Vastarien, Literary Journal: Vol. 4 No. 2
PART TWO OF THIS REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE
PART TWO OF THIS REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE
GRIMSCRIBE PRESS
Jon Padgett, Editor-in-Chief
My previous reviews of this journal: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/vastarien/
Work by
Romana Lockwood, Hailey Piper, Michael Uhall, Carson Winter, Philippa Evans, Mari Ness, Christi Nogle, Gwen C. Katz, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Greg Sisco, Tori Fredrick, John Claude Smith, George Prekas, Juleigh Howard-Hobson, Georgia Cook, Sean M. Thompson, Joanna Parypinski, Rhonda Eikamp, Christa Carmen, S. L. Edwards, LC von Hessen, Sara Tantlinger, Perry Ruhland, Paul L. Bates, Jenny Darmody, Mari Ness, Emer O’Hanlon, Dejan Ognjanović, Clint Smith, Ivy Grimes, Kurt Fawver.
A Walkthrough of Route X: Video Games and the Postmodern Gothic
By Joanna Parypinski
“Now that awful sameness is suffused with a horror at these subtle differences.”
On the frighteningly precarious interface of fiction and non-fiction, I made a walkthrough through this text and became someone else’s walkthrough. And my real-time review of it is thus not as adept as it would have been — but I am still ‘me’ enough to suggest this text may be a genuine classic work of Penrose stairs and Kaplan ‘brevities of flash’, a work that far outdoes even HOUSE Of Leaves by becoming a bijou typographical anomaly in return for at least a part of your body. A classic work in the Horror genre by paradoxical means of bastardising me (and, by extension, any other reader) within an environment where I am now sitting writing a different real-time review of it from the one I otherwise should have written. Who wrote this third one is a different question. But X having four visibly diagonal routes from its centre is now the most frightening thought of all.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/joanna-parypinski/
Thy Structures Rear’d in Blood
By
Rhonda Eikamp
“It was the dawn of a new age for women, 1951, but Marie Munck felt at times as if she were being dreamed by another person.”
A woman Psychiatrist in that, then, world of men — her facing the ultimate madness, perhaps her own madness in red, with the men returned from the battle fields and camp ovens of Germany. A nightmare of marriage and unspoken anti-natalism into a new modernity and her watching a man who is building his own Noah’s Ark in a nearby garage. Co-opting people for this new art-installation ‘oven’? But whose insulin had been given to whom for whose hat? The vision within that garage is, well, — see for yourself!
I found all this very strongly written, in a passion, without thought for patience, in tranches of utter text, and ultimately nightmarish and mad. Facing the ultimate madness, my own madness, perhaps for secreting everyone in my gestalt of book reviews in pairs of misconnections — yet making them safe, I once thought, from some flood of Noahentity. The best of intentions.
“‘A man doesn’t go off without his hat.’
‘He went off without his wife.’”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/rhonda-eikamp/
Vulture Eyes by Christa Carmen
“Who would be foolish enough to ask a ghost how it’s speaking?”
I absorbed this story by osmosis from beneath my senile eyelids, eyelids lent me from above somewhere, daring to only open them to see the story’s missing eponymous eyes at the end. As if I, too, at the extreme point of anti-natal, if not antenatal, guilt and cot-death anxiety as the post-part of postnatal depression or dementia that we all must reach if death doesn’t get us first, ever haunted by the ghosts of those we have wronged during our past life. And those wronged ones replacing those we love and care for more carefully today. The ultimate nightmare.
Here a powerful story of Iris and her own baby Constance and a Weirdmonger, nay, misread, I mean a Weimaraner dog — and an earlier, if disconnected, baby and earlier Boxer dog both of which she fears she maltreated — and the unbearable suspense at the end with a nursery monitor if not the car seat carrier and the doubt as to what happened and what or who was switched with what or whom makes me thankful my eyelids were opaque. And I am still here safe from being implicated by reading it.
The scent of Petrichor, Petra friend of Mother Iris, and youthful drug taking in Waterfall fists of rain now come to whip up our deep anxieties galore….what did we all do? Why are we all here? A review I rewrote to find out.
“The boxer, however, and her apartment closet hovered, ghostlike, at the fringes of this rewriting.”
Revenge and Envy Are Very Small Things: Cosmic Inconsequentialism in S. P. Miskowski’s Skillute Cycle
By
S. L. Edwards
A non-fiction article
My earlier review of Miskowski’s THE WORST IS YET TO COME: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/02/the-worst-is-yet-to-come-s-p-miskowski/
My previous reviews of S.L. Edwards: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/s-l-edwards/
The Accursed Manor of the Mirrorlands
By
LC von Hessen
“Stairs that groan like old men underfoot.”
