Archive for the 'Literaria' Category
No Fivehead This Week
May 31st, 2008
Since it’s technically Saturday morning as I write this, and I haven’t gotten this week’s Friday Fivehead out the door, it looks like another Fiveheadless Friday. Yeah, I know: I suck—but I’m very busy researching and rewriting the first seven chapters of my Lovecraftian novel, “City of Pillars” over at Footnotes to the Human Species.
Next week’s Fivehead is gonna be a blast, though: Ripper’s Delight! I’ve been ripping a lot of old CDs I haven’t listened to in years. CDs that perhaps you haven’t listened to in years, either. Well, let’s have another listen to them, shall we? Has Huang Chung’s first album stood the test of time? What about Thompson Twins’ Into the Gap? You’ll know next week by this time!
Chapter 4 of “City of Pillars” is now live!
March 31st, 2008
For those of you who follow this blog but may not be aware of my grand fictional exercise in blatantly ripping off H. P. Lovecraft, Footnotes to the Human Species, please hop on over there and check out my novella “City of Pillars,” the fourth chapter of which has just gone live! If you enjoy my nonfiction writing, there’s every chance you might dig my fiction as well—but do be aware, however, that my fiction is relentlessly depressing, frequently so violent it would make dear little Alex of A Clockwork Orange shrink in fear, and always, and I do mean always, very vicious and despairing. Here’s a little sample to try out before jumping in headfirst:
The only way I knew we’d made it out onto the 107th floor was that there was noise all around me again and the heat and smoke were a little less horrible. I opened my eyes and Raj was there, asking me, “Where’s Ray? What happened to Ray?”
“He let go,” I choked, “But he was right behind me. Hasn’t he come up yet?”
There were three men pushing the stairwell door shut but Raj threw himself into the gap shouting, “No, not yet—there’s still someone in there!” and the guys started arguing with him, telling him they had to shut the door or they’d all suffocate and they were pulling him, trying to get pull him back in so they could shut the door when Raj said, “Stop it, stop it—I got him!”
And then Raj just…vanished. It was like he was yanked into the stairwell.
[Cressida pauses again to take a bottle of pills out of her purse. She takes two of them—Klonopin, to help control her anxiety—then resumes with a feverish urgency, clearly desperate to tell the rest of the story and be done with it.]
One of the doormen went in after him. I heard the man scream, but it was cut off almost instantly. The last two guys on the door were calling him—“Bob! Bob, what happened?! BOB!”—and then the worms came through the door.
[“Worms?” I ask.]
They looked like worms—that’s how I keep seeing them. Like earthworms, but big and purple, big as firehoses. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: two of the things whipped out of the smoke and wrapped around the man closest to the doorway and he didn’t even have time to say a single thing—he was gone. They’d pulled him into the smoke. “Close the goddamned door!” somebody shrieked and then I was throwing myself at the door with a bunch of terrified people—people who must’ve seen the same thing I did—and the heavy emergency exit door slammed shut. I had my hands on the door and felt something hammering against the other side. Hammering. The door was jumping beneath our hands and everyone was saying, “Block the door, block the door.” I was shoved aside and two boys in black-and-white waiters’ uniforms came through the smoke carrying a metal desk. They threw it up against the door but the…the worms on the other side were still pounding—pounding so hard it sounded like someone was throwing bricks at the door. People were standing on each side of the desk holding the door shut while the waiters and some others went back and forth dragging dining tables and chairs behind them, heaping them up in front of the door. “Get out of here if you ain’t helping,” someone said to me, so I just…wandered away into the crowd.
So there you go! Intrigued? You know what to do.
Book Review: Jonathan Barnes’ The Somnambulist
March 13th, 2008
Steampunk is The New Big Thing. But, like most literary subgenres (this one a subgenre of fantasy, science-fiction, and historical fiction), it’s not that easy to define. Or, rather, its definition is very open to interpretation. Certainly William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine is an obvious example of steampunk; the novel is, in fact, one of the founding documents of the form. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age counts as well…yet, so does China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station—and those two novels couldn’t possibly be more different. In fact, the term “steampunk” is being applied rather willy-nilly these days to any literary work that has a Victorian or mock-Victorian influence/style/setting, or some form of anachronistic technology in it.
Jonathan
Barnes’ The Somnambulist matches this loose definition well, but only in one single aspect: its conclusion—of which I shan’t say any more than that it definitely contains a very steampunky sort of anachronistic technological element. The remainder of the novel, however, is something that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft could’ve written together (had they actually known one another, as in Thomas Wheeler’s The Arcanum) and falls more into the “Victorian fantasy” or “Neo-Victorian” novel classification. Nonetheless, it’s a smashing good read and an excellent example of how effectively an author can combine both first-person and third-person narration to “[t]ell all the Truth but tell it slant.”
The novel may be named The Somnambulist, but the Somnambulist himself is but a secondary character, a sort of mysterious, mute shadow to true protagonist Edward Moon, a stage magician-cum-investigator now, in 1901, fallen on rather hard times. The popularity of Moon’s magical performances (in which his sidekick, the Somnambulist, a golem-like figure whose origins and nature are completely mysterious, features prominently) at his own Theatre of Marvels has been waning for years, and since his disastrous involvement in “that dreadful business in Clapham,” he hasn’t been getting many calls for assistance from the Yard. Yet he eventually finds himself called in to investigate the strange murder of one Cyril Honeyman, a ham actor….
