Kurt Fawver
‘We Are Happy, We Are Doomed’ by Kurt Fawver – Part 2 of my review continued from HERE
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/kurt-fawver/and this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/grimscribe-press/
SHALE CREEK
“…they became blurry, like long exposure photographs. Their bodies seemed to be in multiple locations at once, as if they’d been stretched out over space-time or were unfolding from themselves.”
This an unmissable landmark Swiftian fable, nay, a masterpiece of truth depicting (and thus hopefully healing) what has faced us in recent years with the Trumpster and the Bodger, transliterating those missing parts of our good selves into ash with the fires of hatred and obsession, eventually creating new forms of ourselves suffering depression and paranoia, or even the night-key’s turning of nooses, knots and ligotti upon our honesty glands if not our necks— all of this emanating from the brexitation of a burnished gold structure, and all of us are now consigned, with the password of 010-101-0045, to a network of soullessness. We are happy, we are doomed.
I read and reviewed the next story in 2018, within the context of that incarnation, as follows…
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THE RULES AND REGULATIONS OF WHITE PINES, VERMONT
Another fine future-acclaimable fable for our present times by Fawver, this one as first discovered by Vastarien, by the look of it, now itself looming low or hawling the budding White Pines town perfectionists of wholesome American living into their nearby geographical black hole or pit, one with coordinates and perfect circle qualities that I seem to have somehow predicted in my earlier photo of Vastarien above… Hell and perceived Heaven in contiguity? The former wherein which darkness you need to sign off so as to live in the latter, at least temporarily. The relativities buzz in my head, as this classic emblem from our own particular cut of literary cloth settles in my head. Some of the rules of tradition, history and good living here set out seem hilarious.
THE WHITE FACTORY
“I need someone to tell me I’m not crazy—or that crazy is pretty much the default for the whole damn world.”
A long haul trucker desperately needs to get this tale off his chest, a tale of a job he was once put on with the enticement of much more money than he was used to being paid. Needless to say, what he has to tell us makes me think he is as mad as his tale! Or even madder! Who’s heard of such outlandish things happening? Everything that his tale’s title implies: including the industrially fabricated sugar-cubes of pure whiteness amid the atmospheric desolation of Central America’s dark landscapes — madder and madder, becoming as mad as billions of equally mad folk aching to get their own stories off their chests, or worse!
Some of those billions in the spaces between each of their stories with disarmingly kissy kissy faces like mine. O! Hi! O!
“Like living on a line between two points, neither here nor there.”
TO THE RAVINE
“Their visages betray none of the horror to come.”
A present tense’s prophetic truth about the Thing happening today in the future. Who is the Reverend Samuels who claimed I was the Devil? Who am I on this cot being carried to the ravine, with my preternatural gestalt reviews in the past scrying the future’s path? Who gave me birth, if not this narrator himself? Are you not the latter’s children throwing him or me into the Ravine. Whom the weirded, who the weirdmonger? What the ravened vine at my base? Except the narrator birthed me, too, and incredibly now I am even older than he is. A short vignette that kills me shortly.
“The thing blinks and looks up at the puzzle of stars above us. It can probably see all the connections between them.”
The Ravened Vine: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/02/10/the-ravened-vine/
(THE UNPETTING HAND)
Preface to Mitchell D. Gatz’s Revelation of the Unpetting Hand: The Apocalyptic Visions of Domesticated Canidae
“There was no connection I could make between the smell of ham and cheese and the nightmarish sense of pain, confusion, and loss that Dixie experienced. It didn’t make sense” (Journals 334).
Almost like reading Gospels in the Bible, with verse numbers? And I can safely say this academic article is the most powerful act of imagination as Godly Immanence I can imagine ever to exist in bi-polar hate/love form, and then become worthy of academic research as truth. A connective deployment toward what here is called ‘the Unpetting Hand’, a gestalt of such connection as a means of precognition in canine-human linked Life itself — just as much as I myself have tried to connect things in Literature as, not a ‘canid eschatology’, but more a candid scatology of an Upsetting Hand! A tsunami of smiles towards “miles of freshly unearthed topsoil.”
I really do mean what I say above about this article being a massive feat of imagination as truth, couched in an accessible but not condescendingly simple style of a rationale’s research, and contrasting the differences between the effects of Dr. Lyra Sciavalli’s experiments in canine telepathy with those of Dr. Yu Matsuzaka in human telepathy towards something quite other that threatens literally to blow my mind with a new expansion of understanding of which I assumed I was not capable. A frighteningly apocalyptic narrative nestled within the gentle hand of God that embodies His own name’s palindrome.