Stares at this old man who has been entirely fazed reading this, nay, reading it aloud like the perfect Gothic textual mirror of itself, with so many von Hessen quotable quotes fitting together tactilely and eschatologically and scatologically into a music fit for King Solomon’s Demons, apotheosising this author by this selfsame author as I have grown older knowing of this author already. Heady and hedonistic, sexual and Ligottian, with houses and clans and people and Frankensteins and a ‘you’ — is that you who now crawls squid-like through my mind? — a text full of dolls and fairy stories, backstories, and balls (that one dances) not wondering whether they are balls belonging to this work’s ‘pretty young men’ — and now what I understand to be a Destructive Parthenogenesis (although the text does not contain this word ‘parthenogenesis’): a new asexual literature of virgin births teeming with more sex than either an old man’s or manor’s asexuality or sexuality can reflect from the other. . .You heard about it all here first. Von Hessen essence.
“When we become them. And they become us.”
My previous reviews of the Essence: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/lc-von-hessen/
The Hessence, too.
UNMITIGATEABLE OUBLIETTES: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/unmitigateable-oubliettes/
Anthropophagus, a poem by Sara Tantlinger
“until massacre consumes itself,”
Much tactile and devouring enjambment of bird names, with the one line above preternaturally linking to IN BLEED yesterday here.
(I think I first came across the one word in its title from Othello?)
The Collected Poems of James Zjarek, Transgressor
By
Perry Ruhland
A theme and variations on what this work calls The RasPUTIN defence (my capital letters and English spelling of defence) — the narrator being a friend of James Zjarek, the latter a man who claims he is a moral martyr through a sodomy of stigmata slouching towards Bethlehem, I guess. The narrator is a jealous artist and when James gives him his poetry to comment on, the narrator is at first pleased it is ‘awful’ and not likely to be a rival, but nevertheless James’s gauche poetry remains obsessively nightmarish. I can give you no real idea about this Ruhland work, one that is staggeringly powerful in itself, both in style and subject matter. The essence of a dark guilt that flourishes as fine art. “…a rhythm within the rhythms.” The Intentional Fallacy apotheosised, escapist as well as unshakeably inborn. The narrator and the narrated becoming a single epiphany. The Christhmus channeled beyond time. Soft black stars now transgressed.
The Shining Path
By
Paul L. Bates
“They form an interconnected pattern, she wrote,…”
The penultimate paragraph of such a succinct and inspired vision actually also depicts my own gestalt real-time reviewing in the wake of confused diagnoses and ignored prescriptions, fears of filthy hospitals and frequent nightly visits to bodily letting-places alongside a projected vision of a lifelong spouse continuing with her own gestalt or itinerary of shrines and monuments in diseased foreign places that she follows or will follow alone, following her own ailment. The postcards she sends that will lift my heart even in, as far away as, the place to which she will abandon me, a foreign place called death?…
Meantime, I do not have sufficient stomach for making this work even more succinct with my own summary of its different, yet parallel, plot to mine.
Need is not if but when it is needed
“So many patterns, so many routes, so many possibilities, one destination.“
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/paul-l-bates/
Lullaby
By
Jenny Darmody
A revealingly naive slant, in accomplished prose, upon illness, mental and physical, upon group therapy, and featuring 17 year old Lexie, her love-hate relationship with the nearby beach and its tempting pillows of sand, and with Ted, a fellow group therapist, and his crossword clue’s answer of EDAM as CHEESE, then the deceptive manoeuvres of CHESS, now simply, by a palindromic move, MADE, never unmade or even unmaid — by queening her life’s pawn, there on the promisingly lullful beach? You see, I guess, Ted had castled already. Lexie and words.
A poem and an accessible Molly Bloom-like monologue that deals with periods, hormone treatment, FaceTime sex and sex otherwise, pandemic lockdown and what she becomes as part of the bleeding … making a synergy with the poem … the monologue seeming to cross boundaries where I feel lost, especially with myself having hormone treatment in old age for quite different reasons, making my reasoning mind morph and cease to emphasise or wrongly empathise with whatever gender …
Lonely Wordless Ghosts
A haunting poem by
Mari Ness
Red Knots Tightening
A monologue by
Emer O’Hanlon
“but in those half-moments, I see myself reflected in the mirror on the other side of the room.”
