Interviews & Reviews

SIGNAL ISSUES AND FUZZY SNIPPETS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHASE GRIFFIN by Rebecca Gransden

Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an extended break from text of all types. They say the only way to get out of a black hole is to have never gone into it. While I don’t recommend going any further into this one, it’s already too late for you. -Roy Christopher, 2024 What’s the deal? When and how was this written and translated? Where does Roy Christopher fit into all this? Chase Griffin: Zoidoid was written in an alternate 1980’s by an alternate-me. And Roy is an alternate-Roy. And Roy has half-translated (half-translated because he suffered some Lovecraftian-madness while translating and he couldn't finish) Zoidoid from a fake future language (alternate-me is also a philologist) into English. Thanks for writing that intro, alternate-Roy!RG: How long did it take to write Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Did time pass fast or slow or in-between?CG: It took a year to write Zoidoid in my head. I was working as an overnight stocking clerk at the time. And it took a couple nights to let the whole thing pour out of my head onto the page. The year was long because overnight jobs are fucking awful. The two days passed slowly, but that was a pleasant slowness. I think one of the greatest feelings in the world is being in the midst of that fabulous kind of writer's schizophrenia when time stands still and the alien worm voice guides the pen.RG: It’s been a while since I've written in commonplace. I shouldn't be writing so sporadically in here... the way I’ve been writing in here for the past twenty or so units. I am realizing now that I should be much more diligent. What are your aims regarding language and style for the book? Any intentions regarding world building or backstory?CG: Context: Peter has this notebook filled with his archeologist, archivist parents' writings on the past (our present) and the language of the past and how the language might be able to unlock the secrets of the mind control device permeating all. Further context: So the commonplace book referenced is both Peter's diary (the back half of the fictional notebook which makes up the whole of Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace) and an archeologist book (the front half of the fictional notebook which we do not get to read).I went with this constrained epistolary style because that style best suits a story about translation and a world that makes unreliable narrators of its population.RG: Believe me, I wish I could turn off fresh emphasis. I don't want this trouble. I wish to be a googly-eyed wacko normie schmuck just like everyone else. Who needs this kind of stress? What would you like to emphasise?CG: I don’t know. Having a faulty, sparky monkey brain is great. There’s nothing wrong with the mass madness that is humanity. Because none of it matters. I love my madness. It’s my superpower. And only the outwardly mad ones are the sane ones. We’re all flawed and terrible because we’re gross animals. But who cares. Let’s all forgive each other for being born dumb animals. The sooner we get over this mass psychological determinism we are all bound to, then the sooner the big, dumb Doubt can begin, and then we can all accept it, and then we can go ahead and finally begin gently, cautiously being big, dumb monkeys attempting to not be big, dumb monkeys (which I think involves a lot of mass inaction and quiet and staving off entropy and the elders starving for the young (my modest proposal)). Maybe it is written that we will stop doing things for long periods of time. Maybe it is written that we will finally give up and realize we’re not good or better because we’ve done nothing bad. We’re just lucky. The circumstances we were born into gave us ourselves. We did nothing to earn a self. Not one of us has free will. So these words don’t matter. Nothing matters.God, I’m such a drama queen.Ask me tomorrow. I’ll emphasize a belief in something tomorrow.RGWhy am I still eating this dip? What is the best dip? What is your favourite dip? (Not necessarily connected).CG: Guacamole. Guacamole.RG:  Have you ever smirked momentously?CG: Sure. After a good fart. RGI believe I'm having a strange reaction to death. Makes sense. I often have strange reactions to many things.Have you ever had a strange reaction? Do you aim to establish a particular type of reaction in those who read your work?CG: Sure, I have strange reactions all the time. Life is weird and I have a faulty, sparky monkey brain. And no, not really. I'm not looking to establish a particular reaction