Needless to say, the seemingly random—and very weird—murder of Honeyman eventually leads Moon and his various compatriots into a labyrinthine mystery involving mutated Human Flies, specialist brothels full of sideshow freak prostitutes (most especially a bearded lady named Mina with a vestigial third arm dangling between her breasts), a company called Love, Love, Love, and Love, a strange subterranean world, and the legacy of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
As in any typical Victorian-esque novel (and The Somnambulist has a very distinctly Dickensian cast to it), along the way, the reader is introduced to a variety of eccentric characters, such as:
- the albino Mr. Skimpole and the hideously scarred Dedlock, administrators and agents for the mysterious (yes, that word is bandied about a lot in this review, because this novel is absolutely saturated in their inexplicable and strange) Directorate, a governmental “black project” designed to stop “eccentric” threats to the city of London;
- a certain ugly Mr. Thomas Cribb, who apparently lives backwards in time like Merlin and is, in some fashion, the genius loci of the City of London;
- the irrepressibly good-natured Detective Merryweather, the counter to gloomy Mr. Moon;
- Barabbas, a loathsome, but wise, toad-like murderer—once connected with Moon and his theatrical act—awaiting execution in the filthy, lightless depths of Newgate Prison;
- Mr. Moon’s dedicated busybody housekeeper Miss Grossmith and her odd, jug-eared beaux Arthur Barge;
- Moon’s sister Charlotte, who goes from busting fraudulent psychics for the city’s Committee of Vigilance to penetrating an organization a thousand times more dangerous than shystering table-tappers;
- the horrifying duo of Boon and Hawker, unstoppable, bloodthirsty supernatural assassins who dress in schoolboy uniforms;
- a gaggle of false Chinamen;
- and the ancient Archivist, a wizened old witch who manages the Stacks, a limitless source of information for the handful of initiates permitted access.
Most mysterious of all is the identity of the narrator, the person telling the story of all these disparate characters and how they are all eventually drawn together to stop a terrifying menace from beneath the streets of London. Is it The Somnambulist? Is it someone completely unknown? A great part of the mystery revolves around Our Humble Narrator’s identity, and author Barnes does a spectacular job of weaving that mystery into all the many other mysteries swirling around London like a plague of psychic nightmares a la Mieville’s slake-moth-borne plague of nightmares in Perdido Street Station.
Many readers may find this novel sloppy and overly indeterminate. Though the Big Mystery of what is threatening Mother London is, of course, resolved, very little else is. Who or what is The Somnambulist? Who or what are the Proctors, Boon and Hawker? What happened at Clapham in Moon’s past, and how was Barabbas and Charlotte involved? Who, indeed, are the Directorate and what are their function in protecting the city? Well…none of this is ever revealed.
Could it be because the narrator is more than just your average unreliable narrator, but a complete lunatic?
Could it be that Barnes is planning a sequel that will address these loose ends?
Or could it be that Barnes is simply playing the Lovecraftian game of atmospherics: leaving certain things unexplained in order to maximize the unsettling, unknowable nature of certain events and characters? I believe that he is both setting himself up for a sequel but also playing against popular conceptions of Victorian mysteries, in which the valiant Investigator (be in Edward Moon or Sherlock Holmes) solves everything with aplomb and diamond-hard deductive logic.
It often seems that Barnes is reveling in all the many forms of “low” fiction popular amongst everyday readers in the first decade of the 20th Century. There are elements of detective fiction, yes, but also elements of cheap, sensational penny dreadfuls, weird fiction, and ghost stories. All of this swirled together produces an engaging, quickly-escalating narrative in which everyone is, at some point another, suspect or revealed to be yet another strange and inexplicable figure. The Somnambulist is a neo-Victorian, pseudo-steampunk frappe made by blending elements from a wide range of genres, subgenres, and subsubgenres together into a tasty, twisted whole that will keep many readers chained to the pages while others stumble away in righteous indignation and confusion as they find their expectations torn to shred and left scattered, meaninglessly, on the cobblestones.
I highly recommend this novel to readers with a taste for the weird and the outre. This is an example of that kind of steampunk/New Weird Fiction (another new subgenre that’s as elusive to pin down as steampunk) that will greatly appeal to readers of China Mieville, Steph Swainston, and even Neil Gaiman—though Gaiman fans, do be warned: there is none of Gaiman’s cliched plot standards or pre-determined conclusions here. Gaiman aficionados looking for a good story with a guaranteed ending* will be severely muddled by the end of The Somnambulist…but those of us who like our fiction atmospheric, allusive, elusive, and beyond the middling strange will find The Somnambulist a wonderful, surprising blast from the past.
Footnotes:
*I’ve always found Gaiman’s fiction to be more about the telling than the story: his plots are always very cliched, constructed from well-known bits of old fairytales, folktales, and assorted other archetypal tropes, and their conclusions are telegraphed from Page One—you always know how a Neil Gaiman piece is going to end from the conclusion of its first chapter. However, Gaiman’s skill lies in making the journey to that foregone conclusion so very enjoyable by employing narrative tricks and storytelling skills that manage to hold onto the reader’s attention despite the tried-and-true subjects of his stories.
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Footnotes to the Human Species (re)Begins with "City of Pillars"
January 31st, 2008
Footnotes to the Human Species has returned with an brand-new website and a brand-new story, “City of Pillars”!
For those of you who were enjoying “Trois Freres” on the previous, “beta-test” version of Footnotes–fear not: that story will return in a much-improved, edited, and greatly revised version shortly. The official launch of Footnotes to the Human Species begins with “City of Pillars”, however, simply because “City of Pillars” sets up characters, concepts, and major worldbuilding events that explain more about what is happening in “Trois Freres” and related tales. In other words, “City of Pillars” is the starting point from which all other tales in the milieu, whether they come before or after the events of “Pillars”, originate.
“City of Pillars” begins my re-telling of the history of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries from a Lovecraftian standpoint by supposing one simple thing: What if the terrorists who attacked New York City on 9/11/2001 were Cthulhu cultists armed with an authentic copy of the original Al-Azif of Abdul Alhazred? What if the attack on the World Trade Center was not a goal in itself, but merely a means toward achieving a goal–namely, opening a gateway to unhallowed dimensions of whirling chaos so that the Other Gods and their minions could begin again their colonization of our universe?
All of the stories in the Footnotes milieu are derived entirely from the works of H. P. Lovecraft himself. Readers don’t need to be familiar with Lovecraft’s works to enjoy them, but it sure does help! “City of Pillars”, for instance, features appearances by or mentions of the fungi from Yuggoth, the Great Race of Yith, and Yog-Sothoth, as well as Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos and, of course, Cthulhu itself. In some fashion, “Pillars” is a sort of “sequel” to Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “The Shadow Out of Time”, and “The Call of Cthulhu”–but you needn’t read all of these original tales to understand what’s going on in “City of Pillars”. Lovecraft fans will find hundreds of references to all things…well, Lovecraftian–but even readers completely unfamiliar with Grandpa Theobald’s works will be able to enjoy the stories!
