A.C. Wise
Part Two of my review of THE GHOST SEQUENCES as continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/23/the-ghost-sequences-a-c-wise/
UNDERTOW PUBLICATIONS 2021
My previous reviews of A.C. Wise: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/a-c-wise/ and this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/undertow-publications/
This author had a story in Nemonymous in 2009.
I SHALL CONTINUE TO REAL-TIME THIS BOOK IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
THE NAG BRIDE
Read up to “Let’s go inside”
To be read in parts…parts random in size.
“There’s a delicious thrill to the thought that he’s scaring himself with his own story. It makes it feel more real. Like the Nag Bride has always been here, and he’s just telling something that’s true.”
Andrew and Sophie are 12. Halloween party at his grandparents. She often stays with his grandparents away from the nearby house where her parents live. He tells her outside near the cornfield his spooky story of the Nag Bride.
Of a man who married a were-mare?
And does Sophie see this creature now for real like a woman in the corn? Now near, now further away, by turns.
“A ghost to haunt them is exactly what her mother and father deserve.”
No further spoilers.
“Peeling the covers back, she moves to the window, expecting to see again what she saw on Halloween night all those years ago. What she thought she saw.”
What I thought I read.
Andrew and Sophie have grown up, more siblings than sweethearts? Return now to the area. To sell his grandparents’ house. Memories or dreams of what Sophie saw that Halloween years before. Separate interleaved story of a bride with a veil… Does an apple fall far from the tree that bore it? Can horseshoes nailed to doors keep evil out? Like garlic with vampires, I wonder?
Read up to: “Gauzy yellow curtains,…”
“…they feel like part of a story that’s been going on for a long time.”
I am perhaps obsessed with this story’s growth in extending the time it takes to read it. Haunted. By its unaccountable bowl of marigolds, the cigarette lighter of Sophie’s erstwhile father, the nail gun, and things you will fill in for yourself. Each reader bringing a different self to the patterns. Also the nail-stigmatised woman as bride in the interleaving text with its beholden man who had set up a lonely cabin for a farm yearns to be linked synergistically to my concurrent review of another endlessly extendable story here of man called Stonehouse: https://classicalhorror.wordpress.com/daniel-mills/#comment-758
Read up to: “Bang, bang, bang.”
“A marigold petal—orange gold and shading to deep red at the center, the color of heart-blood. All the flowers she found on their first morning in the house were orange and yellow.”
The two main characters try to triangulate their own gestalt from the sequences of bits and pieces, the ghost sequences, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ that I have ever called them, as if these two join me in hunting the meaning with their own pack of sleuth hounds but hopefully without haunted horses. Andrew’s once alcoholism unaccountably refuelled, and nailed horseshoes galore as well as other signs they once missed before — now coming home to them. Watching themselves as well as each other, and the bric à brac or cuttings they scry with our help.
Read up to: “…she watches herself walk backward into the barn, steps jerky and awkward, as if her legs are bent the wrong way.”
“…hating the selfish thoughts running roughshod through her head…”
An essential catharsis that is felt in the very nailing of words to the page, I sense, even if such pages are just an electronic device, as mine are, similar to the electronic devices between Sophie and Andrew (her brother and best friend, if not groom) in LA, where he is now ‘killing’ his own new job there in a positive sense, killing his life, too, eventually, as we all do …eventually. Even when such an ending is galloped through by my finishing the reading of The Nag Bride, just now, but also studying each semantique and syntax at a gentle trot, too. A murder-and-suicide in Sophie’s heritage and now words that, roughshod, give a sense, too, of the equiness (ness as noun as well as ess as female) by her simultaneously and paradoxically denying and accepting her true bride being wedded to herself to make the bridegroom? Almost a religious concept. Like a ‘horse pawing a question’. I sense she may be just as in The Crossing earlier. That childhood waistband of her shorts now transcended. Those parental pizza parties, too. And “like a horse shrugging off a stinging fly”, transcending the earlier battle with her brother and best friend over alcohol and marigold, his erstwhile earlier “palm up, like he’s calming a skittish horse.” Thunk, scrape. Thunk, scrape. That Christian burden I aligned above, a few days ago in the slow gallop of words, aligned with a man from a stone house elsewhere. Hoofstep by hoofstep, a whole myth’s smile apotheosised with reconfiguring jaws — and transcended as well as stigmatised by using words that nail you to your own heart.
“The Nag Bride’s skin invites bruises; her hands and feet beg for nails. She is made to be wed, to be killed, to unbury herself in a terrible cycle. But is she to blame? If she draws violence to the surface of men’s skin, doesn’t that mean the violence was already there?”
Tekeli-li, They Cry
“…when the future is broken. Which is now because the break stretches in every direction.”