The Three Paradigms of Horror
By
Dejan Ognjanović
A major substantive academic article that seems very impressive to my inexpert eye. Probably unmissable.
The Gyrification of Violence
By
Clint Smith
Carrels without a care of caress …and
“A carousel of teachers covered the room in shifts.”
A significant work, I sense, quite short, yet overpowering my synapses with its implications at what lies behind gestalt real-time reviewing. Overpowering me to such an extent that it impassions further the reading moment and my faithless faith in fiction to a level not felt before. Yet, am I compos-mentis enough to recommend this work willy-nilly? It depicts a narrator who ratiocinates his own creativity in interface with confrontations at school, with a teacher Mr Roach (“his elbow-patched blazers”) who destroys the narrator’s art drawings being created in the carrels of detention and the narrator’s fisticuffs with a gangly fellow student, Cory Price, in the lunch queue. Both Roach and Price achieve their own evil destinies, he later discovers. But whose guilty face does he recall most? How blurred is the borderline between creativity and mental illness? What palliative caress can I expect from agonising over this?… “…decoding connections that […] ‘normal’ people can’t see. ‘Having too many ideas can be dangerous…’ […] ‘Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all these connections actually exist.’”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/clint-smith/
A connection: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/02/18/the-gestalts-gyrification/
I’ll have to check this one out. I thought The Skeleton Melodies was a powerful collection.
The Food Fellow
By
Ivy Grimes
“I pictured miniature patients pushing themselves through the tiny holes in the phone receiver, corkscrewing their way into the office and running around jubilantly. Sampling toothpaste and playing with the picks.”
Somehow that seems to elucidate this insidiously obsessive story of a female dental worker as a narrator and regular customer at THE FOOD FELLOW grocery store, a store, if not story, with its insidious stalking Produce Manager and, later, Store Manager, and, no doubt, I infer, Town Manager and, eventually, World and Universe Manager, as I defy the concerns of the previous insidious work above with a now broader brainstorming of connections, stacking onions as if they are giant pearls, like God’s teeth?
But who stalks whom? Even my own lifelong wife now suspects me of obsessions, having read this review. The tiny, tiny woman who bagged my groceries indifferently, whether in deadly plastic bags or global world canvas bags … well, I drew a meaning from this work like the drawing out of teeth on Surplus Day… I did not steal anything, but simply sampled its meaning on site, in real-time, to avoid recrimination.
Whatever the meaning, this work reads and feels beautifully written. I chose the primest meaning possible from it, but any different meaning you may pick out from the word-managed produce may be the best food enough for you – and perhaps better for your teeth too.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/vastarien-vol-3-issue-2/#comment-20890
Playing with the picks…
My previous reviews of Kurt Fawver: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/kurt-fawver/
This Story will Kill You
By
Kurt Fawver
“Extrapolate, reader. Connect the dots.”
Another Fawver tour de force as a paradoxically hurtful take on that old rhyme — a faux, thus real as a negative of a negative, metafiction that somehow confirms my fearless faith in fiction and the impossible connections made possible by the passion of the reading moment, all factors mentioned in my previous entry above and cultivated there, it seems, simply to be engulfed by this story, in an existentially real and fearful way…cultivated to engulf me, too.
This story to die for is surrounded by the whole Vastarien book, and makes it even more real, were that even possible! Its Lexie of Darmody above returned as Lex as a word in the “wordwind” that happens to embrace violent Storm Eunice around me at its cumulative height even as I write this in a UK real-time. Honestly. See my brief blog here that I posted before it all started, whereby another writer of fiction adds her own Lexical weight….
“The thing from the story will eventually come for them, though. It won’t stop until its work is finished. […] …it barrels straight at Julia, into Julia, through Julia,…”
“The trees that ring the terrorized glade begin to sway in an unfelt breeze. Something powerful is moving among them.”
This is also the Clint Smith work, just now above — “it’s the eternal metamorphosis of the creative mind […] the boundary between the real and the imagined.” – as this Fawver has it. “If she could see inside its gyrating funnel,…”
The FOOD FELLOW incorporated, too, now “tearing sound like a citrus fruit being stripped of its rind.”
…to watch the thing whirl ever closer.
“A living, flying pen scrawl,”…
Julia, the main protagonist as ultimate spear-carrier, the reader, too!
We’re all side characters at the end of the day.
A fictional backstory as a fatal truth. Anticlimax as the most powerful climax. Following all the bloody jam of words on the forest floor.
A rabbit-hole Hell. The unholy roaring in its chimney. The harvesting of Vastarien.
end