So do have a look at the new tale and the new site. Subscribe to the RSS feed and have new material delivered right to your doorstep. And most of all, feel free to leave comments!
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Good Writin’ Episode 1: ""I dont know what to make of that."
September 27th, 2006
Ladies and gentlemens, welcome to a brandnew feature here on Pegritz(.com)!: Good Writin’ - a weekly showcase of excerpts from amazing works of literature. Hopefully, these little hors d’oeuvres of wonderful prose - and, occasionally, poetry - will serve as appetizers to stir up in you the same hunger for exceptional wordplay that they’ve stirred in me. Let them serve as bite-sized samples to give you a taste of the works as a whole, or as tasty little treats for your own imagination!
But just remember…my taste in literature is as variable and chaotic as my taste in music, so be prepared to taste-test everything from Gabriel Garcia-Marques to Stephen King, Caitlin R. Kiernan to Abraham Lincoln, Robert Frost to Robert Heinlein, the Upanishads to Gregory Corso. After all, no true gourmand can ever, in good conscience, limit him- or herself to any one particular cuisine at the expense of all others.
This initial installment presents to you the opening paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s chilling, and terribly sad, tale of drug money and sunbaked lives, No Country For Old Men (2005). The speaker is Sheriff Bell, the aged Texan lawman whose weary shadow lies heavy on the land and the story itself:
I sent one boy to the gaschamber in Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He’d killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. He’d been datin this girl, young as she was. he was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind. I watched them strap him into the seat and shut the door. He might of looked a bit nervous about it but that was about all. I really believe that he knew he was goin to be in hell in fifteen minutes. I believe that. And I’ve thought about that a lot. He was not hard to talk to. Called me Sheriff. But I didnt know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasn’t nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.
Positively chilling, isn’t it? I’ve certainly read my fair share of horror novels over the year, but never in all those tales of demon possession, zombie plagues, bioengineered monstrosities, curses, hauntings, and Ancient Gods from Beyond the Stars have I ever read anything that literally sucked the body heat right out of my blood more than that passage. Not even the many terrible and expressively quotable moments in McCarthy’s acknowledged masterpiece, Blood Meridian, managed to salt my blood with the pure, gritty despair of that opening paragraph. In short, gentle, colloquial sentences (you can practically see the old sheriff shaking his head in defeated bewilderment as he speaks), Cormac McCarthy has shown us just how perverse and horrific the scarred underbelly of America can be. No demon, no alien god, no cartoonish psychokiller in a mask can ever be as chilling as an average, everyday human being who can kill a fourteen-year-old girl just for pleasure.
Incidentally, this first installment of Good Writin’ is, naturally, dedicated to the memory of my mentor Ron Forsythe - Ahab! - who first introduced me to Cormac McCarthy with the words, “None of your monster tales can prepare you for this stuff, brother.” How could I possible resist the temptation to discover just what words like that must mean?! So this Bud’s for you, Ahab! I’ll be sure to somehow get to you a copy of McCarthy’s forthcoming novel, The Road, even if it involves necromancy.
World War Z
September 26th, 2006
Zombies are fun. They’ve been a necessary part of the horror genre almost since Day One…but, oddly enough, zombies haven’t fared all that well in print. Anyone can name a plethora of zombie films, starting with The Mummy (a particularly dry and past-his-prime zombie, yes, but an example of the walking dead nonetheless!) and ending with Shaun of the Dead. But how many zombie novels, or even short stories, can you name? Hell, I only know of these because I’m a horror scholar, and it’s literally my job to keep track of this stuff! There were the landmark living dead anthologies Book of the Dead and Still Dead, both edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector, and more recently James Lowder’s collection The Book of All Flesh and its sequel The Book of More Flesh. And as far as novel-length works go, you’ve got new horror author Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead, and David Wellington’s Monster Island*, which first garnered acclaim when it was first released as a serial on the author’s blog. None of these novels are as familiar to horror aficionados as any of the zombie films, and for two good reasons:
1) the zombie subgenre is naturally better-suited to film due to the subgenre’s reliance on gore and very visceral horror, elements which just don’t come across as effectively in black-and-white print as they do on the full-color, blood-soaked screen; and
2) all of these novels suffer from being completely derivative of the raw visuals and survival-horror surface elements of Romero’s and Fulci’s definitive films without also dealing in the political and social satire of the films. This leaves those books as little more than one-trick ponies: Let’s just see how a varied bunch of people survive in a world overrun by the walking dead. Reading them is like reading someone’s notes on playing a survival-horror videogame. It’s just…dull.
The fascination with zombie apocalypses does not stem, ultimately, from how people survive the plague of biting, moaning undead - it’s who survives. The zombie subgenre is the most sociologically interesting category of horror because it doesn’t deal with just a family being haunted by a pesky poltergeist, say, or with a small group of knowledgeable people fighting off some Threat from Beyond - it deals with humanity itself being threatened with extinction by our own dead. In a certain light, zombie outbreaks are no different than plague outbreaks, but there’s a major difference: when someone dies from Captain Trips or the 12 Monkeys virus, that person doesn’t stand back up, gather together a posse of fellow reanimates, and go hunting living flesh to consume! Zombie films and novels are always about small groups of people - a microcosm of Society At Large, if you will - banding together to survive the onslaught of the Undead Masses. My god, the symbolism is ridiculously obvious! As is the potential for satire…and that’s exactly what you find in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Simon Pegg’s wonderful send-up Shaun of the Dead.
Watching zombie films or reading zombie stories is fun - and educational - because you not only get to watch the dynamic activities of a group of survivors battling the stumbling hordes, you also get to watch the social dynamics among that group of survivors. You get to see heads being blown off, brains and intestines being gnawed on, and living people acting out all manner of stereotypical situations, characteristics, and so forth. Without that extra dimension of social insight, all you have is a shoot-’em-up that ends when either the Last Surviving Human gets bit or the Intrepid Survivors make it to safety. There are thousands of bad direct-to-video zombie productions Out There that are just like that, and though they may be shallow, repetitive, and completely unmemorable, at least they’re somewhat amusing to watch because of the mindless gore and the action. But who wants to read three hundred pages of just that?
