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In order to survive the verbal and physical torment thrown like a sweating, swearing gauntlet in his face as a pledge of the LSU chapter of Sigma Chi in 1989, author Will Clarke forced himself to look upon the rituals (and ritual abuse) of life as a wannabe frat brother with the mindset of a journalist—a journalist having an out-of-body experience.

If it was this detachment that got him through, the narrator of his latest book The Worthy should make out just fine. He’s experiencing the ultimate detachment. He’s dead.

Set at LSU, Clarke’s novel tells the story of Conrad Sutton, a 19-year-old killed in a hazing incident gone wrong and now haunting the fraternity house and the brothers who called his death an accident. As a new crop of pledges arrives on campus, Sutton seizes the opportunity to exact revenge on smug Ryan Hutchins, the big man on campus responsible for his death.

“To everyone at LSU, Ryan’s this big, bright, rising star,” Sutton explains. “But truth be told, he’s really the darkest black hole you’ll ever meet, and nobody seems to realize this. Which profoundly annoys me, considering the psycho pretty much murdered me in cold blood.”

The Worthy is a dark comedy examining the underside of fraternity parties and the brutality of hazing from a uniquely twisted perspective. It’s Ghost, Fight Club and Animal House rolled into one, a darkly hilarious ride all the way through to the final showdown between the murdered narrator and >> his living, breathing nemesis.

“By putting the supernatural next to the mundane you see how absolutely absurd certain things are we take for granted,” Clarke says. And absurd they seem. Pledges in The Worthy are forced to re-enact dangerous stunts from Jackass, offer their open hands as spittoons for discarded chewing tobacco and scrub toilets with toothbrushes while taking rabbit punches to the kidneys.

The novel contains all the usual embellishments and character amalgamations found in other “based on” books, but much of The Worthy’s fraternity flavor was taken directly from Clarke’s own experiences at LSU.

“Books are a lot like dreams where you’ll take something that happened to you and turn it on its ear and make it funny or sad—whatever,” Clarke says. “I wanted to take my experiences and turn them into something strange.”

The Worthy is in development with Sony Pictures and scheduled for a 2008 release. An adaptation of Clarke’s debut novel, Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles: A Spy Story (Sort of) is also on the assembly line with acclaimed indie director David Gordon Green attached to direct. Both novels are available through Simon & Shuster or at willclarke.com.