“What the cluck? How can a book be medical? I don’t know and I’m not going to ask any questions because D.T. Robbins scares me. In a good way! I wish to express my deep appreciation for the wonderful care I received while reading Birds Aren’t Real. BAR cured me of a disease. My disease is called parafearmonia. Every doctor – before BAR approached me with its cure – laughed at me and said, “Just stop.” In between the doctors laughing at me and BAR approaching me and saying, “Hey. I got you, man,” I hid under my neighbor’s stoop for sixty days and survived on dog treats stolen from my neighbor’s doberman and rainwater collected in a turpentine can. On the edge of death, clinging to a pile of underbelly stoop-sand I had named Stingy, BAR found me. She’d slipped through a crack in the stoop and landed on top of Stingy. Poor Stingy. Stingy is dead. Crushed. But BAR lives. I live! Because of BAR. We’re in love and it’s not the Florence Nightingale Effect! Stop judging! Birds Aren’t Real gave me the care I needed. Slowly but surely, as I read BAR and we fell madly in love with each other, my parafearmonia disappeared. I can’t recommend BAR enough. I’m trying damnit! Everyone at BAR from the nurses to the doctors to the respiratory therapists to the characters to the existential dread creatures to the beetles inside my brain that control my thoughts to that friendly-yet-firm personal driver who said he wasn’t D.T. Robbins even though he looked a lot like D.T.R. who kept dragging me off the street at random times in my life and driving me to weird buildings where these people in white coats who kept telling me they were like camp counselors kept doing fun experiments on me — everyone — was absolutely fantastic, professional, caring and outstanding. I can’t say one negative thing about BAR. I received outstanding care throughout my time with BAR and came home vastly improved. I don’t need a leash and collar anymore when my family takes me on walks. Thank you BAR so much for taking excellent care of me. I will never forget it. I hope I never need to be there again under that stoop, but knowing that should I get sick again, that such wonderful, skilled people are at BAR and those people are ready to slip through that crack again and kill my stoop-sand pile, is eminently reassuring. I love you lots. Hugs and kisses.”
-Chase Griffin, parafearmonia survivor and author of How To Play a Necromancer’s Theremin and What’s On the Menu?