GRIMSCRIBE PRESS 2021
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/kurt-fawver/and this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/grimscribe-press/
When I read in 2022 this collection from 2021, my real-time thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
There may still be significant delays in commencing and then completing this review in the wake of my Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Aickman projects…
The Bleeding Maze:
A visitor’s Guide
Has your town got a maze, just as this town has? We shall never know unless we tell each other about them. This one, with red flecks in its stone, oozes blood and wields a tutelary didacticism, a cruelty as cure, horror-without-victims, as well as an Alexis-in-wonderland feel. And other depicted named characters who travel within it. With some very strange journeys between its choice of two paths with four entrances or exits.
Losing your town’s youths in it? So, try to destroy it, or send in trail cameras or overfly drones, but then the fable’s complex or simple moral would fall within the wayside, whatever the videos one takes, whatever one’s view of Anti-Navidson or -Natalism in this our MAZE-of-Leaves (or Entrances). “Was it Cannibalism?” Sickles, beheaded heads et al. Wars of attrition or conclaves of stoicism?…. An amazing tour-de-force of a gazetteer.
“When this time arrives, we will no longer be able to discern maze from not-maze…”
The Man in the Highchair
I am aMAZEd at this major venomous Swiftian fable concerning the eponymous man stationed above where our politics are governed as well as governing us, no doubt a fast tessellating plot-configuration of an otherwise transparent structure — perhaps originally intended as a Trump allegory but one that has now become an amazing prophecy of literally today’s neuro-diverse post-Brexit Cummings syndrome feeding bile and venom into the system gradually, along with its hybrid mutually-fed shopping-trolley trope as the mewling and puling high-chair sidekick in diverting conspiracy. Read it and see for yourself! We are happy, we are doomed, yet again.
The Richview Massacre
From Maze to Massacre, this is another town as a blighted pizzacre…
You will know what I mean when you read this text, all its facts and news blackouts and residual odours and animal culls and gray suits from white vans…
If I say much more, I may regret it. Only those who read this work will know, and they will in turn need to stay quiet. Just hope for Burger Heaven to take the taste from your reader’s mouth. I will, however, add one more thing. I recently visited Rendlesham Forest in nearby Suffolk (UK), whereupon there are legends that might fit in with this text’s set of itemised facts and witness accounts. Just look that forest up on Google. Liberty’s torch torched, I wonder. Makes me shudder at the global implications. Happy to be doomed, be blowed. The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori. That’s a bit rich.
Also, my old post from 2019: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2019/06/23/rendlesham-forest-yesterday/
EXTINCTION IN GREEN
“Day 19: I must force myself to keep these records short, given that there is only one small notepad in the basement, and I intend for it to last as long as we do.”
This work has a definite sensory rhythm that, over a hundred capsule notebook reports, evokes the light that has trapped five (including the notebook writer?) people trapped by that very light, and the others are referenced not by their names but by what, developmentally, they do or not do, as long as they do do, such as “The woman who rarely speaks”, even after she speaks. Until the notepad runs out with some longer entries towards the end and they reach extinction rebellion… I was so hallucinated by this rhythm that I am at a loss myself to rebel enough to tell you more about this nightmarish entrapment.
“…but we value companionship more than freedom at this point,…” but then that was then, and now this is now, and the pervading, invading light seems prehensile. My thoughts are mutated as if I am to be referenced as the man who wrote these entries as if they were written by a woman. Her husband? Or someone else, above it all, the god in the light, or even as the light. As green as the gooey fluid in the faucets? We are happy, we are doomed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion
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Etch the Unthinkable
“‘Can a clown really be that funny?’ floated up from the murmuring throng.”
A powerful, impossibly depressive vignette of ‘queuing behind crazy people’ (my own expression) for this so-called comedy show in an industrial warehouse with their own inflammable instruments carried there for later Ligotting themselves. Those who were cremated in the poem that was just, by chance, read and reviewed by me a few minutes ago here are now re-created to be re-cremated!
This, safely, is the descriptive apotheosis of an ‘entertainment’ in such a place with such a darkness of temperament, outdoing anyone else’s efforts in making us experience, even relish, such a theatrical event before.
We are happy, we are doomed. As we literally become the ‘each’ of Etch. My own italics below. What else.
“Etch, whose arachnid reach drew them to himself, into himself, through himself.”
Apocalypse, Ignored
“It’s time to move. It’s always time to move.”
…a sentiment thats seems a symbol of one of the Sigils this Old Man needs to write in the walls to obviate the dreadful Things that plague us now from between the bricks of reality, but in this story they have gone one horrific déjà-vu stage even further, making me think I was once the man that became the Old Man, a vagrant at the front door of my own house, a common fear for men already old like me who once brought up a son and daughter, whatever Ligotti said! The Country Dream mock-PEACED into Nightmare (“so all I can think is that this Thing”), and I who once never had anything to do with the police am now at war with them till they know they’re victim vagrants, too. Until they know I am their Christ to be crucified in as much of my own spilt blood as possible. I still wallow in books like this one to prove it. Whatever the doom on the doormat says. However you live the Apocalypse, Ignored.
I am happy, you are doomed.
“You’ll feel the interconnectedness of it all. You’ll realize… well… you’ll see.”
This review continues here: https://weirdmonger.wordpress.com/kurt-fawver/#comment-482