Vanishing Stories
Cemetery Dance Publications 2023
My previous reviews of Glen Hirshberg: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/glen-hirshberg/
The ‘Glen Hirshberg’ collage as triggered by my reviews of his work: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/03/23/glen-hirshberg/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…
PART ONE… from the land
I reviewed the first story last year in the context here, as follows…
============================================
BLACK LEG: GLEN HIRSHBERG
“I’m sure half those malls have office complexes or structures like this one tucked into them. But somehow—by its facelessness, its emptiness, its, I don’t know, hands-in-pockets humility—I knew this was the place.”
From a judge’s ‘legal pad’ to the various black legs, spider, or beetle, or necklace, this staccato as well as rivering, riveting story is of what I call a Legotti mall, via jury service, on a trivial driving case of a Latinx man whose legs pumped nervously under the legal table, and I follow the lens of this protagonist narrator who met a co-juror who was later declined without explanation as juror, and who somehow had tempted the ghost-hunting filmic narrator here to the Legetti mall, his erstwhile co-juror having been a deadpan man who was one of those who tease ghost hunters with tales, but I, too, had a shared instinct with this narrator and all manner of tiny legs flickered at the edge of my mind’s reading screen, and pings, too, for the ears, as I watch (fleeting motes, not an endless intentional moat) what happens and then I return to my own troubles and sad memories in real life, as did the narrator.
It, too, took thirty minutes.
An invaluable Glen Hirshberg thirty minutes to add to the other times spent with him here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/glen-hirshberg/
“But even ghost hunter work had dried up in the recession,…”
DEVIL
“…reframing those moments even as they relived them. Embalming and enshrining them. Turning them into stories.”
This is a mighty Hirshberg! Not so much a ‘walking wink’, as we listen to the Old Damper man, but also the lovers’ backstory of Tim and Mika, through Tim’s eyes, both of them guides in the Tasmania outback for today’s family of tourists, playing roadkill games with them and teasing about competing eponymous devils biting through their own heads to get to the prey, above, all, the Damper’s rail trackstory instead, back at the people garage and rain drumming on its roof. With a rising shriek on shriek as we, too, reading this, are engulfed not by a ‘drop bear’ or a ‘drop-mouthed grin’ or a ‘dark mofo’ death metal show, but sure by the death metal of train trips into the silence of yore. All in a prose style to kill for. With two brilliant ‘elbow’ moments, as bonus track sides. With a tinge of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. “People just disappear.”
“Amazement at being together backstage at the factory where memories get imprinted.”
PART TWO …from the coasts…
JETTY SARA
“At some level, we really are one entity, at least in this instant.”
From the drumming rain in the previous story as backdrop to it, now a subsumption of rain and the not-sea like a world folded IS the story itself! With its concomitant human characters with their backstories, and a man with his own personal rainstorm within his clothes, and so what will be, will be by dint of a lighthouse’s own folding. And the eponymous grieving woman who proves that tsunami is manitus in more ways than one.
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him–a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured–captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
— Elizabeth Bowen
I previously reviewed the next story in the context here, as follows:-
============================================
“‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops.”
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ by Elizabeth Bowen
***
SLOUGH by Glen Hirshberg
“Inherited. The clocks.”
This is a genuine horror story masterpiece, one to help cope with our own hateful times. I am surprised I had not heard of it before, and glad to have reunion with reading this author after so many years. You don’t often meet such masterpieces, but I met this one today, ever turning left when in any doubt till reaching What’s Left Beach, while travelling in the head of a woman called Gabbie, and amidst “the dangers of interpreting texts”, I got to some bespoke nub of this story. After dealing with presumptuous Daniel, she angles off to an earlier friend called Julian, crossing Rhode Island to reach him, with much protesting backstory as backdrop… and I was further excited to see this story has the relentless soul of my favourite author, Elizabeth Bowen, in both the beautifully startling style and the nature of a ticking Zeno’s Paradox as theme. Such mutual synergy is doubtless inadvertent between the souls of these two writers with their being otherwise worlds and times apart, but it may be that borrowing a swimsuit does link souls. Yet, their mutual synergy definitely stems from the preternatural literary gestalt not from each other. This story actually makes me say such things for the first time without worrying about my being called pretentious afterwards.
