“He wanted to live long enough to see the human race destroy itself in a nuclear war. He imagined a moment before his own destruction where he would enjoy the end of the species and it would be a beautiful moment.”
This work is both hilarious and somewhat terrifying in its implications. Certainly, intriguing, too.
Who is this Chrome fellow purported to be dead? — some of the story’s characters are celebrating his death but also daring not to believe it isn’t fake news, celebrating because of what evil he did to them and their kin, and there are other mad folk like a Lord in Westminster who wants to solve the mystery of the expensive coffin given to Chrome’s body but equally left to putrefy in it without embalming and also to summon any means to resurrect him — but is it indeed fake news, about someone who once seemed in life to have a tan, but is brought back to life from the tar in smoke that is derived as part of the need for nicotine backwards as it were into the body as well as into time, here blown into the orifice at the opposite end of the supine body to the mouth with which he once mouthed off? See ‘Chrome (mineral) tanning’ versus ‘vegetable tanning’ in the conversion of animal skin to leather. Tobacco’s smoke-tar and its nicotine are derived from plant leaves. Not animal or mineral. A fable for our populist times. In Westminster, too. A story about the fundaments of shag, and our crazy desperations. As well as about this story’s oft-called ‘bastard’. (my italics, my bad)
Without my conscientious, if preternaturally brainstorming, theories about this story, it can be appreciated on other levels, and ever remains fundamentally what I said at the beginning of this review.
“…when the bastard starts burning.”
***
This story is available in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #72, published August 2022.
My previous reviews of Julie Travis: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/julie-travis/
My previous reviews of TQF: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/theakers-quarterly-fiction/
***
LATER EDIT (6 Nov 22): The tar tan as the new embalming!
My ongoing reviews of single stories by living authors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/the-single-story-toward-a-novel-world/
Pingback: The Single Story Toward A Novel World | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
Pingback: LEVANTHIA Edit
Spoilers beware, as result of above Pingback…
https://julietravis.wordpress.com/2022/06/17/tartan/
Very interesting! Unaware of this link until now. Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy, eat your heart out! Or proof of the preternatural literary gestalt?
References missed by me, and they now give this story even more potential grim as well as terrifying depth for me.
https://julietravis.wordpress.com/2020/11/13/all-mass-murderers-are-evil-but-some-are-more-evil-than-others/