Zombie literature has to take a slightly different tack than zombie films. Zombie lit simply cannot emphasize the action, or the gore, or the mere mechanics of the survival-horror plot–that stuff just doesn’t do so well in print. Instead, if you’re going to write about zombies, you have to emphasize the sociological, the satire, the emphasis on the “human condition” as opposed to the slam-whizz-bang furor of popping maggot-infested crania. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a zombie novel that does that.
That is, until I picked up Max Brooks’ phenomenal new work, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (official Random House site here)!
Max Brooks - son of Mel Brooks (yes, that Mel Brooks, the comic genius behind History of the World: Part 1 and Spaceballs) - first ventured into the realm of zombie lit with The Zombie Survival Guide (official site here), a tongue-in-cheek, yet still practical, handbook to surviving the inevitable zombie apocalypse. “Organize before they rise!” is the book’s slogan, and it is at once dead serious (ha ha ha!) and completely hysterical. Why? Brook’s guide is not a silly, over-the-top comic farce, but a completely sober, serious piece of satire that examines contemporary American civilization and its various weaknesses by showing what could happen should the dead begin to rise and completely destabilize our individualist, technocentric civilization. It’s a proud example of that sophisticated kind of satire best exemplified by Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, which took the piss from Eighteenth Century Britain’s highminded social critics by expertly pointing out that the Irish famine could be eliminated if only the Irish would consent to eat their children. For all zombie aficionados, the practical, down-to-earth advice of The Zombie Survival Guide was a Major Publication, because it scraped together all the ideas about zombie uprisings presented over the years by Romero, Fulci, Savini, and the like and distilled them into a hands-on guide explaining just what could happen to YOU - and what you could do to survive it - when the apocalypse begins.
But World War Z one-ups not only The Zombie Survival Guide, but - quite literally - every other zombie novel and movie ever made. You heard me. But, you reply, them’s some tough words, there, Pegritz. How does a novel by a famous funny-man’s kid trump Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead (original and remake), or even The Evil Dead?! It’s simple: World War Z takes the social satire and survival-horror basics of Romero, combines them with the pervasive sense of Total Apocalypse of 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead, then blends them together with an extremely sharp perspective on the current state of world affairs to produce a “nonfiction” account of the entire Zombie War all around the planet. The novel is truly global in scope, not only because of its international characters and settings, but because it examines virtually everything that is Human in light of the Dead: foreign relations, domestic policies, cultural conflicts, technological issues, labor issues, psychological issues, public-health issues…hell, even pet issues!
Simply put: World War Z is the first of its kind - a worldwide zombie omnibus that doesn’t just restrict its POV to, say, a tiny sampling of Americans holed up in the Monroeville Mall. That approach is fine for something with the limited scope of a feature film, but a novel demands More Details. Brooks handles this by presenting readers with a wide range of perspectives: folks from around the world, ordinary people to governmental movers-and-shakers, military skullbreakers to abandoned children gone feral. He shows you the Zombie War from nearly every angle imaginable.
This book is exactly what zombie literature has been waiting for: its definitive text. Max Brooks has clearly eaten the brains of Studs Terkel, whom he thanks for the neural donation in the book’s credits-reel. In an interview with Ain’t It Cool News, Brooks notes that Terkel’s amazing oral history of World War II, The Good War, was an obvious influence on his own work. World War Z is not a “novel”, per se, in that it does not present a unified narrative propelled by the interactions of a limited number of characters: rather, like The Good War, World War Z is a collection of interviews in which the characters speak of their own experiences before, during, and after the Zombie War.
The interviews are collected in a number of chronological “chapters” detailing various stages in the Zombie War: the early stages of the initial outbreak in China, the spread of the undead plague throughout the world, the Great Panic, the following harrowing years of attempting to stabilize the situation, the final “sanitization” sweeps, and the first few post-war years.
To begin with, Brooks does an amazing job at defining the epidemiology of the zombie plague (in fact, he defined it earlier in The Zombie Survival Guide, and World War Z can easily be seen as a dramatization of the Survival Guide’s ideas). He leaves no stone unturned when illustrating how the worldwide outbreak occurred, spreading like wildfire due to many governments’ snide unwillingness to even believe (and, later, acknowledge) that the dead could possibly be coming back to life. The author never goes into the biology of the zombie plague, of course - that information is just not necessary to the story - but he does pay close attention to its consequences, painting a VERY frightening picture of just how fast a virulent new disease could spread throughout the entire world thanks to our global transportation networks and the inevitable governmental bungling of public health crises. But that’s just the beginning of the horror.
There are moments of action in the various characters’ narratives (some of the first survivors’ tales deal specifically with their initial encounters with, and bloody, brain-smashing escapes from, the walking dead), but the true horror of World War Z comes from the atmosphere of mounting dread that pervades the early chapters. As the governments of the United States, Russia, China, and the EU attempt to deal with the outbreaks in secret to prevent widespread panic, Israel and South Africa - sites of some of the earliest outbreaks - close their borders and begin taking aggressive steps toward dealing with the contagion. In the US, an opportunistic biotech tycoon rushes a useless vaccine through the FDA and makes a fortune selling a defense against the “African rabies” epidemic, while China and Russia attempt to cover up the crisis completely under stories of “insurgents” and “civil unrest”. By the time the First World governments wake up and decide to take any kind of reasonable action, the contagion has hit the unstoppable point of exponential expansion. Cities have become seething wounds filled with zombies and terror. The Great Panic has begun…and as people desperately try to flee the contagion, they find themselves trapped in hundred-mile-long traffic jams, easy pickings for the shambling, biting undead.
The most interesting aspect of the zombie plague is that Brooks does not present his zombies as the quick-moving, furious cannibals of the Dawn of the Dead remake or 28 Days Later. No, his zombies are your traditional stumbling, moaning, hands-held-out-in-front-of-them Romero zombies. They’re slow, they’re stupid…they can’t really climb stairs or figure out how to open doors. So why are they so deadly? Simple: numbers. They might be slow, but how are you going to fight an enemy whose numbers grow with every bite? Who can take ten bullets to the chest, have his arms and legs blown off, and still keeps coming relentlessly? The United States military attempts a “Shock and Awe” standoff with the tide of the undead outside New York City, in Yonkers, and despite the soldiers’ high-tech gear, they are quickly overrun and butchered by the walking dead…who just keep coming, and coming, and coming, pouring out of the city like a tsunami of hungry ants. The soldiers empty all their ammo into wave after wave of zombies, and when they run out…there’s still another hundred waves of undead coming.
