stake, who is going to blink first? The kid holding a gun, or the very sad, still squeaking clown holding two guns?

Dondumb expertly defuses the situation by telling the children if they shoot him to take off his pants, he will shoot as many of them as he can before he dies. The human-like author very humanly weighs these options out loud, and decides this is creepy. It's right.

And that is how we meet the hero of Duane Laflin's clowncop novel, The Party is Over!. What majesty. A perfect book. It's probably the closest Duane Laflin's gospel will ever come to convincing me of the immaculate glory of Christ.

A sudden plot twist crashes into the book like a revolver from a rubber chicken pocket– Donald's main motivation in becoming a clown IS TO GET GIRLS. It's something he has to wrestle with, knowing this about himself. "What kind of sad fuck needs to become a clown to get girls?" wonders the robot writing a book for a Christian clown. It's such a wild misunderstanding of humans and what you and I might know as their souls and desires. Did the AI look at clowns and think they were trying to be sexy, or is this Duane's influence? Why am I asking as if there could be an answer? All we know is in the text of this book, in this universe, people become clowns to get women, and it works so well you can't even be sure yourself if you became a clown for the sex or for the betterment of children's birthdays. It is, again, glorious. Only a benevolent, all-powerful God could create something this beautiful.

Dondumb is hired for a birthday party, and though he is there in a clown capacity, he calls upon his detective skills to identify the attractive woman answering the door as the birthday boy's mother. The clown starts to take in the curves of her alluring body, but his thoughts quickly turn to father, always to father's discipline. Father's rules on punctuality were quite severe. These memories of father, the clown's father, are vital to our understanding of the clown's arrival time, and yet the clown does not share these memories with the beautiful woman. Gasp. I just realized there's a very good chance author Duane Laflin never read this, has no idea how amazing his book is, and he's learning about it right now after Googling his name.

The party does not go well, and Dondumb is not a hit.

Later, Dondumb meets a lady cop named Darcy, who agrees to go to dinner with him, the calories of it being mostly irrelevant because they each maintain regular exercise. Also, they don't kiss. Both of these details were important enough to state very plainly, several times. Like Chance Powers, the "James Bond of magic," our hero is extremely horny, but his romantic goals are modest. He only wants to one day kiss the woman he's dating, probably. Our narrator isn't reliable since it's an overheating server in Belarus being steered by a confused, retired virgin in Branson.

She downed a spoonful of bak– ? Sorry, nothing interesting happened in this clipping. I must have pasted it into my layout doc by mistake. Sorry! Let's get back to the kissing.

Darcy finally says something nice to our clown hero, and he wishes he could kiss her, kiss her, or kiss her if only she allowed it. The author considers this at processing speeds beyond the scope of man and decides "She didn't allow it or even think of it." Everyone, listen. God is real. God is real and His mighty hand guided us all to this book.

In the way humans eat, Detective Donald Stallworth takes his turn at beans. In the way humans eat, Detective Donald Stallworth wipes his mouth to clean it, wipes his mouth to clean it.

In a huge plot twist, Detective Donald Stallworth swallows more beans, wiping his mouth to clean it. It's the clue he needed to bust this case wide open. But first…

… Detective Donald Stallworth takes another spoonful of beans, the way humans eat beans and spoonfuls of them one after the other.

Picasso's Blue Period. 19th Century French Impressionism. The Spoonful of Beans Era of Duane Laflin's ChatGPT Prompt. Over the course of one plate of barbecue, the novel depicts a sad clown, maybe the saddest clown, longing for the lips of his beloved, each spoonful of beans a wet reminder of his chastity. Each wipe of the napkin another dry kiss of loneliness. I was a fool to not believe in Him, for only The Divine explains this.

During the many spoonfuls of baked beans, each honored with its own description in the novel, Dondumb comes up with a plan to disguise Darcy as a homeless woman. It's a very baked beans idea, and it helps him realize he has feelings for her.

He decides he might be longing for more than a kiss. Dondumb could be in love. Probably, he realizes.

In the next scene, Dondumb gets in a fight with a guy who isn't that good looking, but, and you're not going to believe this part, he's with a hot chick. And this guy, who… I mean, how did this dirtbag score such a tubular babe? Anyway, when the lucky jerk sees this clown, he throws his foxy tomato on the ground and attacks even though he is making out, which, come on, who would leave that!? Making out is the home run of s e x. Duane must have done some personal editing here. I honestly don't know how you'd get a robot to talk like this. This is how middle schoolers talked about girls when Duane was in middle school. Only a 1973 incel would think to include "the pleasures of making out" as a potential motivator in a clown fight.

The battle begins, and here's all you need to fucking know: Dondumb the Clown does not run, and he does not do karate.

Dondumb reminds the reader he is a giant clown beast unlike any man. His punches are not punches, but heart-stopping jackhammers. Wait, no, correction: through a series of unlikely wonders, not quite heart-stopping. Which is bad news for his punch victim, because he's alive when Dondumb's knees become predators unto chunks of four-by-four lumber, and they smell crotch. And if you're on the ground, this bean-filled clown is going to stomp your penis all the way to Hell. That doesn't sound quite right. ChatGPT, what's the Christian word for penis?

Right, "the juncture between the man's legs." Thank you.

The stupid jerk who thought he was so cool because he got to make out with a hot chick dies, the juncture between the man's legs shattered into wet penis meat. Dondumb doesn't say anything when he does this, but if he did, I think it would be, "Take a spoonful of penises and wipe your mouth, punk. Take another spoonful of penises and wipe your mouth, punk. Killing you was almost better than a kiss."

