Saturday, December 24, 2016

They Don’t Come Home Anymore – T.E. Grau







10 thoughts on “They Don’t Come Home Anymore – T.E. Grau”


  1. I – V
    “Not death itself, but what waits for the body afterward.”
    First five bite-size chapters forming mid-teen girl Hettie’s story seen through a prose-sophisticated lens darkly. Threading, at least in mind if not body, passages like sewer outlets, the equally mid-teen but fey girl called Avery gifts Hettie with best-friendship from her toilet throne in a derelict toilet where Hettie finds her. This I sense is their first real engagement together as human beings in their school career so far, and I sense more than I can tell you without spoiling something not yet told to me.
    If you know what ‘fey’ really means without googling it, a word not yet used by this book (if at all), then please proceed. (Even if you google it, some of the definitions the search engine finds are wrong. Be careful.)
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  2. VI – IX
    “They passed through the rooms, on their way to somewhere else. But no living took place here. No memories were created, no shared moments.”
    They say grotesque humour and horror in fiction often go together well. And they do. But here we have cerebral wittiness and horror, and they, judging by this book so far, go together even better.
    Hettie’s crush on Avery (not a Sapphic one so much as a self-conscious girly one) stretches between social classes, Hettie’s family being on a lower rung than Avery’s. And it is also a crush between death and life, as well as between social rungs? Avery is suddenly suffering from leukaemia, but that is the last time in this review I will give out a potential plot spoiler.
    The immaculate prose style about the circumstances of the two girls evokes a mind-stretching quality, but the font size it’s printed in has a less expansive effect. Another tension of opposites?
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  3. X – XII
    “Supernatural creatures must set the humor bar lower than those burdened with mortality.”
    …indeed, as Hettie treats us to glimpses of her parents’ Bad Movie Night, and of the suburbs in America when compared to its midtown!
    Some brilliant character studies here on her “journey to the hinterlands” – and descriptions of types, too, like underage Goth girls. I think i know the nature of the by-product of Hettie’s quest for vampires, REAL vampires… But do you?
    I feel my brain is sharpened every time I pick up this chapbook. Into a spike?
    Don’t forget: vampires are forever, not just for Christmas.
    “ODDVCK.”
    Reply

  4. XIII
    “Critics who dared give less than glowing reviews were savaged online by dedicated internet honor warriors…”
    A whole commercial world of twilight vampires of which this book is an obliquely constituent part and about which it is a satirically witty whole. And Hettie’s thinking outside of her box takes on new dimensions, but whether she sucks inspiration from her own author who is named on the tiny spine or that author sucks it from her, I keep my powder dry.
    This book flows sweetly and sophisticatedly along a line of trip-switches and hilarious booby-traps it has set for itself. I, for one, will not now attend any signing, even if (or especially if!) it is one for this book’s author. We understand the ends of Hettie’s mission but the means remain mean with their meaning. After all, any general brainstorming process keeps its likely eventual results secret in real-time – until the orgasmically revelatory moment of pay-off.
    Part of the tegumented deal, I guess. Fannish flashmobs, notwithstanding,
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  5. XIV – XVI
    “The tag was labeled with an ‘L’…”
    Burroughs-type “cut up lines”; a falsehood, a temptation to follow, but whereto and whence? Hettie (Henrietta Wexler or Wexy or Waxy) shrugs like one of the dark’s born-again shruggers she is with, shrugs on a costume in a fitting-room and taken through the destined by-ways of this text, like upon a tiny insect path, towards another stage in her quest, a preachy gathering in Mall-land, a gathering that she skips. I am beginning to believe in this character, her new-found curves and her ability to face off others she needs to face off.
    A “wax seal” on Waxy’s wrist.
    Love the style, the panache, of this book, so far.
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  6. XVII – XXI
    image
    “Just mute trees that had seen too much over too much time and an empty city that didn’t care enough to watch.”
    … bracketed by air quotes.
    Hettie meets someone, a sort of saviour with a collapsible cattle prod ostensibly defending her from abuse or bullying, one who promises to further her quest, a figure in nondescript Corporatese, but with a factory without minimum wages, making distressed denim so that people can be seen, I guess, to wear down faster into life than life does itself, let down by parents and peers alike. Avery notwithstanding, remaining Hettie’s fey raison d’être.
    There is so much in these passages that spikes with fresh bright witty expressions deliberately made somehow to seem worn, seasoned or distressed ones. Even rotting ones.
    “…the legs of the M bending in on itself in exhausted surrender.”
    Reply

