If it were a movie, it would be "Men In Black" meets "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." As it is, not a movie, it seems to be a very weird, funny, and in parts moving, anti-novel.

The Origin of Flapping

One morning many many years ago, Knox stopped off at a San Francisco saloon as he walked from the bus terminal to the printing company where he worked as a shipping clerk. He had his usual quick couple coffee-and-brandies while reading Herb Caen's column at the bar. He was astonished, angered (by jealousy), and saddened (by the certainty that the universe held no such break in store for his most-deserving self) to learn that a local writer had gotten a $100K deal for the paperback rights and movie option for a 68 page book about a DUCK. Sixty-eight pages about a duck!

He had long been diligently researching—certain aspects of which effort are better left for another time—the phenomenon of Flapping and he knew that he could write a much better 68-page book—filled with the arcana and lore he had uncovered through his travails. Hell, he had already sent out two loving and subtly encoded missives to those nearest and dearest to him, for their edification and, nay, their very protection: Straight Facts About Flapping and Bulboscity in Stasis—upon which he could build for that phat 100K bling bling ...

Knox smoked another Camel, contemplating the arc of the Story, who might direct the movie (Lynch or Speilberg?), possible color schemes for the cover, and how he would use the 100K to finance a number of large-scale art projects he had been planning for some time.

He hopped off the barstool, strode to work enjoying the bright south-of-Market morning, as well as the caffeine-sugar-and-booze rush, walked into the plant, sat down at his desk, threaded some paper into the old manual typewriter normally used for shipping labels, and wrote the introduction and the first three chapters of Flapping as they exist today, word for word. It would take another excruciating 11 years of sacrifice, self-discipline, and delusion to finish the opus.

Sadly for the guy who wrote duck story, George Lucas's egomania and alcoholism had by the mid-eighties advanced to a sufficient degree so as to engender his making of the movie "Howard the Duck," which bombed bombed BOMBED, shelving all duck movies in Hollywood for at least a generation.