BAD HAND BOOKS 2023
My previous reviews of Michael Wehunt: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/michael-wehunt/
The current shifting collage: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/04/15/michael-wehunt/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below….
VAMPIRE FICTION
“…like an extra shadow pinned to them as they went to the same places on the same days.”
A shocking ending, possibly the most shocking imaginable, after sometimes in-joke things (eg naming Bartlett, Langan, Ballingrud, Paul Tremble etc.): and seemingly someone’s personal musings about real named vampire fiction including that of King, Rice and Stoker, in poignant conjunction with a wife in a failing marriage with the protagonist in THIS vampire fiction and their small daughter, but who is estranged from whom? Who the vampire, who the sucked out on a potential family Halloween? And the text is tantalising with subtle depths and misunderstandings of reading it you don’t know are happening but you sense them happening and somehow gives hints to me, perhaps improbably, of not only the authors mentioned in Langan’s intro, but of, perhaps my favourite novel ever, Ishiguro’s ‘The Unconsoled’ with the latter’s blend of oblique installations of absurdist in-joke and utter seriousness. I expected the vampire to take out an ironing-board and carry it around with it wherever it went! Such thoughts on my part not spoiling the darkness, though.
“There were no rules except the only ones that mattered: those of light and invitation.”
HOLOOW
“Her piano played on inside her head without them, hard stabs and vigorous tempi that kept the dust off her memory.”
Wow! I’m so glad I have lived long enough to experience this utterly poignant portrait of old age, in conjunction with several classical music references. The central figure is a lady pianist (once a concert player of promise) astonishingly and perhaps inadvertently containing absurdist visions in mutual synergy with the male piano player in ‘The Unconsoled’ as another concert pianist with promise — here a widow, ageing before her time, with a past failing marriage that is now recouped in her mind by memory beyond the utter marriage failure in the previous story. This work is very important and resonates with images, whether seen dementedly or not, images such as the red-tunicked workmen outside, the raising of a piano, the potential doppelgänger theme in synergy with Nicholas Royle’s work (and I mean that as a huge compliment), the conflation of people and family from this pianist’s life as she sits in a ‘care-sheltered’ apartment block opposite another one across an alley. It will linger with me forever, for however long forever is. Between the hollow of birth to the farewell of death.
I reviewed the next story in 2018 here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/black-static-62-interzone-274/, as follows in its then context:-
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CARING FOR A STRAY DOG (METAPHORS)
“He thought this was another metaphor, one that held hands with the first.”
All stories hold hands with others. And I am pleased to report that this substantive work in three parts is a worthy addition to the mighty Wehunt canon. Also, it deals with metaphors as veils (although that word is not used explicitly). And such have always been an essential ingredient of my gestalt real-time reviewing or hawling (a savouring of words and the odd change in a letter, here CORSE (corpse, course, coarse) as we were told to savour ‘nascent’ and ‘abject’ in the previous story, and somewhere here in the Wehunt I noted, for example, ‘treat’ used instead of ‘teat’) – metaphors to which I often refer with the TS Eliot version of metaphors as ‘objective-correlatives’, and here it is the Robert Frost version, defaulting towards us in the margins. The story has ‘gauze’ for wounds, ‘milky grey’, ‘milky gloom’, photos that first appear as ‘gray squares’, ‘a dim stripe of non-color, but a dark blurry bar’ defaulting to an antlered shape, ‘colorless gray sheets like lost ghosts’, ‘delicate symbolism’, ‘stripped of its textures and literal meanings’. So much to link this story to the others above, hand in hand, baptising, marking, an unrequited bereavement… it tells of a man whose five year old daughter was killed in a mass killing by a pastor of a Baptist church, and he is now haunted by or randomly, preternaturally drawn towards such churches, ones with the word CORSE in their names, and he is using a stray dog as objective-correlative in this quest, a dog perhaps aptly he calls Grace, while both he and his separated wife are texting each other about their own versions of conduit or exorcism. The visions seen through these word-savourings and metaphors engulf the reader, are frightening but strangely leading to some comfort. The ‘tending of pastures’ under the auspices of an antlered God as God or as the Devil. And, finally, as I said above about the first story, perhaps a man needs marking, too. And here in this story that we hunt together: “Would you be marked, something asked him, something far from a voice and more like a woolen texture in the air,…” Woolen, not wooden. See my own original photo above at the head of this review.
“The story wrote itself on the shore with a great pause.”
The Pine Arch Collection
“A figure crawls out of the hole, not unlike a spider the way its arms are elevated to show the sharp silhouettes of its elbows,….”