  7. XXII – XXVII
    “Age and retelling does not a fact make.”
    I am the first – and doing the second.
    But neither will conjure for you the fact of this novella. In any event, the whole work takes time to filter through the reading artery, still filtering through mine even now, as I stir in my seat after staring lifelessly at the pages passing before my dead eyes, allowing the keyboard to delay the flashing retrocausality of fast typing dulled by “internal antennae that coated every nerve ending”, and external ones like mobile prods, I guess. With bling or not.
    The end of Hettie’s quest is, inter alios, hyper-Ligottian to match that distressed factory, and now a slow hindsight revelation about the fey Avery, not an anti-natalism so much but more a pro-eschatological process of dulled rejuvenation. Striking visions of vampires not as twilight heroines, but as…. but if I retell those visions here, that would be far inferior to you truly having this text directly enter your artery.
    And there is also an inscrutable seemingly discrete chapter that I am still filtering, one that you will need to help me with, help me as Hettie wishfully tried to help preserve her fey soulmate … but any soulmate needs the other one to be a reciprocal soulmate? There are so many questions as to intentions and results still ringing in the antennae of my cerebrum. There is no pretence as adorable as pretentiousness. Meanwhile, the tegument prevails, its promise fulfilled – and promising, I sense, even more in the literary future (if there is a future), sensed with my personal faith in the relative directions of up and down via, at the end of this remarkable book, a “button labeled M.” CoMe hoMe anyMore.
    Strong dark rapture this text, one you will experience fathoming during the process of connection with the dark-Platonic aspirations of an empathic creation like Hettie, whatever your age or gender or height or other healthy size or sickly gauntness, or whatever other epithets you decide to use about yourself.
    end
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Thursday, December 22, 2016

Central Station – Lavie Tidhar


18 thoughts on “Central Station – Lavie Tidhar”