in readers. I'm looking for readers who are down to have fun with the text.RG: I think I will crack open my briefing case. Today's setting will be archoniff sider and maybe it will help with my damn sass. What is the importance of sass to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Where does sass begin and end? How much is too much? Does sass have an objective measure?CG: It might not be sass. Sass might be a random word that Roy chose when he was translating. And I don't know about the beginning and ending of sass. Maybe there is no beginning or ending. Yes, I feel like sass has an objective measure and its measuring instrument is an oversized spanner covered in purposeless springs and gears. RG:  Please introduce Bippy.CG: Bippy is Peter's dead mom’s cat. This prissy furball is the hero of the book and the best character I have ever written.RG: I’ve written too much and I am going to become an unshakable thing. How horrid!Have you encountered any horrid unshakeable things, either in the writing of the book or generally?CG: Surely. All the time. I encounter horrid unshakable things all the time. I live in a densely populated village. How could I not encounter horrid unshakable things? Don’t read the local paper, by the way. But what am I to do? Nothing really. I see it all as character building. I have to be like the Buddha Or maybe not. People suffer so much more than me, so why shouldn’t I suffer some too? I just got lucky because I wasn't born into terrible circumstances. No one earned anything. How horrid! RG: The book features song lyrics. Are there melodies behind these lyrics or do they exist solely on the page?CG: I have melodies for them, but the reader can make up whatever melody they want.RG: What significance does music have to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Do any bands or albums share common elements?CG: Music plays a big role in prosody, and prosody is very important to me.Music is always on my mindMusic prompted the writing of Zoidoid. One night at work, while I was listening to “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, I came up with the basic outline for Zoidoid.Also, Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace and its fraternal twin, Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes (they will be published together as The Ampersand Collection on Corona Samizdat), are like the twin Guided By Voices albums Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The common elements are the signal issues and equipment blockage. The books and the albums have these fun messages to send you but the low studio quality and signal issues (mostly due on both parts to limited budget) only allow fuzzy snippets of the messages to get through. And, of course, this fuzzy snippet-ness (this constraint technique) is all a part of the charm.RG: I am the only untranslatable person in the world. There's no one here who can decipher the whispered gibberish. Does your writing demand comprehension? What is lost or found in translation?CG: My writing doesn't demand comprehension. All that matters is the emotion and the emphasis, the incomprehensible human-ness (the faulty, sparky monkey-ness), poking through the rigmarole-membrane of the literal and figurative institutions. My works are more like fantasy and fairy tales (which don't require explanations for their motions) than science fiction (which is like a fairy tale giving excuses for its behavior).RG: How do you define New and Old?CG: Pre-old is our time. Old is the glorious golden civilization that arose from the ashes of our time. New is the oppressive society that followed the downfall of Old.RG: Does Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace have anything to say when it comes to politics and current affairs?CG: Not sure. I don't think there's much to say. We're all actor-bodies of the leviathan-theatre and all political conversation is a big script. It's all catechisms. Even what I just wrote. And also with you! Gesundheit!But maybe the book is asking about obscurantisms and mesmerisms. Are we searching too hard or too little for obscurantisms and mesmerisms? Are we too paranoid or not paranoid enough? Should we be putting our energy elsewhere? Is this, the searching and obsessing over possible hidden things, a design—like a figurative Air Loom? RG: How do you approach the use of signs and symbolism in your work?CG: Character and story always come first. The conceptual materials are handed to me by the characters and the story. Then comes the welding torch.Going back to music, this is how a lot of the great concept albums were made. Fellowshipping equals motif discovery.RG: