BROODCOMB PRESS 2022
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/r-ostermeier/and their evolving ai-collage: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/4320-2/
“R. Ostermeier’s new collection revisists peninsula folklore and history though the lens of psychotherapy…” And what I expect to be pareidolia, psychogeography and uniquely disturbing folk horror fiction become truth — judging by my instinct going forward and by memory of the previous collection.
When I read this book, my self-therapy as shorthand or aide-memoire experiences will appear in words and/or image in the comment stream below and in the collage above.
My facilitating these collages in the last few months has been very therapeutic at my ailing age.
CONKERTOP
From what I see as the Bowenesque ‘shadowy third’ to this M.R. James- type two-man adventured folk horror’s ‘third presence’ as catalyst in a childlike theatre of shadows, string and cut-ups, for reluctant therapy of a small girl, who has been or will be ‘rangled’ from ‘helix’ to ‘heel’ within a fist of yew trees.
RUBBY
“‘There’s meaning everywhere,’ Irwin said.
‘There’s meaning everywhere,’ I repeated.”
An important story for me – pencil rubbings from books – event or word pareidolia toward gestalt – our psychotherapist’s patient Irwin and his passions, even lethal crimes of passion, of the moment that is so evident in gestalt real-time reviewing when being epiphanised by random synchronicities thus cohered – after empty-chair and avatar therapies, I now learn of vent. therapy the day after gestalt reviewing Koury’s ‘The Voice From Nowhere’ HERE only yesterday! Not to speak of Rubby himself as the dummy, being part of another shadow theatre. And the ‘third person’ here in Ostermeier as another Elizabeth Bowen ‘shadowy third’. Also Irwin’s ‘gestalt of the session’ and ‘under-narrative.’
My previous review proper of the next story SKIN AND GRIEF is shown in full below…
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A story 22 luxurious pages long, and long enough to deeply disturb…any longer, would be lethal, and indeed it may still be lethal once I start to understand it properly…
Published in 2021, it contains this sentence…
“I think it was made in Ukraine.”
And, using some of that country’s letters, RIKE is the name of the main protagonist, someone whom the narrator is counselling, but really that narrator is the main protagonist whom the readers slowly become, as we find out we are being counselled not to fully understand what we are being told so as to make it impossible to re-narrate its matter more clearly to others, about the bacon processing plant and their scraps, causing scavenging cats whom we earmark with what I see as peninsulas of gristle clipped from their ears, showing that we have spayed or castrated them, about the Chernobyl trees, about the dance around the fire pit, and tiny folk with their own ears clipped, some of these folk wooden and engrained in our own wooden hearts….as we move along a pipe as a conduit into death. The only thing I want to remember about this work is its music. Other than Rike, all the other characters were stilty or reachy. All skin and grief. I don’t want to become like them. I want to survive atrocity. A case history in man’s cruelty to animal as self. So, I didn’t allow its gestalt to talk to me, by deliberately not reading its last two sentences. Importuned to do so, though, by someone else running their fingers through my hair…
“The core of the dream was a wooden woman, bloody to the elbows,…”
***
Rainer Maria Rilke
from Internet:
“Rilke’s journeys to the Russian Empire in the spring of 1899 and summer of 1900 were an early and formative experience. The second took him south from Moscow to Ukraine, where he visited Kyiv, Kaniv (Taras Shevchenko’s grave on Chernecha Hill), and Poltava. Rilke is known to have been interested at the time in the early, thematically Ukrainian stories of Nikolai Gogol, and to have acquired a copy of Shevchenko’s Kobzar in Russian translation. He did not, however, clearly distinguish between Russia and Ukraine, and his responses to what he saw in Russia and Ukraine were strongly influenced by the turn-of-the-century myth of the simple and god-seeking ‘Russian soul.’”
THE SHOP
“I cast a shadow on the Shadow and in doing so I become the Shadow.”
Our Peninsula therapist not only becomes tantamount to the subject of the effectively mercenary dream-therapy he facilitates, by rote and rule, to a male client, but he sure also shows us the full clinging atmosphere of the Peninsula and its areas, much of which is in mutual synergy with Ligotti and Veres — and the detail of the therapy session and the follow-up by the therapist himself into the actual scene of the client’s dream is impossible to itemise here, but I am convinced it even outweighs the tortured tortoise power of those two other authors mentioned above as well as Wyckoff’s ‘backroom’. THE SHOP is one of those texts it is dangerous to enter let alone read. But how do I know? Time will tell.
THE ULFSSON CHAPEL
“They were bare, forearms and elbows clean and smooth but with rhubarb-and-custard mottling of once afflicted areas of skin.”
Is this to be a novella of Skin and Grief?
To optimise for myself its therapeutic powers as well as to provide a base for my eventual verdict upon it, I intend to slowly show below my reading aide-memoire chapter by chapter…
(I shall try to avoid plot spoilers by mainly noting down apparent irrelevancies but I may inadvertently fail.)