Cf IN BLEED reviewed by chance earlier today, to give and to take: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/john-travis/#comment-2448
Cross-referenced with THE INTRUDER here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/02/04/a-trick-of-the-shadow-by-r-ostermeier/#comment-23997
Dermatology,
Eschatology
This is a story that I have been awaiting for a long time, an on-line apotheosis of forums and self-help groups and social-media viral tsunamis of mutual comfort and conspiracy, better than real doctors, with all anger and passion and induced spite simply as necessary side dishes. This is about the self-comfort angle of the super-wired highways of a Jungian gestalt.. The ultimate intimate need for collusion and reassurance and supposed mass wisdoms… here someone diagnosed with hives (incidentally, what a great word for bumps on the skin that you believe insects or other things live within!): here becoming a monstrous culmination of what I have just described above but effectively seasoned with what I sense is pungent fawver spice. An ingredient that also sets my own gestalt-reviewing syndrome haywire! Perhaps out of spite to punish my irrelevancies!
Where, indeed, “answers and connections and monstrosities are all irrelevant.”
OPUS MANUUM ARTIFICIS
“Was this device pumping him full of healing elixirs or draining his life?”
The recurring performance of Sam, from behind a recurrently drawn and indrawn curtain accompanying a scream. His scream or a scream from the audience, for whom Sam is also a recurring audience to their performance? But the state of Sam itself? We readers are hypnotised by the words as performance art of inexplicable stapled mouth, handless arms, ports from Sam’s body to a pumping device (my own heart?) and black confetti or shards of desensitisation floating from the ceiling upon Sam. No mention of his elbows? And whose are they, those exquisite bouts of recurring pain? And whose Samsara?
“Sam didn’t understand the connections his brain was trying to make.”
Sara and a bearded Sam in the audience?
A PLAGUE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FINERY
“Dazed, knees and elbows bruised and bleeding,…”
Once orange balls, and now another brainwave Swiftian fiction from Fawver’s finery of figurative fervour, this one deploying a plague of bespoke suits with a highly financed quality of texture…
“what the fu.” What the fustian!
“He pulled out a credit card and brandished it before him like a crucifix…”
Pwdre Ser
The apotheosis of Pwdre Sêr, as filtered through Faw Vêr.
“It reminded us of an inflamed wound clotted by auroras. It reminded us how far from the rest of the world we really were.”
Gash rift tear climate centennial celebration an ovoid glob
“…a small town that crouches at the lonely end of a peninsula which, at its base, sprouts off into a much larger peninsula…” – an insular community near the equator in mutual synergy with that folk horror peninsula of Ostermeier (here) in a contrastive climate. But a community just as susceptible to Samhain et al…even to Samsara or the Collusive Soul, a Collusion as Collision, explicitly matching a startling conception in Fawver of “immaculate collision”: a rush to subsume ourselves towards inserting the word ‘that’ in the middle of this rarefied apocalyptic book’s overall title…just as we have with the presumed, once happy child-like penisula’s jelly-and-cream of the Internet that has swept us towards the Trumpster and the Bodger, and even further!
A compelling Fawver narrative suspense a genuine tour de force …
Not enough space to write all I want to write about this rollercoaster of religious jelly and so I need to write words by etching them on our own blank flesh. Words that are unclouded and literally uncloudeable.
“So, as the object hurtled ever closer, the importance of our centennial dissipated.
King High School”
Sky jelly star jelly cosmic rot our cherished containers for the glob’s garnered jelly and with stretched-out people wobbly people who claim half of us as hostages and half of the jelly back from our vessels, from our holy grails that we used to contain it…
The calls, the disappearances…and possibly one of the most poignant descriptions of something that needs describing against all good sense of human sensibility that it should have been written at all, let alone repeated in real-time here…
“…a noise like you’d get if you took two pieces of rusty metal about the size of planets and scraped them back and forth over each other. It was such a huge, distant, lonely sound. It made me want to wrap myself up in blankets and pray for strength.”
“Zen state or a religious fugue”
“When they complained that wobbly, rubbery people were leering at them through their bedroom windows…”
‘Immaculate collision’, yes, indeed, immaculate conceit. What’s the word I’m looking for?
The ultimate gestalt real-time reviewing…and now I know that I started doing this type of reviewing in readiness for this so-called novelette. Till now, I have been keeping my powder dry or sere. (Sere is an old literary adjective for withered or dry.)
…turning to jelly…
“..we turned to the jelly for defensive support. We studied its embedded, glimmering shards for intelligible patterns of refracted light, for coded signals, for any form of direction or knowledge.”
“Day in and day out, an unnamable anxiety bored its way into us.”
Jelly talks with images, fundamental, a coronal virus, collucid, co-vivid…
Gospel of the Jelly unclouded and literally uncloudeable.
Writing like scrimshaw, or, I guess, stigmata such as Christ’s or as a scared or sacred self-harming…
Self-deception (how can you know, if you are already self-deceived, that it is indeed self-deception?), a clouding of minds from the cosmos itself or from ourselves, from our unevolved jelly brains — we are happy that we are doomed.