  1. img_2705
    PROLOGUE
    ONE: THE INDIGNITY OF RAIN
    TWO: UNDER THE EAVES
    “I missed the sort of rain that falls from clouds.”
    The setting and plot-compass seems, so far, to be summrised above on the back cover of this book and no doubt in any digital adverts for this book, so all I’ll say is that the book is a sort of central station itself for a connection between a late dawn of past history/geographical politics and an early dusk, I infer, of a far future like a sort of digital/ moving metal/ flesh-mind (a future now the book’s present), plus a central station’s connections between religion and mind, robot and human, insulation as a once Earth on its own and now of a civilisation into the solar planetary systems, private mind and digital conversation (a Conversation like a ‘cloud’ in that quote above?), textual reality and virtual reality, love and metal, inside Station and outside (cf Reed’s Remoras?)
    A fiction world of nemonymity and self, where fiction is stronger than reality? And another connection…”No one had produced robots for a very long time. They were a missing link, an awkward evolutionary step between human and Other.”
    I am positively entrammelled, and will take this book slowly.
    Texture and feel, so far, a bit like one of my favourite writers, Salman Rushdie. Don’t rush to die…
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  2. I intend there to be no plot spoilers in this long-term review.
    THREE: THE SMELL OF ORANGE GROVES
    Pages 34 – 38
    “And they needed their buffer, that in-between-zone that was Central Station, old South Tel Aviv, a poor place, a vibrant place — most of all, a liminal place.”
    A buffer, and an “art installation”? I wonder as I travel back with Boris Chong’s ‘memory-scent’, gaining the genius loci of this place, and (like Johnson, a Russian spy today whose ‘Conversation’ enabled Brexit?) why he is called Boris…
    The politics and today’s history seep for me into this wondrous text of the future, as we explore, through Boris, the Jaffa part of the installation…
    [I read a lot of SF in 70s and 80s, but not a lot more till in the last few years I started reviewing the fiction in every issue of INTERZONE and latterly a whole real time review (!) of VanderMeers’ THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION (at those links) plus some other SF publications. These are my shaky SF credentials.]
    Reply
  3. Pages 39 – 52
    “Humans lived longer now, but the mind grew old just the same,…”
    …this being a resonance with our lot today, while empathising with something stronger than mere empathy itself, the sense of the Conversation and the I-loop, the aug on the neck or a golden thumb as hyper-‘on-line’ Others, feeding into us a sort of immortality (like these my looped labyrinths of connected gestalt real-time reviews of hyper-literature?) or a reincarnation-by-genealogical-memory? I am now reminded of Lawrence Durrell and his ancient Alexandrian Quartet by style and early premonition of rarefied multi-Othered substance in this Tidhar. And its cosmopolitan, non-alien, future inter-religious genius loci with political and religious tentacles back to our own troublous times, and perhaps not so far forward as my earlier expression of ‘far’ future portended. A literary time-compact Oracle.
    I do not think it’s accidental that the text here embeds the words: “…like an explorer in an unknown land, feeling his way by touch and instinct.”
    It is a strange fascinating world we are visiting, paradoxically accessible and inaccessible at the same time. A sort of intertextual, interpersonal, multi-nemonymous ablution by Lavie?
    Reply
  4. FOUR: THE LORD OF DISCARDED THINGS
    “Adaptoplant neighbourhoods, seasonal, unstable, sprouting walls and doors and windows, half-open sewers hanging in the air, exposed bamboo plants, apartments growing over and into each other, growing without order or sense,…”
    In many ways this text is not so much such an Adaptoplant neighbourhood in itself, but sometimes it feels that way in spite – or because? – of the Durrell and Rushdie comparisons I made earlier, but it’s more something that makes you into an Adaptoplant Neighbourhood as part of the the reading brain inside the skull.
    Here new characters, Ibrahim as this chapter’s eponymous character, finding a baby boy amongst the discarded things, that boy’s later connection and meeting with the boy from earlier in the book, some sort of collaborative messiah (?) with the oblique hinterland of Jaffa oranges, the Holocaust as we knew it as a keynote word now as a denial with six million ghosts, and other tentacles of past religious history of messiah &c. &c. – each with its own Other and the ‘crazy angles’ of Conversation – and “consensus illusion.”
    This real-time review has already become this book’s own Other, a Chiang-like retrocausality as consensus clinching gestalt? Or vice versa? I have no presumption as to which has more effect on the other, this review or the book it’s reviewing. More of a belated Adaptoplant synergy, I guess?
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  5. FIVE: STRIGOI
    “In space, cargo was a religion all by itself.”