If I tell you the full plot’s rite of passage and what Gabbie sees on her journey and beneath the waves away from the wet rain, and what wonders of expression, image and vision that teem in whispers before the reader among the soft wagon houses, I would no doubt cover pages and pages with this review. The story just is. Where do I start? Where do I end? I had in my mind so many things to quote from it and events/emotions to point out to you from it, but I have come to the conclusion that I can only say you must go there from whatever presumption of place or person wherein you currently stand, using whatever route through it you might choose; indeed you MUST read this momentous story full stop
***
My first noting of the Bowen – Hirshberg synergy was almost ten years ago exactly, here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/the-two-sams-glen-hirshberg/
DestinationLand
“DESTINATION: DESTINATION”
This is a most beautifully poignant evocation of a cobbled together derelict train and caboose ‘zoo’ or museum as a final destination for such hulks and shells and living objects of once human construction, with one moving purpose-built train ride, as as well as a carousel. Teeming with unforgettable* images and emotions, fulfilling the undercurrents of this book’s overall title amidst perfectly pitched characterisations of children-at-heart and a real child called Wong, not wrong, and so-called grown-ups, too, as the train ride allows even those of us from history on board to reach our destination. An American concentration camp of souls. As my own personal aside, complete with two separate significant ‘elbow’ trigger moments upon picnic table and metal seat. To supplement the other two in ‘Devil’.
* “Not looking out a train window, but looking out the fogged-over memory of looking out a train window.”
Compare, too, in ‘Devil’, the haunting railtracks.
Pic by Aye Eye
A Paradise to Live In or See
“The feel of floorboards like those under your feet, forever falling away.”
There is an explicit so-called ‘mansion’ in this incredible story that reminds me of my ‘Mansions Without Rooms’ written a few days ago; you might even think I was influenced by reading this Hirshberg today! Believe me, I wasn’t. This short short of mine, by the way, some may be interested to know, is one of a number of short short ghost stories that serve to break a writer’s block of twenty years, all now being linked from here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/new-dfl-ghost-stories-commenced-in-later-2023/. Please excuse that self-referential aside!
The Hirshberg story itself is a humdinger, a mansion without a roof, too, an undertow of subsidence, with a flash fire near or at every horizon in some wilds of America of which I’m unaware but are perfectly evoked for my imagination, and the Bowen swimming quote above is now apotheosised by a swimming pool to die in! A mother, a ‘Mom of Mediocrity’, in her parked trailer, caring for her young by besieging her daughter’s latest man called Stump with whom the daughter is shacked up, alongside another man in the sinking mansion called Bastard. All suffering each other’s presence with pent up suspense, till the mother of all police raids transpires. Witness it at your peril. Sewage is not even a small part of this story’s tricksy quicksand, I guess. With bullhorn bellows and a highway that bellowed, too, plus three, yes, three ‘elbow’ moments!
PART THREE …from…
Tell Me When I Disappear
This is the closing story, one where all readers disappear one by one, leaving the Tontine to me in this ‘trick of the rocks’ Picnic of a story potentially outdoing even Lindsay in the bellowing, ballooning tent of my head! Again, in some wilds unknown to me but evoked in my sitting-room for me to crawl through like a tortoise, Mojave, I believe, cactus and flash bombs by nearby army manoeuvres, scorpions , and school youths on a school maroon-party (a term for a substantially lengthy picnic) officiated and chaperoned by the sad aging widow teacher protagonist (older and colder) and a brash man called CFK, with all the signals of schoolyard flirt and teacher backstories and shooting stars and mobile memes and mischievous Blair-witching and a role-play or real-play disappearance. With mention of those wild fires again from the pervious story and “the monster in the White House”. And warm metal spikes as tent pegs, “bones in blood” to supplement the two ‘elbow’ moments here! Wendigo as When I Go?
“Morton Feldman-type thing, little blips or bursts of sound, long silences.”
***
A momentous book that disappears, story by story, into my mind forever. And do not tell me when forever ends.