ANTRIPUU by Simon Strantzas

Posted on November 26, 2023

Published in ONLY THE LIVING ARE LOST, a new collection by Simon Strantzas, published in 2023 by Hippocampus Press as described HERE.

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author (some of which are reviews of stories in this new collection) are linked HERE.

***

“The problem, instead, is what’s beneath the storm, mimicking the howls of the storm, trying to coax us into opening the door and letting it in.”

This is a fearsome scenario made into a psychological study of a narrator mixing life-preserving hope with death-embracing depression and other elements of his self-complex when on a trip into the Iceteau Forest with his two male colleagues from the Socket Company, where they meet, in the throes of terror, an itemised man and woman in a wayward shelter — all of them besieged by the eponymous monster as a unique version of the Wendigo, a frighteningly tall, yet narrow hand’s breadth, thing which I imagine to be full of sockets and fence joints and  ’bent knees’ and an ‘overlong arm’ in different contexts elsewhere in this story, but tellingly never an explicit elbow. But where is the bad story and the good story hinged, and by what means do you believe the Antripuu is also hinged to the fate of those it terrifies, as it terrifies the reader, too? Somehow, for me, the narrator is already embedded as the ever joyless one, embedded indeed within ‘Antripuu’ as the ever partnerless ‘Puritan’, even if one eventually escapes the other. When I do go, the you follows.

“They have to have. They have to.”