Collegiate Times

Bid farewell to dental hygiene and macaroni, for you will never see Listerine or Velveeta the same way again.

Chad Kultgen's second fiction offering, "The Lie," crosses more lines than hopscotch - but wasn't that game occasionally a blast?

The book follows the inner monologues of three students at a mystery university, SMU, in Dallas. The reader is welcomed into a residence hall during the first few vulnerable weeks of freshman year and eventually departs the cast upon their graduation as seniors. Well, two-thirds of them turn their tassels.  

There's the old adage that proclaims, "Everything is bigger in Texas," and Brett Keller is certainly a giant jerk; furthermore an invincible one. Brett is the presumed heir to his father's business, Keller Shipping, the second largest freight and shipping company in the southwest. With numerous students depending on Keller Shipping for well-paid jobs, Brett traverses campus trailed by a legion of brownnosers.

His father also attended SMU where he was the president of a highly regarded fraternity. Brett is expected to mimic the tracks laid down by generations past, and while he entertains his supposed destiny, he truly craves a unique existence.  

Brett holds a wicked disdain for the constructs of wealth and status; specifically, those who try to acquire them through associating with him. While he manages to emasculate several fraternity brothers, Brett far more frequently exploits women. He views them as deceitful and disposable - tick marks on his bedpost, and he is running out of writing room. His sexual appetite is insatiable and infinitely immoral (a $12,000 vacation to Viking's Island, populated entirely by prostitutes), and it started at the tender age of 11 when he slept with his 16-year-old babysitter. You read about his fateful Jacuzzi so often that you can feel the jets on your legs.

Heather Andruss' priorities are more confused than Joaquin Phoenix's rap career. She majors in elementary education, but only because she thinks it will be valuable when she has a baby. She totally, like, loves her sorority and, like, Kultgen clearly, like, stereotypes the verbal, like, capabilities of such girls. Heather wants so badly to be the only junior in Greek life who is engaged, but only if the ring meets her catalog of requirements. Her nightstand drawer packed to the max with condoms hints that she's not picky when it comes to a mate.

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