    I feel I am a sort of cargo cult myself, awash in this staggering imaginarium that my Adaptobrain makes real, now ubicking in all directions, clouded and mist-mashed, but I am following it, as well as being followed – learning more about Boris and the more I learn the more I think he is Boris Chongson – and his past relationship with a Strigoi – now meeting up again at Central Station via their backstory – this long enthralling chapter not so much a data dump but a crystallisation and a bringing back together characters in tune with the brief summary of the plot I found on the back cover of this old-fashioned paperback with rough-to-the-touch pages in contradistinction to the onoff lines of these data vampires but more in keeping with the hanging sewers when we once read realbooks in base terraced houses, as some of us still do now, being taken out of ourselves by reading SF, particularly this hyper-hyper-hyper SF, where I sense the only pure alien is a human being.
    “data moving at the speed of light, so slowly . . .”
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  6. SIX: FILAMENTS
    “Blong stap o no blong stap
    Hemi wan gudfala kwesjen ia”
    A short burst of Pidgin reminds me that this novel – in a good way – is exponentially reminding me of my real-time review of ‘Finnegans Wake’….and it is another truly staggering chapter, this one exploring the connection between religion and the book’s concept of digital Otherness – and between that and metal as a sort of spiritual cyborging …….”Crucifixation” and Circumcision, the latter making me wonder what the procedure would entail if the member is metal, or what that concept might lead to with abuse if the bit of the body being abused is metal. That connection and the amalgamation of all faiths as we understand them today, that amalgamation now being the essence of Central Station itself, both the book with that eponymity as its title and the Station itself near Tel Aviv and Jaffa, a genius loci that the book has created within it.
    The characters and plot continue to develop, too, as they do in Joyce.
    “A group of disgruntled house appliances watched the sermon…” cf Lock’s ‘The Cone Zero Ultimatum’ in CONE ZERO (Nemonymous ∞)
    “But it was not easy becoming a Jew. It was a faith that discouraged strangers.”
    “Love made humans shine, as though they were metal filaments heated by electrical current.”
    “Our maker who art in the zero point field, hallowed be thy nine billion names…”
    Reply
  7. Yes, I read Lavie’s Central Station recently too and thoroughly enjoyed it. And yes again, the networking of sentient beings and especially of the AIs struck a chord in me and brought back memories of Arnold Washinator, the self-aware washing machine🙂
    The Cone Zero Ultimatum still remains one of the most favourite things I’ve ever written.
    Read ‘Central Station’ it’s certainly worth it.
    Reply
  8. SEVEN: ROBOTNIK
    EIGHT: THE BOOKSELLER (up to page 143)
    “Backwash, hitting him: memories that shouldn’t be, of times that never were.”
    …and a similar ungraspable feeling of backwash that I might have read some of this book’s text already, as the characters and their characteristics of place and self gradually form a gestalt in my real-time ageing mind – a similar experience, it seems, is that of together ageing and gestalting / gestating books like this one!
    I am like the collector of books (paperbacks like this Central Station one that I described earlier above) – ancient books (supplied by the earlier Discard man) that are now valuable as rare antiques, smelling of my piss and other bodily wafture ( Craphound et al). His meeting with the Strigoi, seems obliquely apt the day that Rabbi Lionel Blue dies in real-time today. RIP. I listened to him often. Discarded bust of Albert Einstein, notwithstanding.
    “… the works of poet and science fiction writer Lior Tirosh.”
    The bookseller and the Strigoi. Motl the robotnik and his love for a real girl. The accoutrements of my thoughts earlier as to the sexuality of cyborgs…
    “Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying halfway along their quests, loves requited and un-,”
    Reply
  9. Pages 143 – 163
    “It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man and woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre.”
    And this book has already but here, with great acceleration, taken off with that prerogative of hyper-Imagination or High Weird, bordering upon some essential truth closer than any other version of articulate ratiocination. I also know what it means to be “drunk on data”, as this book puts it. To have its “secret purpose.”
    To have books that fill the “holes” of the Conversation. To fear but love the “empty labels” (this author’s interview with me in 2003 about Nemonymous etc here.)
    We are now gaining more knowledge, too, of the interaction between this book’s characters, for example the nature of the two boys I called a ‘dual messiah’ at the beginning of this review. The nature of the Strigoi (or Nosferatu from the books) and possibly about what reason and how she had been let into this world of Central Station, her romantic force as a lover? Her “I am not a weapon” on this very moment of real-time (yesterday) someone used a lorry as one in Berlin.
    “But we do turn off. Shut-eye.”
    Reply