Onomatopoeia—what are its limits?CG: What are the patience-limits of your ideal reader?RG: How would you advise someone approach reading this book? Any particular demeanour or method of engagement that would enhance the experience?CG: My books like to be read aloud (although many readers have told me they prefer to read them silently)—in the same way Shakespeare is best ingested when read aloud aloud. Not saying I’m Shakespeare by the way. I need to add way more dick and fart jokes to my work if I want to be Shakespeare. With something like Hamlet, even if you don't understand the language and the cultural references, if you read it aloud you understand the emotions and the emphasis. And maybe that kind of understanding is more important than direct understanding, which is an understanding that always ends up getting folded into the flux.Also, use whatever pronunciation you want for my made-up words. And then stick to whatever pronunciation you choose.RG: I looked back to Shea to make sure he wasn't examining my facial expressions too closely. What facial expression best expresses what Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace is trying to express?CG: How about that fun face Johnny Cash is making in that famous picture of him flipping the bird?RG: Do you hate computers?CG: Meh. I'm pretty indifferent. What even is a computer? Are they terrible for the earth, like air conditioners and cars?RG: Believe me. I didn't want to trust him. I didn't want to set aside my urge to stomp his brains in. I didn't want to not hate him, the fucking mentor fuck. But I submitted, and I set it all aside.Have you ever trusted someone to be your mentor? If so, what influence have they had upon Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: No. No mentors.There have been Lots of cool old guys and gals in my life though and they’ve given me really good advice. Please excuse this aside. The most trustworthy old people I ever met was this hippie-pirate couple who owned this fantastic used bookstore and junkshop called The Memex. I spent most of my youth sitting in the back of their store reading old copies of Mondo2000, the Illuminatus Trilogy, Rocco Atleby novels, Ursula Le Guin, and the Whole Earth Catelog.RG: Do you ever get the feeling of brain growth caused by reading? In a physical, oh jeez, something changed and I’m not sure in what way?CG: Yeah, definitely. I feel squirming sometimes. And I hear a little voice. The voice says things like, “It's just you and me, buddy,” and, “More guacamole, please.”RG: What portmanteaus, neologisms and/or spoonerisms do you like? Are there literary devices you would NEVER use, because they are lame? Conversely, are there literary devices you consider underused, so would like to advocate for?CG: I like whatever looks good on the page. And, I don't like to knock stuff. Because I wouldn't want to indirectly knock a fellow writer’s style. Everybody is allowed to do their thang. And, I don't know what's overused or underused. I use devices when the need arises.RG: Is there a chance that Bippy could have her own spinoff universe?CG: Yes, absolutely. Bippy deserves ten books.RG: Which renowned philosophers would read and appreciate Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: He’s a TV character, but I feel like Bernard Black might like my book. I had his voice in my head, impatiently making up words and saying sassy lil deconstructions, when I was writing this one.Although, Bernard would probably open my book, drop a piece of jammy toast in it, make a face at his mess, and then toss the book-jam-toast monstrosity at an annoying customer.RG: How is information transferred via Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: Information is transferred through the air via the Air Loom.Spoiler alert: The Air Loom was built during the golden civilization when we finally figured out the horrible truth. We built the Air Loom in order to hide the Lovecraftian revelation from ourselves.RG: Have you ever kept a journal, diary, or log?CG: Yeah, I keep a journal. I mostly write about the cute things my kids do. I keep a commonplace book too. That’s where I do all of my story and character mining.RG: What is your dream for the book?CG: My dream is for it to get folded into the book cocooning all of my current books, SCHLEMIEL GAUCHO, which is about this one-man Brothers Grimm who is collecting postmodern fairy tales (my books) before they are swallowed up by the flux and incorporated in the fold.RG: Where is Peter Zoidoid and where is Chase Griffin?CG: Peter Zoidoid is in the book writing with the slime-pen filled and Chase Griffin is in Tampa writing this answer.  