Brooks is particularly sharp at illustrating how high-tech is not always a guarantee for survival or military success. We in the U.S. have a major love affair with technology, and often believe that if we can “out-tech” an enemy we can beat them easily. But Brooks points out clearly that high-tech solutions aren’t always the best solutions. Later in the novel, for instance, when the U.S. finally begins to rally and the tide starts to turn against the zombie hordes, the primary weapon issued to soldiers is a modified trenching tool now called a “Lobo”, or Lobotomizer. A shot to the head is still the most effective way to take a zombie out, naturally, but what happens when you run out of bullets? The Lobo is incredibly low-tech, but works every time. It needs no reloading, no maintenance, and is very cheap to produce in bulk. Now, consider the combat laser weapons also mentioned in the novel: they can fry zombies, sure, but they cost millions to produce, are extremely fragile, and can easily malfunction. Why use a multimillion-dollar laser weapon to zap a handful of zombies when you can equip a number of soldiers with $10 Lobos that only need a little muscle-power to work? While that laser cannon’s recharging, a couple of guys with glorified sharpened shovels can take off ten times as many heads!
Brooks’ descriptions of how our advanced civilization could be brought down almost overnight by something as “simple” as a plague of the undead is particularly harrowing - especially if you are, like me, a citizen in a country like the U.S. Furthermore, Brooks gives us glimpses of the world after the Zombie War: a world in which many buildings are built on stilts with retractable staircases and ladders, United Nations patrols scour the northern countries after winter looking for frozen zombies that might thaw and cause trouble, and many people once again carry swords. Low-tech, but consistently effective, solutions to a low-tech problems. The lesson of the novel is quite clear: technology is only as good as the people using it, and if they’re not prepared to use it properly against a special type of enemy, it’s more a hindrance than a help.
This is a novel with many lessons - and many of them are political. Make no mistake: this is a politically-charged novel. Brooks wear his politics on his sleeve, and they are most definitely not the kind of politics our current administration, or the current administrations of China, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Russia want to hear. Brooks is unconditionally and unapologetically critical of China and Russia in particular - but he is not looking down on them from a high-and-might First World stance. The author clearly has sympathy for individual people, and flatout recognizes that the two most dynamic economies of the immediately pre-Zombie era were not the US and the EU, but China and India. These nations’ governments, however, are not to be credited for these economic strengths: it was the average people who made up the rank-and-file of these countries who kept them going. Brooks even shows how, after the collapse of Castro’s regime in Cuba, the Cuban nation becomes one of the greatest economic powers in the world thanks to the stability of the powerful capitalist system that emerges there when mainland banks flee to the safety of that little well-defended, offshore paradise.
But don’t take Brooks’ for a bleeding-heart liberal. He clearly - but not explicitly - points out that the great mistakes the U.S. government made in the early days of the zombie outbreaks were committed by a Democratic administration that made its way into power on a strict anti-war stance after the collapse of our involvement in “the last brushfire conflict” (Iraq? No…really?). Liberals of all stripes will no doubt be appalled by the “Redekker Plan”, developed in South Africa and implemented, eventually, under a variety of other names around the world, to save governmental and military systems by abandoning strategic population regions so they can serve as “zombie magnets”. These zones would draw the ravenous zombie hordes while governmental and military systems could mobilize, concentrate, and eventually strike back. But in a true total war like this one…sacrifices must be made. Individuals don’t matter as much as long-term stability.
Nonetheless, Brooks’ zombie politics are, ultimately, about as anti-conservative as you can get. One can easily read World War Z as a scathing critique of our present world situation, with extra emphasis placed on the repressive governments of Russia and China, and no little scorn for the United States’ love of spectacle over responsibility. One of the best means of pointing out a nation’s problems are by setting up fictional situations that exacerbate them and make them obvious. Sinclair Lewis did so with It Can’t Happen Here, and throughout the first pages of World War Z that mantra, “It can’t happen here!” is repeated over and over by officials and civilians all over the world. But it can. The undead can and will find you. They are as inevitable and overwhelming as any force of nature.
And that’s what the zombie apocalypse, ultimately, is. A natural disaster for the entire planet, a worldwide Hurricane Katrina. Though clearly aimed at American audiences, I have no doubt that readers in other countries will be able to see the significance, because the rest of the world is much more familiar with natural disasters than the U.S. is.
In conclusion, this is the zombie novel of all time. No kidding. If you’re looking for vivid descriptions of arms being gnawed off or intestines being yanked out, then go and read one of those inferior other zombie novels. If you want to see the Full Picture of the Zombie War that Romero’s films only hinted at; if you want to read a masterful piece of satire; if you just want to enjoy a novel with a truly epic scope…then World War Z is what you’ve been waiting for your entire life! God knows, I have been waiting long enough to read something like this.
Also, the audiobook version is well worth checking out. it features the author himself as the interviewer, and such Hollywood greats as Mark Hammill, Jurgen Prochnow, and many others reading various characters’ stories! It is an abridged version, comprising only the lengthiest narratives from the book, but a wonderful companion piece to the novel.
And, yes…there will be a movie. Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights before the novel was even published! Now, this could be good news, or execrable news. If the film is designed to mimic the book’s “nonfiction” delivery and is presented as a documentary featuring actual footage from the Zombie War, interviews, and maybe recreated scenes, then it will be awesome. However, if it becomes “Hollywoodized” and turned into Yet Another Zombie Action movie like Resident Evil, then I fully expect to see a zombie horde marching on Hollywood to kill, maim, and eat the morons involved. Let’s hope the former prevails.
*Which also has sequels: Monster Nation and Monster Planet. Apparently zombie novels, like zombies themselves, travel in smelly packs.
100% True…or Double Your Money Back!
January 13th, 2006
Here’s a little anecdote for you, straight from the Life n’ Times of Derek C. F. Pegritz–that is, me–which will soon be showing up in my forthcoming memoirs, NONFICTION!