  10. Pingback: The Central Station of the Cross-Genre | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews Edit
  11. NINE: THE GOD ARTIST
    “running in real-time”
    I feel I am the god of this book, at least for the extent of this chapter’s quilt. But then like the old artist who created the god, as Boris arguably created children without being a parent? In many ways there is a growing Gestalt here of the nature of some of these characters and their interactions, unclear again with drugs and a new area called ‘gamesworld’, the text fitting well with different types of electronic music, as I have tried this morning. I feel I am on a roll as a Dreamcatcher, been given this chance to be a book’s god for real.
    So many quotes I pencilled to quote as remarkably expressed or enlightening passages that I have decided not to quote any of them except the one above. Gods are like that. Oh, but there is this one quoted from the rough paper page:
    “‘Gods are born, and die,’ the old artist said;”
    My wife’s latest quilt (mind-spatial created from crude material):
    img_2626
    Reply
  12. TEN: THE ORACLE
    “New faiths rose and fell like breath.”
    Whether Conch or Cohen, I seriously think the only way to understand this book is not to understand it. I extrapolate, in its own terrms, that it has been written by a committee of writers stretching through future and past, using the composite name on the spine, the ultimate nemonymous parthenogenesis of late labelling. If any reviewer of this book tries to explain the plot to you or seems to confidently describe, interpret and evaluate it, then you must smell a rat, sense an Other in this chapter which makes a fist of explaining the differences between Others and what we think we know today as Artificial Intelligence. But such a fist needs to contain a golden thumb!
    This book is the future of SF, not the other way round.
    Not a committee of writers, then, but an eventual Gestalt of all its readers? Only ‘A Third Alive’ as a Zeno’s Paradox so far. Till full, then understanding is not possible.
    I note the author was talking to me about Gestalts in 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20050221035642/http:/www.dusksite.ukgo.com/print.php?content.49
    Reply
  13. ELEVEN: THE CORE
    “…a paperback much worn and stained with age.”
    But, meanwhile, this chapter is the book’s wonderful and never-to-be-forgotten epiphany, I guess (the remaining two chapters being its combined coda remain to be seen and read.)
    This epiphany is experienced by Achimwene (the erstwhile discard man), one without a node, stalking the Strigoi as a lover, out of the loop of this book’s version of something we saw in the early real-time days today as our involvemeant with social media (in the BBC news today about lurking on FB as a source of unhappiness)? Out of this book’s Conversation. Now within Central Station, its elevators and itself accretive beings of Conversation? And the halfway children tapped into significantly more than just the Conversation….
    “He was the hero of his own story.”
    Reply
  14. TWELVE: VLADIMIR CHONG CHOOSES TO DIE
    “Boris when he was five and his node infected by a hostile malware virus with rudimentary intelligence.”
    Meanwhile, this is another moving chapter, indeed another pre-coda, to be clinched by the final Chiang-like hindsight Gestalt of the presumed coda proper (still to follow and be read.)
    This chapter deals with an eschatology that exists in this world despite that nodal world’s consciousnesses beyond the consciousness. A potential blend of Cyborging and Cryology? Even euthanasia at euthanasia park leads to an embrace by gravity, I assume, that continues some form of consciousness? A sort of real-time Alzheimer’s as I even feel it encroaching today: a wistful carelessness and acceptance of real-times-a-changing – for the worse or better? This chapter is miraculously part and parcel of my own consciousness of death and laid-backness at dodgier health at the age of 69: not old, I know, but old enough.
    “– how quickly and startlingly the landscape changed in so small a place. It was no wonder the Jews and the Arabs had fought over it for so long.”
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  15. THIRTEEN: BIRTHS
    “‘I left before he was born.’
    ‘I know that, Boris!'”
    A telling coda in the light of the vision of tapping children and the concepts of death in the two pre-codas. Also an I-Loop of this paper book itself from beginning to end and back to beginning again.
    And in view of something I said about Boris earlier in this review, his workaday occupation is not surprising, but in fact inevitable, judging by even today’s variegating real-time methods of human birth. In a nodal world of robotic machines, virtual reality, Gestalt Jungian codes and data, space travel, Otherness, what could we otherwise have envisaged beyond that?
    I shall just grab on one element – virtual reality – in the above list. This book, despite its paper and its non-visual, non-illuminated real-time words of today, somehow becomes a miracle of tomorrow’s nodal virtual-reality in itself.
    “The traditional words.”
    end
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Saturday, December 17, 2016

