The Malignant Demon, The Horrible World, One Man Ticket Madurai: three attempts to tell a story

Getting married to Maggie and writing novels for a living is John’s vision of the ideal life. But there are problems. John has writer’s block. Maggie isn’t ready to settle down. Friends try to help. Hall, a slacker to the core, finds his friend’s predicament hilarious and encourages him to spin his stories into comedies. Joseph, a middle-aged hyper-intellectual still living with his parents, takes John’s troubles to heart and foolishly attempts to model solutions after his own. In a last ditch attempt to find some inspiration and material for a novel, John travels to India, where the chaos, complexity, disease, and loneliness he finds threaten to overwhelm him. Are John’s stories of failure, of being unable to write a story, the story he’s been trying to tell all along?