Synchronously, seriously even, a lesson for me, if not for you, in my own real-time horror creations concurrently transpiring in spate HERE, if not in real video, but in the cut-and-run video of words themselves, where half is hoax, the other half hex, but disbelief is still suspended and scares are shared between us, as various characters with intertwined backstories in this ghost Wehunt interact via real-time emails in an insidious and extended (and full of amorphous black shapes of threat) theme-and-variations upon a new Blair Witch Project, one character conniving, another colluding, another neither. Reclaiming Kit Mester from Vampire Fiction and someone called Brit Evenson whose words as Cine Harp I love to strum,
“House to mound. Mound to house.”
The Tired Sounds, A Wake
“…imagines the heavy door easing shut on its pneumatic elbow.”
This novella needs to be read painfully slowly while easily and enjoyably read, too, indeed savoured by me, without any public spoilers, as diurnally as possible like feeling an impasto painting, as I follow intently in rich text the thoughts of a man called Lorne sneaking an illicit cigarette in a toilet during a children’s birthday party, dwelling on his mid-life crisis and his failing marriage with Gwen who has taken up painting. And my head, as reader, looks over the wall of the toilet to check him out. Whatever the case, Lorne sees something far more horrific than me. He’s in this story after all, and I’m not.
I have felt my way up to:
“It all has the momentary look of a painting, one of Gwen’s with her hard putty-knife texture,…”
Please read my own much shorter literally impasto story, ‘Craquelure’ written a few days ago before reading the start of this work, from the link above.
This remains hauntingly, texturally and densely packed with Lorne’a viewpoint and backstory as well as Gwen’s, both on the brink of their mutual Silver wedding with memories to rekindle — a sort of period of debriefing following Lorne’s and the reader’s frightening experience at the birthday party, but frightened by what? I can only mime it for you for fear of spoilers.
This reader has so far reached: “She mixes these things in with her earth tones, clots them in bold strokes of her streaky reds.”
“How she’s gone from a glorified bookkeeper to a celebrated artist so quickly is still a vast enigma to her….”
Agonising by Gwen about the Bowenesque ‘shadowy third’ that seems to stalk herself and Lorne (the latter name I genuinely misread in one moment as ‘Louvre’), as she remembers the time she took up painting instead of being Lorne’s clerical assistant leading to that fell moment becoming an ‘elbow’ one, for which to delay reading further…
“…raises herself onto her elbows. The moment has passed.”
“It is a hollow sound, an empty wind, like singing into a conch shell.”
This is sure heady stuff, more frightening and studiously written than most modern fiction you will read, as you follow Gwen’s artistic and personal backstory into the forestory of her life with Lorne, as she reaches an attic …after her grappling with a grapefruit. Her over-tall canvas stands up right but who or what is supporting it from the back?
Now, still needing to dare read it as slowly as possible, I have read up to…
“…an elbow cocking out to land gently upon an incline that isn’t there,…”
“Lorne sits in his office, leaning over with his elbows on the desk, not sure why he’s thinking of his father.”
We learn so much more, about involvement in a painting by one’s image magicked into it, premature burial, Lorne’s dayjob and his once secret creative urge as writer, is he writing this from both points of view of a broken marriage that he wants to heal? Goya and an upturned penny from heads to tails. I stand waving my reviewer’s arms wildly as I cannot speak, to come read this story. Or should I stow myself away in it and change yet unread bits of it overnight, so that they are not quite so disturbing when I come to read them tomorrow?
I have read up to: “…and she is finally afraid.”
“The high ceilings hold the light in the center of the house,…”
The sense of paranoia we live through with Gwen and later the guilt with Lorne as he finds a mansion, that he calls a house, wherein to book a renewing of their marriage vows? There are so many darkly exquisite details and observations along the way, I am breathless. I’m pleased that I still manage to eke out the reading of this masterpiece. You, on the other hand, may understandably wish to rush through it. Whichever is the case, any unconsoled ones among us are bound to remain inconsolable. And spoiler-free.
I have eked up to:
“A convergence of points that feel as though they always belonged together threatens to wrap around him,…”
“But in this moment, that little hollow is gone behind his breastbone.”
The rapprochement of husband and wife is compellingly suspenseful, between the parallel rapprochement of their own respective still growing or being-restored patterns of art, as if one continues to need a renewal of a reader’s vows to suspend the characters’ disbeliefs. Boxed in by a book with a claustrophobia of its involvement with oneself. For example, can their insidious shadowy-third (a term that imbues Bowen and perhaps Ishiguro) possibly be shadowy enough when painted, even in bits, with white paint? A codex erelong?
