Urx Quonox – Adam S. Cantwell


MOUNT ABRAXAS PRESS MMXXI

My previous reviews of this publisher HERE and of this author HERE

When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

3 thoughts on “Urx Quonox – Adam S. Cantwell”

  1. Over 60 pages, my copy numbered 93/113.
    A luxurious book, with the Mount Abraxas luxury of a beautifully-upholstered creation to which I have long grown accustomed from this publisher. But I never take their books for granted. Each is uniquely beautiful in its own way. Silky smoother pages than normal, I feel, and, as ever, stiff ones, too — as fitting for the first story below!

    THE MONARCH IN DISARRAY

    More the reader in disarray! – discombobulated, as I am, by this work’s exponentially induced concupiscence. I cannot tell you much about this Grasmically convulsive work, as you need to read it for yourself in one ecstatically endless gulp before, yes, BEFORE reading my most inadequate summary of it in the next paragraph below.
    An attritionally rumbustious, balls-breaking journey through dromes and waterfalls and much else, of a scheming barbarian mercenary with a sword and his continual coitus-interruptus-in-the-balance with a so-called Queen’s lust for him, and the passing involvement of an unforgettably orgiastic In-The-Hills-The-Cities golem of many whores …

  2. SCREAM OF THE BLUE JAY

    O Loogas, O Lewis, O Henry, urX quonoX, nullimmortalis, I feel it is I myself that am the old man emitting his long sad monologue in the ward, raving of loggers, of his wife and an aunt, and oodles of whatever else, — and Grasm institutionalised from this book’s previous pages is listening to these ravings; this barbarian with a sword has his own memories of fishermen and forests just like Torni Maa’s, often raving to us himself but clearly to escape from his own ravings and from the shaggy shapes of what the words must have meant all along to himself and that old man. This reading is like literally living through madness. The words although shaggy with madness, are sharp, tactile, Proustianly tentacled and whirl through like teeming Joycean consciousnesses… no, not Joycean, more Pinter and Beckett thewed through with Robert E. Howard’s Conan gnawings.

  3. To a reader-bespoke coda, if not decoder…

    CITIES BELOW THE STRAND

    “No riddles! Release me!”

    And the book does.
    Grasm, after listening to meanderings of Unz the hermit, meets, after grappling with a city’s vertical street, the sorceress in the form of a girl in the waves, and this makes madness more manifold (“Some big power is at work…”), makes it thus by somehow helping the riddles at the end of my readings of this eight Aickman-edited book series in the last day or so here: the Keir Cross, the Riddell and the Grubb. And A Monster Calls still prevailing here. The Model still prevailing here. 

    “…the monster is of the largest, and indeed is not to be spoken of….”

    “It was as if her brain were being penetrated by a dozen swords, entering from all directions at once. It was at least as much a torment as a revelation.” – Robert Aickman, sentences quoted for the first time earlier today from The Model.
    Spasm as Grasm. If pent-up Urgasm.

    end