Some Will Not Sleep – Adam L.G. Nevill







11 thoughts on “Some Will Not Sleep – Adam L.G. Nevill”


  1. Where Angels Come In
    “Nana Alice smells like the inside of overflow pipes at the back of the council houses.”
    The inferred creator of this text seems to be the person of whom to be scared most! By the way, my Nana was also called Alice, a most important figure in my life. This is your telling to her – in hope of her salvation (from both directions of salvation) – of your boyish trip to the white house on the hill (far scarier that the real White House with its new potential tenant?) – an archetypal house of horrors, with fiddled kids and their dolls and statues with hearts in their hands and old people with sticks not to assist old limbs but BE such limbs, yes, a cornucopia of visionary terrors each single one of which could have made on its own a great horror story about nothing else. That’s what I mean, it’s overdosing on tropes so that you sick them up to allow yourself to overdose all over again – and again. And it somehow works.
    A mockery of subtlety, a one-fingering at the nightmarish overlap, because each nightmare works discretely if not discreetly. And just one example of its strength is in the pissing down the legs through rushing this act as well as the piss making your legs wobbly with worry from within. Not only the mind gets scared but each and every other single bit of you does, too. A literary experimentation in mass vulnerability targeting. Each piecemeal fright denying in defiance their own eventual gestalt of fright. And that is possibly the most frightening thing of all… no pickering or choosing.
    “Even taking slow, reluctant steps got us there real quick. And on legs full of warm water I followed Pickering up to the doors.”
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  2. The Original Occupant
    “I noticed another configuration of horseshoes nailed about the porch canopy, to protect the entrance of God’s house. If indeed these primitive iron symbols were used to ward off evil spirits, then why would a crucifix not suffice? Perhaps, an irritating voice cried out inside me, because a cross is not recognised by eyes older than the origin of that symbol.”
    When does a gentleman’s stylised even hackneyed tale of terror told to another gentleman over dinner and cigars become a tale of true terror irrespective of who tells it and who listens? When it transcends its own satire of the Blackwoodian genre on the cusp of a moment of genuine panic in an isolated cabin in the furthest reaches of Sweden. And when it is also a tale told about events between mutual friends where the storyteller becomes part of his own story about his so-called friend, making us wonder who IS the original occupant of the story and which the outsider looking in, whether shod like a horse or unshod like some other terrifying beast – or the man himself, no longer civilised let alone gentle, in relentless pursuit. Only trees can make the noise of wind when there is no wind to make its own noise. Gentlemen and their talking, too.
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  3. Mother’s Milk
    “Each back door faces the milky pasture and leads into a kitchen.”
    Seriously, I feel spoilt, to read such a seemingly archetypal, yet original, classic of fiction at such a price; it seems as if it surely must have grown over the years since it was first published with ‘buy one get one free’ teats deliberately to suckle me in. To join me to its curdish fount. The main protagonist in fact works in a supermarket warehouse or something like that with another who return at night on the bemused bus to a genius loci that eventually becomes a blend of the first story’s earlier white house on the hill, here with a red roof to match more than one such house, those Swedish red houses in the second story…and those earlier limbs like doll’s ends or sticks here attached to milky mounds of a Mother figure and other such suction and agglomeration, a teasing love of a family around you as well as something perhaps more suspiciously sticky, whence to escape. This book, so far, has that sense of playful connivance with our own love of ‘revelling in vulnerability’ that I once publicly called the Horror Art of Fiction. Whence now goodness needs to be mined or hawled gradually from Nevill’s teasing vats of dark imaginative irresistibility. Perhaps some will still be able to sleep, like me, but some may not.
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  4. Yellow Teeth
    ‘There’s plenty of things you can see without light.’
    You never really expect to be exposed to a story – here a relentlessly and incantatorily driven story of some significant length – where you seem entirely to forget you are reading a story at all. But you did forget with this one. It went by like a flash of ineluctable truth.
    And when you feel utterly wrung out after finishing it, you feel as if you have REALLY been faced — during the last hour of your life (extended to weeks and months of the plot’s timeline) — with believably incremental circumstances of sheer threat and personal horror that anyone could meet in normal life … and even when those circumstances get out of hand in wild proportions at the end of the story, such extreme events make you feel that you’ve been through those FOR REAL, too.
    I won’t tell you of ANY of those circumstances because this story, out of all stories, truly needs to be read from cold and then to be experienced like a virtual reality, this being the only time I can envisage mere words conveying what virtual reality is likely to produce from an as yet uninvented virtual reality device of the supremest quality with a full-blooded surround environment of private visions, sounds and smells detestably within one’s own potential synchronicities of stored-up life now disfigured.
    “Yes, it was like a record being pushed backwards against a stylus.”
    Reply

