Each small story that makes up the book is filled with dark satirical humor, and the stories in Merciful Flush are morbidly addicting.

“On the other hand, Ball Washer is incredibly well-written and cerebral for all its baseness. The contrast is rather fantastic. Lance takes the very graphic and often embarrassing parts of life and opens them wide for all to see. That is a kind of bravery in writing that not many authors can claim.”

“If I have one complaint about the new book from Lance Manion it’s that Merciful Flush pretends to be a book of bathroom humor instead of reveling in what it might be… the most interesting collection of short stories I’ve ever read.”

*   I always look at the human body as pretty easy to cut up. Just snip at all the joints; ankles and wrists and elbows.

*   Memories are like scars on your brain.

*   I might as well be rejoicing about extracting individual hexadecimal digits by calculating preceding ones using some lame Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula.

*   Words have always been a problem. This need to fill a conversation the same way you’d overstuff a piece of luggage for a short trip.

*   All I know is I like the image of a man sitting in a grocery store cradling a bottle of detergent.

*   If you want to be happy find a girl that is a balloon shaped like a kite.

*   Listen, you may think you’re the shit with your silk being stronger than steel of the same thickness and all but you don’t know dick about the weather.

*   Sometimes at night I lay there and imagine my face with no skin on it.

*   I swim with the same finesse that most people drown.

*     Eternity is every second you spend in fear.