Back in The Day, I was prettymuch transparent, at least to the mate-seeking laser eyes of your typical early-20s single girl. After I’d had about ten or twelve tequila sunrises, I’d sliiiiiiiiiiide on up to one of them at the bar with my vintage ’70s wingcollar shirt unbuttoned just enough to show my single chest hair, my breath cool and Binaca-fresh as I’d hit them with my standard line, “Can I see your bruise? You know, the one you got when you fell out of heaven?”–and they’d just stare right through me as though I were made of transparent aluminum. Or slap me. Needless to say, no matter how hard I tried, freakin’ Beavis and/or Butt-head had a better chance of scoring than I did.
The statement above is 100% True. You have my word on it. Because…really, what possible reason could I have to tell a deliberate untruth of any sort in my writing? I mean, only completely and utterly honest people will take the time and effort to put their stories into writing, and, therefore, we can trust everything that’s written to be Actual Factual and verifiably true. This holds for both the Internet and the print world - doubly so, in fact, for the latter, thanks to the wonders of certain dedicated people known as “editors.”
You see, even if some author were to - god forbid! - stretch the truth a little bit or, worse, outright TELL A BLATANT LIE (though who in their right mind would do such a thing?), publishing houses are fortunately staffed by legions of cautious, hyperintelligent editors and fact-checkers whose entire careers are centered around being absolutely sure that their employers do not accidentally publish a tome riddled with factual errors or loathesome exaggerations. This is why you, as a consumer, can and, in fact, should believe anything you read if it’s been printed and distributed by the likes of, say, Random House. Random House and other American publishers have a truly Platonic dedication to The Truth, and would sooner fold up shop than ever deign to let a compilation of deliberate falsehoods slip through their presses onto bookstore shelves.
But…oh, dear - what if a mistake were to happen?! What if a book riddled with embellishments and other such obfuscations of The Truth were to somehow seep through a crack in the fact-checking bureaucracy and end up in the public sector, where its embellishments and obfuscations would naturally be mistaken for The Truth? And…and what if this book also happened to become extremely popular thanks, in part, to its being a featured selection of a famous talk show host’s book club? Why, it would only make sense for the publisher to do the responsible thing and offer a refund for those terrible, error-ridden texts!
You would, perhaps, expect to eventually encounter such a situation as described above if you lived in Perfect World, where Everything Is (Or At Least Should Be) As It Seems and everyone but a handful of acknowledged Bad People is blissfully enamoured of The Truth. But I hate to break it to you, folks - we live in the Real World, where people exaggerate, tell lies, and where, because of humanity’s propensity for never telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you can’t believe everything you read.
For example, my little anecdote that introduced this rant. It’s at least 99% true - but there is one small untruth in it: that I needed ten or twelve tequila sunrises to get my groove on with the ladies. In fact, I never needed more than five: if I drank twelve I’d be more likely to puke on a girl than to hit on her. But why would I bend the truth like that?
Because it makes the story a little bit more interesting, or entertaining. Exaggeration does that: it generates humor…as anyone familiar with Monty Python’s Flying Circus or the films of Adam Sandler will damn well know. Does it harm the story - or, worse, the reader - that I streeeeeeeeeetched The Truth just a little bit to make my brief little statement of Striking Out with the Ladies a bit more amusing? NO. Not one bloody bit.
Writers always play a little loose with the truth, even when writing biographies and autobiographies - and not always because they just want to spice up an otherwise average or pointless scene with a bit of hyperbolic pep. Sometimes writers make up out-right lies…to save face, perhaps, or just to include a scene or an event that in some way impacts the text they are writing positively.
Let’s take, for example, Vanilla Ice’s 1991 young-adult biography Ice by Ice, in which the then-popular rapper mentions that he got into a lot of trouble with street gangs when he was but a young’un growing up in da hood. That never friggin’ happened: Robert van Winkle grew up in a lily white upper-middle-class community; the worst trouble he probably ever encountered was being grounded when he got caught frenchin’ the neighborhood floozy in the back seat of his parents’ minivan. But you can’t be a smoove, thuggin’ white rapper if you don’t have some street cred, right? So he manufactured a bit of his image. What. A. Surprise. But well do I remember the stink that blew up when it was “discovered” - no doubt through the tireless muckraking of some Rolling Stone journalist obsessed with revealing the harshly un-harsh suburban truth of Vanilla’s past - that Herr Ice’s junior-G days were all bogus: you’d've thought he’d fabricated a tale of taking Madonna’s virginity in the spare bedroom of Paula Abdul’s mansion, or perjured himself before Congress concerning his role in the Iran-Contra Scandal. Goodlord…all he did was gussy up his past a bit to make his life story a little more interesting - a little more like what his fans already thought his teenybopper days were like. He didn’t have to alter or make up anything about his teenage motocross achievements, though, because such activities are, by definition, more interesting to readers than an account of how he made it through highschool with a B average.
Every personal biography and memoir ever written by a human being has contained some untruths in it. Hell, most of the time, they don’t even end up in the text intentionally. Human memory is a fallible thing, and any event recalled long after the fact will have undergone a certain amount of entropy in the mind, rendering it a less-than-perfect entity. Anyone with the merest dram of awareness will automatically know that you cannot believe wholeheartedly everything you read - ESPECIALLY when the words on the pages or screens before you are marked as being “true.”
But that doesn’t mean you can’t be inspired, or moved, by those words. Many people are touched by events and characters in popular novels: they’re inspired by the everyday trials and tribulations of Bridget Jones, the perspicacity of Sherlock Holmes, the suaveness of James Bond, and the homespun decency and bravery of Huck Finn. Every single event and deed in those novels was fiction - completely made-up - but how many kids were led to become FBI agents by Clarice Starling? Or to give up the smack by reading Requiem for a Dream?
It’s a lot easier to be inspired or moved by “actual” stories, of course, because…well, supposedly, those stories Actually Happened. Who hasn’t been stirred up in some way by reading the account of some real person’s triumph over adversity? But how much of that account was actually The Truth? Most of the time, there’s simply no way to tell unless you track down the author yourself, shoot him/her up with enough sodium pentothal to make Satan himself talk, hook the author up to a polygraph, and proceed with the ol’ twenty questions. You just choose to believe the story because it impacts your life somehow…and so what if something in it turns out to be an embellishment, right?