  5. Pig Thing
    “Sandwiched between his sister’s vulnerability, and the innocence that he recognised in himself, and his older brother’s courage, that he admired and tried to copy, Jack’s task was to stop Lozzy crying.”
    Three English children abandoned by their parents in the bungalow built recently in the well-conveyed New Zealand bush, and the tension between such migrants and that bush’s people, and the fact such people’s opacity (pottery et al) and bloody offspring spoor or more of this book’s hung horseshoes of defence shows they took any thing for granted. It serves to make this a creepy, laid-back acceptance of what instincts bring disguised as monster…
    It’s like watching, while insulated or screen-deadened, opacity’s bloody breaking news back in the reader’s home?
    Reply

  6. What God Hath Wrought?
    1848 Utah
    “He smelled of mule, years of sweat, bear grease, pipe tobacco and shit.”
    “They’s work to be done. Whether it be the Devil’s or the Lord’s, who can say?”
    “One of its stick arms was twisted backwards and flopped across the ruin of its exposed spine.”
    A “whore’s cunt” and a Hill Cumorah and an Angel Moroni and a Great Dead Sea and a Great Awakening, this is a mighty work that works with real history as well as against it, as if the diaspora of those days, that new Zion, those fair-skinned Nephites, that Brigham Young and the ‘Prophet’ Lehi – are denizens from the rest of Nevill’s stories, not just the zombiesplatter that this tale allows them, along with the soldier dragoon’s Old Wristbreaker sword seeking vengeance for his sister being taken on this diaspora of the New America where Trump, I infer, now brays loudest of all, as part of this unforgettable mayhem of crushed skulls, blasted innards and matchless Nevill crepitations of semantics and phonetics…
    I sense that I am the old prospector smelling of shit and mules who comes back into this story to find that God is only one letter short of Gold, not basalt.
    Just waiting for the black carriage coming to collect me. And I wonder – and will one day write an essay on – what this work says about history yesteryear and breaking news today. Some will DEFINITELY not sleep.
    “And the Nephites had organised themselves but four months before his return from war, to travel in a long wagon train to the Promised Land as the Day of Judgement was all but nigh. Because Lehi’s congregation needed to be in place at the Great Dead Sea to escape the persecution of the apostates, the Gentiles and the already damned, who comprised a multitude so vast that it included anyone who was not a devoted and servile follower of the Prophet Lehi.”
    Reply

  7. The next story I read and reviewed in 2013 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
    ———————————–
    Doll Hands
    “Inside my stomach I feel a sickish skitter.”
    This story of a sheltered property and a banquet for its strange residents is not in one of your crazy cruel nightmares but in the real future. However, it is like a crazy cruel nightmare, not unlike a painting by George Grosz.
    Told by the one with the big head and doll hands, this story shows that the residents in the home are quite normal in what you would expect for a crazy cruel nightmare, but if it’s not a crazy cruel nightmare, which it patently isn’t, then these residents will certainly haunt your future crazy cruel nightmares about such a banquet and its caterers and its living provender and such provender kept behind from the banquet for you to deal with when you wake up…
    “Whuff, whuff, whuff, they went.”
    Reply