I read up to: “Her face is full of beautiful bones that make little hollows,…”
“Für Hollow features a piano—decayed-looking and textured with gobs of paint, but majestic in spite of it—“
This is major stuff. The piano from Unconsoled and the alternating viewpoints here (and the respective arts of Lorne and Gwen) oscillating faster and faster in their alternations, shockingly mixed with their bodily fluids in some Dada apotheosis or orgy, and crime scene outlines and they find in the place where renewed vows are due that their own very signed artefictions, if not artefacts, and the shadowy thirds as mimes multiply, too! These are not spoilers, these are enticements to read. Nothing can spoil it. The gestalt can only be assessed by your own reading of this compelling fiction, that I now sense is almost concluding?
I have read up to:
“…loving the blur of the blocks of words as they fly by.”
“There’s just enough room to fold them at the elbows…”
An enormous, anomalous, amorphous ending with a hole in the ground, and all holes are hollow, I guess, but an elbow, too? There’s a vague visual assonance in these two words at least. The shock of a shovel making him aware of his own bone shapes, “…and absorbing it with his elbows.” This is a very powerful portrait of the marriage of two artistic souls and their ambitions, and the possible fruition of such ambition by some pact with a devil? Or with a Mime called Decroux? With Ishiguro somewhere below it all. And we hunt the ghost within it, as I have been doing in past weeks in other quarters. As if this were written specifically but inadvertently for me to read alongside these current days of mine.
“His arm plunges back in, up to the elbow.”
A Heart Arrhythmia Creeping Into a Dark Room
“A scratched Bartók record is playing at a low volume,…”
But this story, a self-portrait of a horror writer formulating his Frankenstein monster story for a commission, increased its volume beyond the precarious undulations of vinyl music, onto the page. And involves you as reader as the ultimate victim, if the characters in the story don’t work as believable victims — a multi-levelled literary narration of leasehold and freehold fiction as horrific truth, in musical counterpoint with the mountains around where the freehold author or leasehold narrator lives and the pent up terrors of his heart condition, an ordinary couple with a friendly dog. Not an ordinary writer as part of the couple, though, as you will discover. Powerful and allusive, just up my street of horror as an intended or accidental interactive catharsis within Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy and the gestalt real-time reviewing process itself. But any purging by such a catharsis still needs to be completed. And who did ‘slide up onto’ whose ‘elbows’ and see what ‘in the corner of the room’?
“Perhaps the sign of a true artist is to make people afraid of things they didn’t know they were afraid of.”
The Teeth of America
“This is a new demonology. These are the teeth of America.”
I am not American, but I felt every word fibre of this prophetic collage of extracts and I sensed Trump somehow merge with a god like Azathoth, in my very bones, including my teeth. The way we are, the way we will be, cult and occult, pyramid and trees, hate and supremacy, I sense a Swiftian glimpse of truth, but where Swift was ironic, Wehunt is something else altogether! The Chainwheel! U are dead!
It Takes Slow Sips
I didn’t really click with this story of estranged or unrequited love, obsession, paranoia and electronic stalking via social media and DVDs with echoes of this book’s earlier Pine Arch story. Very well written, with moments of empathisable bodily horror in tune with all of the above. My fault, not the story’s. It’ll probably come back to haunt me.
Is There Human Kindness Still in the World?
“As though the benches themselves were destinations. / They were anti-tourists, anti-ghost hunters,…”
This is a highly rhapsodic and disturbing account ending with some oblique hopefulness, wherein I found myself to make a small walk-on part in its art installation, or wax museum, an account of a woman who hunts for the Cupid dolls buried at a forgotten bench as memorabilia of her engagement to a man there, who soon dies before she marries him. A quest haunting her as part of her battles with predatory men and subsequent campaigns for victimised women, and eventually her own real marriage to another man, all told to us into her older age. It is perfect and I am allowing my old brain to soak in its pervading message, and despite the hope built-in, somehow inconsolable. A vision that continues to expand after its last words are read.
“…an elderly man, old sagging skin and an infant’s globe of belly. Sexless between its legs. Its head was too big for the tired body,…”
An Ending (Ascent)
“What’s always made death peaceful, or close as we can get to peaceful, is knowing that everybody’s got to go there. It was something you could reconcile. But now it’s just me.”
Not just me. Not a Midsommar cut-off at 72, as I have already long exceeded that! More an agreed dystopic or even pretend utopian Null Immortalis, where all born before a certain date are due to die, but others around have the gift of forever — as seen through the eyes of a man, speculating on his grandson’s immortality, even his own wife’s immortality with another man. Amid the AI and electronic ‘tether’ and contravened warming. And as two of these finite men cut W into the grassland with scythes like Tolstoy, unless I misremember, I thought of the end of Elbow or Hollow. Bur ironically it is the start of a different word altogether, an ironic counting of stars as what we condemned people prepare to embrace them in tune with Zelenyj. And I smile, as I stand upon my Midsommmar pedestal again, after “handing out water, packing up the kids’ elbow and knee pads.” Consoled at last.
This book will, I trust, be just one of the few I take with me