UNDERGROUND - the story

Excerpt from Real-Time Review

Underground - by Steve Rasnic Tem
A substantial Tem story, without a doubt, and, for me, a personally important one that (like all the stories in this book so far) I’ve just read for the first time. It carries this book’s own internally connected themes plus a pre 9/11 ground zero (or cone zero – see another Nemonymous volume that preceded cern zoo), here a seemingly deliberate building construction hole, with encroaching themes of that hole ineluctably being out of control, and themes concerning explicitly stated statues, ‘tree-men’, travel to ‘earth’s core’, the swimmability within ground or earth [and in my novel 'Nemonymous Night' it is flyability in the earth as well as swimmability! - a novel, for me, felicitously and coincidentally and differently resonating with Tem's 'Underground' as perhaps encapsulated by the concept of what I call 'hawling'] – and the poignancy of ‘difference’, sexual prejudice and many other factors I could enumerate. Here quite brilliantly connected within Poe’s premature burial fear – and a bereft sense or fear of leaving no descendants (note that word!), even too fearful to leave one’s dead body so as to mulch the future? Hence, that bereftness, too, perhaps, when there is no inter-generationality by enforced personal proclivity, i.e. no potential posterity. It’s as if we’ve been led artfully to this point by the previous stories, whereby the meticulously caring among us can now be shown how to care horizontally as well as vertically. You will know what I mean. An intensely caring literature. And so much more, too, like messages not getting through. This one, for me, did. But one needs to read literature with all these moments of meticulous care in their cumulation so as to reach such a point. A ‘hawling’ of emotions to the surface so as to optimise their message, empowering it even further by making readers work hard to ‘hawl’ the meanings free from their clinging roots. But God knows, even optimisation is often not enough. We can only do our best. A story for our times. And for the moving ’dead’ in the Guest House of our soul. (13 Feb 12 – another 90 minutes later)