  8. To Forget and Be Forgotten
    “I thought the world mad. Desperate and cruel and stupid, endlessly repeating the same mistakes with terrible consequences.”
    I said earlier in this review about another story: ‘Seriously, I feel spoilt, to read such a seemingly archetypal, yet original, classic of fiction at such a price;” and it seems that was not to be an exception. The exceptions, in fact, are the other ones that are not so. This one is so archetypal it seems already part of my reader’s DNA without my realising it till now. A solipsistic individual, who wants to mind his own business and not have others to mind his business, gets a job in an Antwerp block as nightwatchman. The building is like a ship liner that might have ballrooms and other Art Deco of yore, but eventually it seems to grow chintz and more utility rooms out of sight with aged stick-limbed residents, after months of his loving the job by simply watching monitors. The whole throughput and outcome are original, too, but with supporting aura of Poliakoff and Wyckoff.
    Elements, too, of Ligotti, Aickman and Charles Wilkinson.
    Shadows, noises, room numbers, being trapped in an old photograph, and much more.
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  9. The Ancestors
    “I didn’t want to move here and I was scared of the new school. But since I made friends with Maho and the toys it isn’t so bad.”
    img_2708Another story that digs deep into my reading DNA, perhaps planting something there as make-believe to prove it was ever there. A story of children’s rights and parental punishment by recriminatory abuse upon adults as replacement for this world’s abuse upon children, with a not so imaginary ‘imaginary friend’; a Japanese tinge to the people involved, but I suspect the toys are cosmopolitan, toys that more than just haunt the old house whereto the protagonist child as narrator has been moved against its child-like will and about to be moved out again against the same child-like will. With bits of terrifyingly conceptual parts of tiny lifeforce stuffed up the chimney-flues as stop-gaps or more planted evidence to prove adults are fiddling them back down again…?
    And the narrative child’s imaginary friend whose endless lengths of hair is a material swaddling as a complement to the endless heavy rain outside the house.
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  10. The Age of Entitlement
    “To think I once regarded the sea with fondness, its fragrance and bird calls producing a sense of comfort.”
    The gems keep on coming. At first I thought this was a theme and variations upon the long-term Platonic relationship of St John and the narrator in ‘The Hound’, where the hound here is the sea – and in many ways it is and it is.
    But it is also a story of a couple’s relationship with a far more ingenious twist in its tail, a devastating, memorable twist, a twist I cannot divulge here – a beautifully constructed and prose-styled work of fiction that could easily find its place in an anthology of best short mainstream or literary fiction in any year of the near future, AS LONG AS its staid editors can critically see past their attitude to the story’s all-consuming lugubrious horror of a dystopia in that very near future – taking place upon the English couple’s trip to Normandy, where the Second World War’s residue imbues the text with the near-abandoned towns and derelict buildings with impressionistic statues of the dead – and far more, to the seething background of an entitled nature of the sea, a sea and its rocks that are the passive-aggressive fulfilment of some retribution for a severe personal disentitlement, and a future that is already in regress towards the Dark Ages.
    “He was content to lie among the unkempt graves of five thousand dead soldiers whom no one has the energy to honour any more, after all that has happened so quickly in this world.”
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  11. Florrie
    “Frank was overwhelmed by an unwelcome notion of age, its indignities, its steady erasure of who you had once been and the recycling of your tiny former position in the world.”
    This is the perfect coda to the dark symphony of this book, the saddest part of the book. The sweetest, too. I have been going through such frank flurries of regression for a few years now, a definite accretive preparation – for the nature of death not being able to hurt too much when the time comes. An attrition that is also an attraction. You will have to read this story to see if you can resist the onset of your childhood era and its accoutrements of product and entertainment, all brilliantly conveyed here, and then live in that era as an old person, the thrusting person you thought you still were now gone, no longer with the modernistic need to be clinically minimal with decor and furniture. About time you became a human being again, before it is too late, because as you die is as you will ever be thereafter, I guess. Death is no bully. Not a gutting, but a retrenchment. Some will sleep peacefully, after all.
    The striking thing about this landmark collection is the diversity of movements in its dark symphony. The chintzy harmonies and the atonal nightmarish clicking. And variations between. But it has the irresistible soul of a single unique composer, a retrocausal force digging original-but-archetypal tropes into your reading DNA, making you believe those tropes or trappings have always been there – like Florrie’s off-the-wall bits and bobs? – clinching their gestalt-in-hindsight.
    That is the end of my review, and I will now read the author’s story notes for the first time, but I will not come back here to report on them nor to allow them possibly to retroact on what I have already written about the stories above.
    end
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