Following the success of 'Rosebud Investment' and its declamatory punch ending, Lint repeated the formula in a string of stories which pulp historian Mike McCurry describes as 'garbage': 'He kept doing these stupid endings where the main character or villain turns around and announces some revelation, but it got pretty predictable pretty fast.' Such as the story 'I Married a Trash Compactor' in which, after marrying a trash compactor and suffering the many adversities pursuant to that mistake, the hero turns to us, the readers, and states, 'It was bound to happen, because...I married a trash compactor!' The element of surprise was a distant memory when Lint submitted a tale in which a postman wakes up early, goes on his rounds, drinks some coffee, finishes his work, leaves the office, then stops to announce, startled by doom, that he did it all because he is a postman. Lint was by this time eating nothing but kelp and some kind of papery gauze, according to Abodon." Jeff Lint was author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical SF of the twentieth century. He transcended genre in classics such as Jelly Result and The Stupid Conversation, becoming a cult figure and pariah. Like his contemporary Philip K. Dick, he was blithely ahead of his time. Aylett follows Lint through his Beat days; his immersion in pulp SF, psychedelia and resentment; his disastrous scripts for Star Trek and Patton; the controversies of The Caterer comic and the scariest kids' cartoon ever aired; and his belated Hollywood success in the 1990s. It was a career haunted by death, including the undetected death of his agent, the suspicious death of his rival Herzog, and the unshakable "Lint is dead" rumors, which persisted even after his death.
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