I
Ilsa with psoriasis and Eve with dermatitis attend the Doctor Fish clinic for what they told me in the early fifties was ‘skin trouble’. My own mother suffered it at that time when I was a tiny boy and I needed to be looked after by someone else. This clinic comprises baths with fish in them. Later, Ilsa has a printed blank square to worry about, when trying to track down the mysterious Goodrum Clinic. It snows at the end of this chapter just like at Mann’s Magic Mountain sanatorium.
II
“…reservoirs for aqueous cream at elbow and wrist.”
So far read up to page 104 after Ilsa, on an Island with caves (one named after this novella’s title) and chalets, meets the clinic’s short eponymous owner and the other patient David, and she visits the clinic’s skin and skin disease museum, so heady and mind-fazing, I needed to break off on page 104. The museum, although quite different and more adeptly described, reminded me of ‘The Scar Museum’ (republished in ‘Weirdmonger’ book in 2003), especially the bit referring to “excised scars”!
Also please note reference to ‘The Drift’ by Scott Walker, an album that I often listen to, perhaps more than any other.
II (to page 114)
Tattoos, skin scrimshaw and pre-treatment suspense. The words themselves incisive.The human characterisations deepening.
III (upto121)
We delve deep, post-treatment, into the nature of the treatment room and its concomitant cave, the nature of psoriasis as a sloughing off or leprosy or excreting while swimming, and its concomitant self-pity, with Ilsa and David comparing intimate notes. The ‘toy cupboard of cruelties’. Tugged out words.
Therapy is slower than words, I guess.
FINDING HER ELBOWS
Up to end of III
“‘The Isle of Salt,’ she replied. She pointed east to the feeble light of dawn. ‘I live on the peninsula.’”
…’finding her elbows’ — ‘birdwatching, bookmaking ’ – lovemaking?
‘the leg of a Boris’
This is incredible stuff sloughing off the page with sharp meticulous ‘mystery’.
A cure has to be oblique, if not opaque, for literature to be fully therapeutic, I find.
see comment below re ‘The Singing Detective’
IV Upto135
“‘Elbows,’ she said.”
The psoriatic skin-differentials pre-and post-treatment between Ilsa and David elicits the latter’s backstory he tells her of sacks and cross-dressing, all resonant, for me, with concepts of of skin-shedding, skin-exchanges…
To end of IV
“…her elbows were smooth, free of scale.”
…while this novella grows in scale!
Is Ilsa’s treatment prehensile, she wonders. Automatically, while I happen simultaneously to be reviewing an anthology of Azathoth stories (here), I wildly thought of the nature of the treatment in that light within the cave system attached to the chalets! Bee-thistles, notwithstanding.
The chapter ends with a cliff-hanger!
v
Sevenston / Seventy-two-hour
I am so disorientated, even shocked by this chapter, and no doubt saddened for yet unknown reasons, that I can only think of the earlier cello and the way to play it is more like scraping.
vi
This novella THE ULFSSON CHAPEL made me pursue it, before planned readiness, to its end today, since the suspense was too much for me — a statement that forms my final verdict upon it. And that says a lot!
I won’t tell you exactly what happens, exactly how far-fetched it is or not, for fear of scraping the skin from your reading of it, a scraping that some call plot spoiling as an area over-exposed. All I can add is to summon a mutual synergy with a story by another author, a story (THE CURE) upon another island, a story that is close to my heart because I published it in 2013 in ‘Horror Without Victims’, as later described here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/31/the-cure-by-john-travis/
What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’ — from THE SINGING DETECTIVE
Another story with skin disease!
see the ‘ROstermeier’ collage here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/4320-2/
Two more stories yet to be read.
VULNUS
“Synchronous resonances were all around.”
From therapeutic word games to word connections for telling of the eponymous folk ritual, ‘vulnerable on the moor’, a standing stone near Stone, participants with filled eggs and others with crow costumes or uniforms, from blackhead-squeezing words to ‘tourist’ and ‘torus’ — and it becomes utterly sinister folk horror, not simply folk. Turning me into George. Hope-laden eggs into what they contained, be it candle or whatever, even a child or a near-living ‘gludge’…. an aide memoire not a review. That’s all I am good for, these days.
DELIGHT
“Come.”
This is about a therapist watching another therapist, and also names like Gabriel and Gaitskill with guilt or gusto, a cat and mouse or hide and seek game, mixed with this book’s folk horror ritual nights, anti-natalism or Cioran, skin sacks or beer gut pouches like baby papooses, tree bark flensed or exposed like skin with poetry on it, and a home-made jewellery box with nothing in it, as sort of romantic test or an empty chair therapy? Black marble hills. This book is an endlessly scryable delight.
I keep my powder dry or my salt pig handy.
“Fully half of the counsellors I meet have a relationship with empathy that is indulgent; they can be as little trusted with it as a child with an Easter egg.”