Skateboarder, punk rocker, kitchen slave, and general ne’er-do-well with a slightly tarnished heart of gold, When Thinfinger tries mightily to survive a seemingly endless round of troubles in small-town Florida. After getting fired from his job at the Barbie-Q, he lands a gig at the hippest pizza joint in town, where he soon becomes the leader of a disheveled crew. He’s the singer for a mediocre rock band, but his bandmates only let him sing their name, Wormdevil, to all the songs. His girlfriend dreams that he murders her and decorates their apartment with the skulls of small animals. And his best friend enlists him in his plan to land his photo in Thrasher by skating a bowl of poisonous snakes. Navigating a life littered with freaks and miscreants, When crosses a line, and things suddenly become hotter than his pizza oven. Jeff Parker’s laugh-out-loud funny first novel follows a contemporary Everyguy through the strange twists of a woefully complicated life.

Jeff Parker’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Tin House, Ploughshares, Hobart, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006. For more than a decade he worked in the kitchens of Italian, Mexican, seafood, pizza, fast food, and bar-b-q restaurants. Currently, he teaches creative writing and hypermedia at Eastern Michigan University and is program director of the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia program. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Toronto, Canada.