Not if you’re a reader of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, apparently. Frey’s memoir of drug addiction and rehab has been proclaimed one of the best books of 2005, and, as noted above, was chosen by the Mighty Oprah Winfrey as a featured selection for her Book Club. The book would’ve taken its turn in the spotlight, climbed up and then back down the Amazon.com best sellers’ chart, and promptly been forgotten by the General Public were it not for the fact that The Smoking Gun, a website run by Court TV, ran an article pointing out a number of factual errors in the book. In fact, the article alleges the author “wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw ‘wanted in three states.’”
Now, I haven’t read Frey’s book because junkie memoirs don’t really interest me–and I have even less interest in anything stamped with Oprah’s Book Club’s kiss of approval. But I have read The Smoking Gun’s expose on Frey’s exaggerations…and they seem to have, indeed, reliable information (garnered through perfectly legal means such as interviews and requested court documents) that exposes the fact that the author made some stuff up here and there, or “wildly embellished” some details.
To which I reply: Who cares?
First of all, Frey’s account is a personal memoir, in which he recounts various sordid and awful details of his own life NOT to slander others, but to illustrate his own personal hell and the means by which he escaped it to become sober for the past nine years of his life. He does not use falsehoods to injure or humiliate anyone but himself. Quite frankly, I think he exaggerated certain details of his story for one simple reason: to give his tale more impact, since he clearly intended the work to be a cautionary tale and…well, what good is a cautionary tale if it doesn’t shock you or alarm you into being cautious about something? So what if he fudges information to make himself seem like “more of a victim”? People do that: sometimes they lust after sympathy or pity, sometimes they do it to make their case more shocking and memorable for the benefit of others. When authors write books, they are not fundamentally interested in telling The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth - they are interesting in telling a story that will entertain and stick with people, that will catch like shrapnel in their audiences’ brains and not only sell a trillion copies but also remain in light. And most of the time, the actual truth of the story - however much the author carves TRUE STORY into its hide - will only form the seed from which the document grows.
James Frey is not writing a history book, or a book concerning string theory, or even a biography of some famous person. Factual details are fundamentally unimportant to the story he has to tell. The final impact of Frey’s tale of puke and pills and booze is not dependent on the veracity of the events depicted therein: it’s not the simple sum of its parts. A Million Little Pieces really could be compounded of a million little lies, but that does not detract in one bit from what the book is aiming to do, and that is depict the horror of an ex-junkie’s almost-wasted life. You get almost the same effect by reading Hubert Selby’s entirely fictitious Requiem for a Dream, but no one is demanding refunds from Random House because they discovered that something in Selby’s novel might not be 100% true.
The lesson here is simple, humans: Don’t take every word you read to be the Abject Truth, especially when it’s labelled “true story”. But that doesn’t mean that the words you read can’t have an impact on your life. The actual, meaningful “truth” of the words transcends the mere prosaic “truth” of their factual validity. Anyone demanding his or her money back from Random House because they were “duped” or “taken for a ride” by James Frey is a flat-out idiot who should, in fact, be fined by the Thought Police for egregious breach of common sense and criminal gullibility. And if you are one of said folks, and want to buy me a tequila sunrise at the bar some day for pointing out to you the stupidity of your ways, just think for a minute before you start pushing glasses my way. I might have already had my limit of five.
Orion’s Arm
August 18th, 2005
Orion’s Arm is, quite simply, the most impressive, most well-developed, and most extensive collaborative “shared world” science fiction milieux I have ever encountered either on the Net or in oldskool static print.
Orion’s Arm sets itself a lofty goal - map out the next ten thousand years of terragenic civilization and sapience utilizing only hard sci-fi principles either already known to current physics/biology/cognitive-sci/etc. or logically extrapolated therefrom (no moronic psi powers, FTL maguffins, or treknobabble, thank you very much) - and actually achieves it through the collaborative imaginative superpowers of a number of hardcore sci-fi freaks n’ geeks from all over the world. I cannot stress the following point enough: this is not a piecemeal environment compiled higgledy-piggledy by various nerds obsessed with Farscape and other such ludicrous tropes - Orion’s Arm is self-consciously styled on fairly traditional Space Opera grounds in order for it to be engaging, fascinating, and dramatic to everyday readers…yet is founded in rock-solid scientific, sociological, and psychological principles. Orion’s Arm is as richly-textured as real life, with a consistent historical and technological model that give rise to a world that remains convincing and flat-out exciting even as it’s populated with such trans-trans-transapient beings as “AI Gods” with constellations of Jupiter-sized brains processing thoughts powerful enough affect the quantum vacuum itself!
The foundations of the Orion’s Arm universe are laid in the very near future, deriving primarily from three paradigm-shifting technological developments: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and the interfacing of human neurologics with machine circuitry. These are three technologies virtually every transhumanist on the planet (like myself) are looking forward to and keeping tabs on, for they promise to lead to truly revolutionary changes in the basics of human life on Earth and, eventually, beyond it. From there, the next ten thousand years of terragenic history, involving the founding of interstellar empires, the development of godlike machine intelligences, the fragmenting of humanity and its robotic cognates into literally billions of separate species, clades, phyla, and so forth, and encounters with alien intelligences and the remnants of extinct civilizations, are mapped out in the most incredible detail. All of this background information is provided in a simple graduated timeline, a glossary, and a “galactography” illustrating the current distribution of civilizations through the 8000-lightyear volume of the “Civilized Galaxy,” as well as an amazing index of sophonts detailing the evolution and nature of the millions of different thinking things populating the galactic scene.
Best of all, Orion’s Arm is NOT just an exercise in transhumanist futurology–were it such, it would still be amazing and Mad Fun to read…but all of this worldbuilding has not been done just for its own sake! Orion’s Arm is fundamentally a collaborative world which anyone can contribute to and use for his/her/its own creative development. “Cafe OA” showcases various forms of short fiction inhabiting the OA universe. The Orion’s Arm universe is also uniquely suited to gaming possibilities, as well, and there are a number of RPGs based in various eras of the OA universe are currently in the works. The site also includes a large gallery of graphic works, a HUGE collection of links to various scientific whitepapers and other resources designed to help out potential OA-builders, and all manner of other supplementary materials.
In fact, the site is so thoroughly developed, expect to spend a few days wading through it all.