A poetic monologue with like it or like it not cries of pain and sorrow at CERN Zoo’s skip of time, and depicting the life and characters at the South Pole as an Area X of male as well as female researchers, the narration as soliloquy by a woman who seeks her own daughter’s ghost in the land where a Bird Flew but did not fly , whatever the ways and means into bird bodies by dissection, and her daughter suffered her mother’s feet on the car’s brakes not pushing hard enough, if at all, because we are all affected now by ‘climate change’ (quoted from this story) as a nightmare osmosis of Lovecraftian aura, mentioned here, like co-vividness and 3D printing as, inter alia, replacement limbs. And, what is more, “History is full of people who have frozen to death naked in snowstorms.” Because the extreme heat was too blizzard-pixelated to bear, I guess. Harking back to the murder-suicide and alcoholism in the Nag Bride and its own Christian death and resurrection, but without faith it will never work, I say! ‘A skip in time’, it says somewhere, but at least in the country where I happen to live, ‘skip’ can mean two quite different things. One meaning is an abstract movement that a body and its limbs can make (sometimes parallel-configured — less abstractly — by a skipping-rope) or as a skip in time as it says here or a skip of reading something like this without reading it all, THE OTHER being a heavy metal container where a life’s rubbish is put.
“It isn’t my fault if anyone reading this doesn’t understand.”
The Men From Narrow Houses
“Not a memory, but the promise of a memory waiting to be born.”
This story surely is a classic, especially in the way it conjures up not only the feel of childhood nursery rhymes but also such nursery rhymes morphing in their words and in the nightmares evoked as well as daytime fears crossing or cross-sectioning considerations in the magician and nag bride stories above. All centred on a woman called Gabby, her boring fiancé Fred and her dead uncle with whom all manner of connected imaginings firing up like today’s perpetual “autumn flame” and digging upside down houses. The ribbon that made the fingers of her hand into a paw. Or wild tropes into gestalt. The furniture shop with the concatenating cabinet. Here the nag, a fox instead. And do please review what I see as a fox face upon the non-fox dog that this author tweeted recently (to which I linked somewhere above). I may have been waiting to read such a nightmarish confabulation all my life, but particularly so in the sometimes smeary and sometimes sharply prestidigitive light of much of the foregoing context of this book. Dare I call it a masterpiece, during this passion of the reading moment in real-time? Yes, I say with an ‘apple-slice grin’! The blueprint now within my skin.
“The orange reminds her of flames. Gabby holds up her hands and counts her fingers against the smeary light.”
***
My own tweet yesterday before reading this story:
I read the next story in 2019 in the context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/08/28/echoes-edited-by-ellen-datlow/, as follows:
=========================================================
THE GHOST SEQUENCES
“She would go on binges of eating, trying to fill herself up so there was no room for ghosts inside her skin.”
There are many other eye-catching and chilling hauntings in this series of fragments (some confusing to me) — concerned with building up the gestalt of a four-woman collective of conceptual art and paintings in the museum and their exhibition, involving an Ouija board, their own memories, personal experiences. One about a school’s famous mass suicide in Japan, and a vanished film with a ghost in it, and one with two sisters in tune with this whole book’s double-berth exhibit: “…like we were lying in invisible coffins. If we were good enough at pretending, the ghosts would think we were one of them. We called it The Dead Game.”
of the Tremblay.
It also has the
[Finally, for me, chillingly remarkable and frightening, in the context of this whole ambiance of hauntings, is its ending, an ending that miraculously resonates with a Vladimir Nabokov story that I reviewed here earlier this very afternoon in my real-time, where I wrote about myself: “…I have often been known to point at parts of art galleries themselves as being part of the art being shown.” When you read this Wise story, you will know what I mean!]
My personal coda to an enormously inspiring book that I finished reading with the previous entry of this review….
MELLIE’S ZOO
2009 (never republished as far as I can see.)
This ‘elbow tree’ is where, judging by the story’s description, Paul first waited for Mellie as a sort of apostle…
Coming home fresh to my memory that was never a memory till now, this powerful haunting story (that surely must have been powerful enough to have always haunted me, nullimmortalis) turns out to be an empowerment story for those who were children when it was written but who are now adults facing today the world as it is, and this is told about Mellie (all girls as one girl as the Mellie I mentiond earlier in this review) and, in tune with the friends in the Nag Bride, Paul lives next door to Mellie and they pass between the hedge with impunity since their own memories began, Mellie with her own difficult parents, too, and possibly worse, like Gabby, — and Paul, along with a girl-like boy with long eyelashes and another girl called Lydia, takes them to a secret derelict zoo but still with its animals, under the underpass, past the graffiti tags, the disused railtracks, and each child has spiritual synergy with their chosen animals tellingly in their cages. Some animals quite outlandish or nightmarish, but always a colluding if colliding synergy that will ever work positively, I sense. Even metallic like CERN aspects already mentioned in this book. A Hadron Collider of elements of flesh, fur and feather in its spinning coils. To “remake the world”. This happens twice, the second time with more disciple children. Where are you now, I ask?
Mellie’s animal is vaguely akin to her cuddly childhood hippo, ‘hippo’ being a word that derives from the Greek for “water horse”, an expression that resonates with the Crossing (on “improbable paws” as well as equivalent pause till now ) and with the horse bride earlier, even the would-be were-fox, where “here” became “her”.
Her book. Wise not only after but also before the event.
end