After the successful mission, Dondumb invites Darcy back to his home, and sex-havers, you know what that means:

Darcy sees his foam parade prop that says "shave the whales," and it confuses her. Dondumb carefully explains how it's a humorous parody of "save the whales" a popular slogan from the American 1980s. He explains further, for you see a pun such as this is best shared many times and gently, like waves lapping onto a lakeshore. Darcy shares in the mirthless understanding of whale shaving and its irreverent relation to whale saving, an example of "whimsy," which is a type of rhetorical baked bean. And I think I speak for all human comedy when I say, uhh, going into this book I did NOT have 'robot explains puns for an entire page' on my Bingo card (lol)!

Speaking of entire pages, I have to show you the next page in its entirety. This is the page Duane's poorly prompted large language model decided this woman and clown, after several months of dating, would share their first kiss:

Darcy gives Dondumb a kiss on the cheek and it takes him a full four paragraphs to recover. Then she explains, with no ambiguity, that she fell in love with Dondumb after hearing the explanation for the pun on his "shave the whales" clown prop because it proved how serious he was about being funny. Of all the author-insert wish fulfillment fiction produced in man's history, there is nothing more embarrassing than this book. This is the chaste fantasy of a man who reads taffy jokes to dolls before he pets their diapers to completion. The genitals of Duane Laflin withered off the juncture between his legs so long ago he can't remember why they were ever there. I can barely look upon his failure for I am not worthy of its splendor.

After sharing a cheek kiss standing among the giants of all-time cheek kisses, Dondumb says something awkward about how maybe he can have another kiss sometime and his fast-as-a-steel-strap detective mind deduces he fucking blew it.

Anyway, the clown cop killed a couple people and we find out he's a psychopath.

Darcy, like you would to someone dumbfounded by a shave the whales parade float, explains how humans are supposed to feel guilt after they kill. "I forgot to pretend to regret murder so I may walk among them," thinks this machine, thinking as a clown. I don't like the sound of it at all.

Darcy and Donald's romance continues, a steamy affair we are carefully informed involves no sex and separate beds. "I use the bathroom at a different time than you," one of the human lovers says to the other. "Yes, we take turns," the other lustily pants.

Chapter Twenty-Five begins with a few thousand words about the Mississippi River, and since none of it pays off later, I assume this is the kind of malfunction you get when you tell a robot to write an entire clown love story with no fucking. Here's a fun fact: the publishing of this type of book is outpacing the publishing of normal books at such an alarming rate that within a few years, functionally 100% of all literature will look like The Party is Over! Book One in the One Book The Detective Was a Clown Book Series. The next generation of AI will base more-or-less everything it knows on this. Which means the Duane Laflin novels of the future will think, "It is normal and expected to start the 25th chapter of a detective story with every Mississippi River fact, spooning another baked beans into its mouth."

The unrelated Mississippi River facts remind Detective Donald Stallworth that, as a clown, he can never know if a woman's love is true. Does Darcy truly care for Donald, or was she only pulled in by the seduction of Dondumb? He had to find out. After sharing a cheek kiss and many separate bathroom trips, the stakes were too high to not know.

"The clown is not a child predator; like all clowns he has received special training to avoid any appearance of child predation," reassures clown author Duane Laflin. "It's okay to pat them on the head. See? All he did was pat the boy on the head, everything is fine," reassures clown author Duane Laflin in his squeaky clown voice.

So here's an interesting thing that happened. On page 284, the narrator switched from first person to third person when referring to Dondumb, but not Detective Donald Stallworth. I don't know what it means, but I think we should keep an eye on it.

After being hired to perform at the birthday party for the son of one of the men he killed, Dondumb the Clown has trouble explaining his emotions. "It's like when you're a little boy's hero but you also killed his dad?" is how he decides to put it. He's speaking in the first person, which means he killed the boy's father as a man, not a clown. I love that I know that. I also love that two weeks ago I was like, "Ha ha look at this shitty Christian magician, what an ordinary day at work for me," and now I'm reading the compelling self-destruction of a horny virgin clowncop written by the seasoned author of 250 novels that day. The number of inhumanly weird traits both Duane Laflin and the world had to have to create this… it's nothing short of a miracle, praise Him, Amen.

Detective Donald Stallworth gets a hug from the busty, glamorous widow of the man he killed. This is a scandalous level of contact for a Christian magician author. In a secular book, the equivalent of this passage would be, "Detective Stallworth knew it was time to leave. With a friendly nod, the mother accepted two inches of anal penetration on his way out."

Donald handles the hug, mmm the bosomy hug, the way he handles all interactions with women– he worries he's not good enough because of his many terrible clown traits such as foul clown smell and pathetic clown personality. And to make matters worse, that hug almost cost him everything with Darcy, who saw the whole thing. She spent the birthday party disguised as a bag lady in the park for no reason. For no reason.

After several pages of adding up the salary of a part-time clown before taxes for the second time, a thing I'm being serious about, Duane Laflin brings book one in his one book clowncop series to an end. It's the ending everyone was hoping for– Dondumb finally got that mouth kiss from his serious, longtime girlfriend. Author Duane Laflin, who has kissed a girl, describes it not like getting licked by a cat. No, in fact, this woman's kiss was much more like a human woman kiss, the spoonful of baked beans of the face. The End.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Justin Brewer, an obnoxious sixteen-year-old wanna-be gangster funnier than any clowncop.

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