The OA community is particularly vibrant and friendly, as well. Expect to find me contributing to the site a great deal in coming times–and while you’re at it, if you find yourself as inspired by the construction as I have been, then feel free to contribute! Best of all, the entire project is licensed under Creative Commons!
On a personal note…I’ve been working on a novel lately whose core concepts have turned out to be dramatically similar to many of the ideas developed in the OA universe. It won’t take much work at all to tweak it in order to fit into the OA world. So expect to see something of that emerging in the near future as well!
In the meantime, lose yourself in one of the most perfectly realized future histories ever developed. I’m sure you’ll find me kicking around in there someplace, careening from wormhole to wormhole in my Archailect-powered starship The Inevitable Middle Finger, with my Muuh astrogator riding shotgun and a Greater Archive stuffed in the hold, headed for the Periphery where I heard I might be able to jack into some ancient transcension network and upgrade myself to AI God….
Tom Piccirilli: Newskool Southern Gothic
June 16th, 2005
Tom Piccirilli is one of my favorite members of the latest crop of contemporary horror-fiction masters (along with Caitlin R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti). I’ve followed his work since I stumbled upon A Lower Deep several years ago, and was instantly enthralled by Piccirilli’s uniquely surreal, oftimes almost Burroughs-esque style and the surprisingly creepy way in which he uses such disjointed narratives to revive age-old horror/Gothic fiction tropes such as the evil necromancer and undercover Satanists that have otherwise become parodies of themselves in myriad lesser authors’ hands. Horror is one of those genres which, by this point in its evolution, has pretty much exploited every possible plot, every possible source of human fear, and every possible constellation of characters: one need only take a quick glance at the legion of Leisure Horror paperbacks clotting the horror section of your nearest Borders to realize that almost every damn one of them is the nth rehash of the Haunted House Story, the Demonic Baby Story, the Psycho Killer Story, the Walking Dead Story, or what have you. Most horror writers today are content with endlessly regurgitating the same ol’ plots in the same ol’ ways because, really, the horror genre has become established: its readership expects certain content and will gladly pay for it, no matter how many times its rehashed and rehashed and rehashed.
Piccirilli’s work, then, just like everyone else’s, deals with one or another of these established themes - in the case of A Lower Deep, with various -mancers and their Faustian bargains for power - but Piccirilli’s will stand the test of time, and will eventually find its way into representative anthologies of early-21st-Century and late-20th-Century horror fiction, because his work takes these old, wornout tales and infuses them with a whole new unlife by scrapping so many of the genre’s default stylistic conventions (the barely-serviceable, straightforward prose and the mechanically-logical unfolding of plot) and throwing tales at you clad in amorphous clouds of surreal characters, dreamscapes that intertwine seamlessly with the waking world, plots within plots, subtle details that prove to have vast importance, landscapes that exist in no specific place or time but seem to inhabit the archetypal realm….His work doesn’t leap at your from the pages of his novels and scream “BOO!” then leave you giggling because It’s Just A Stupid Story, but seeps of the page like a hot, sour mist that leaves your skin clammy and haunts you with a shivery melancholy and an indefinable sense of dread.
In other words, Piccirilli succeeds brilliantly at the Lovecraftian dictum that horror is first and foremost about atmosphere - because even in the 1910s ol’ Grandpa Theobald had identified the fact that there were only so many possible plots and storylines to follow, and that the only way to generate a good weird tale was by amping up the weirdness of it, tweaking its atmospherics, until despite the silliness of the story it leaves you shaken. Gigantic ancient gods rising up from the seafloor to devour humankind? Pshaw! Hardcore materialist that he was, Lovecraft didn’t believe a word of it. It was just a story. And yet…who hasn’t been genuinely creeped out by “The Call of Cthulhu”? Lovecraft’s sense of style and his expert layering of scene upon scene, each growing stranger and more outre at every turn, nevertheless summoned that blubbery god from the depths and left every reader shuffling away from the story feeling like a moon is about to fall from the sky and crush him.
Piccirilli’s work is not as cosmic as HPL’s - in fact, Piccirilli’s fiction is surprisingly earthy, involving casts of Everyday Joes and Everyday Miseries….But much like Thomas Beckett could take Everyday Joes and their Everyday Language and build genuinely unsettling, out-there works like Murphy and Molloy, Piccirilli creates Lovecraftian morasses of threat from very mundane matters. And whereas HPL built all of his fiction within the New England Gothic mode, Piccirilli employs the Southern Gothic.
Oneirophrenia
May 12th, 2005
I’m currently in the process of establishing Oneirophrenia.net, another “blog” powered by WordPress 1.5 that will basically host my freeform novel Oneirophrenia–a window into the mind of a pseudo-omniscient “narrator” who rattles about life in a constant dreamlike state. There’s really no other way I can describe it: there isn’t going to be any particular “plot,” at least not one that is particularly recognizable considering how often things shift and mutate at the drop of a fuckin’ dime, but everything will make a peculiar kind of sense–this ain’t Samuel Beckett we’re talking about here, though Beckett is an obvious influence, as are William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, and various other “surrealist” or imagistic writers.
OK, I admit it, Oneirophrenia is mostly going to be an excuse for me to kick out the crazy-ass English-major word games. I’m a huge fan of creative stylistics, and I try to work with interesting styles of writing in everything I do…but, obviously, in a work like NONFICTION! or any other form of “popular” writing you can’t get away with a lot of wiggidy-wiggidy-whack word games and avant-garde stylistics for fear of swamping an otherwise engaging narrative beneath sheer orthographic craziness. When you’re writing from the point of view of a possibly-schizophrenic narrator, however, all bets are off and you can really let your hair down and just execute all manner of bizarre, innovative, or just plain entertaining linguistic acrobatics a la Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but obviously not so dense and mutated and impossible-to-figure out that only the author himself could ever understand what’s going on. I want people to read this thing, and enjoy it. Enjoy something in which I can kick out the jams without having to worry about the confinement of conventional narrative, but at the same time not get so convoluted or esoteric that I render the “story” as such completely invisible.
So, there you have it. My aesthetic statement concerning Oneirophrenia. I’ll obviously let everyone know once it’s ready to kick off, so you can RSS it or bookmark it as it develops!