Fiction

A GAME OF GO by RY

A miracle had come to the mansion that evening, dressed in peasant robes as she played go on the doorstep. The house of Lord Liu was in desperate need of a blessing. The past month had been disastrous for those staffed within its walls. The change from a serene yet celebratory atmosphere had quickly dulled after one of the maids caught sight of the Lady’s physician leaving her room with a cut over one eye. Surmising that he had said something to anger her, rumors spread over the course of a single night – vines choking the mansion halls, blossoming with fragrant anecdotes.The less fantastical yet albeit as shocking truth was made clear the next day, when all the maids were assigned dark sashes to wear across their waists. A sign of mourning, a homage to the Lady’s stillborn daughter. They were to wear them throughout the year and were warned to tread carefully around the Lady’s room, as she was, according to the physician's report, “of a disagreeable disposition.”When servants came to deliver her meal trays, they came silently, heads hung low like crouching flower stems. She would get angry over the most menial details – a stray stain on one’s cheek, a distractingly uneven gait. Once she had clutched a young maid by the cheeks, demanding she get on her knees and pluck out her own eyes.Those are my daughter’s, do you understand, you knave? My daughter would have had those eyes. Her nails dug into the maid’s face, drawing blood with her thin fingers. She would have had them. Greedy. All of you, taking what isn’t yours.No one could bring themselves to complain. Employment at the wealthiest home in their village was the best most of them could achieve, beyond taking up whatever meager trade their families specialized in. They were well compensated, and much of their pay sustained relatives. They were servants, masters of staying out of the way when need be, so they listened as she wailed night after night and learned to adjust.It was on another of those tumultuous evenings that the girl arrived at their doorstep. She couldn’t have been more than eight years old, barefoot in white robes, setting up black and white go stones on a wooden board. Her dark hair was short, brushing against her shoulders, two buns tied with lavender ribbon on either side of her head. At first, she appeared to be some beggar child, perhaps sent out to be the breadwinner by a parent. More careful parents would have their children rummage through the cook’s trash, and the servants, who had all come close to living similar lives, turned their heads whenever they saw mousy clumsily scampering off with bones and rinds.  The nature of her posture, too straight and poised to be that of a poor person, was immediately suspicious. Her robes were free from blemish. Though she wore no shoes, her feet were similarly spotless. Most striking of all was her skin – the palest, most enviable shade imaginable. Courtesans spent half their earnings on lead powder to reach such lengths, and died before they ever could.The maids exchanged furtive glances. They ought to remove her quickly, or call one of the guards – how had she managed to evade them, anyway? And while lugging that wooden go board, too?Before any of them could attempt to escort the girl off the premises, the Lady appeared from the opposite end of the courtyard. None of them realized she had left her room, and her steps held no trace of a sound. Her dark, ebony colored hair slid in lazy circles down her back, uncombed for days. “Who,” she said aloud, in that quiet tone that suggested a beating, “are you?” “Hello.” She rubbed a white go stone between her fingers and looked up eagerly.That day, the Lady of the house received the daughter she had so badly wanted.  

. . .

 She was, according to the maids, a no-name girl from a no-name land.Her official words were that her parents had died of plague, and she was now an orphan. The go board and stones belonged to her father, the last sentimental possession she carried. The establishment they used to run had been burnt to the ground to stop potential contagion. She was – according to her words – all alone and dearly missing her mother, and had caught word of the compassionate Lady Yin of the Liu household. Compassionate? Was the same dry, echoing thought in all the servant’s minds. By now everyone had heard of how unhinged she’d become during her time of social recluse. She was still visited periodically by other court women, but solely because she was of higher rank and could not be disrespected in such a way without the possibility of punishment.Compassionate was not a word that could be used to describe her any longer, but it was the one the go-girl used, and just the thing to soften the Lady’s hardened heart. She had taken the orphan in and claimed her as her own. The Lord had contested the decision at first, but he worried that any comment on the girl would revert his wife back to her former state. Lady Yin kept the girl at her side during all her daily activities. During the few times she left the house – still publicly in her year of mourning – she toted her newfound child with her. The Lord had decided that the girl was a cousin they were charitably adopting. Visitors had no choice but to believe it – she had all the doubtless exuberance of a noble. She looked like the Lady, and many theorized that once she was of age, the two would be difficult to discern from a distance. The girl was not prone to childish outbursts. She wasn’t meek by any means, but she never seemed to share the tantrums of others her age. She settled disagreements by striking deals, a skill that amused elders of the House. They engaged in her games for their own fun, and thought nothing of the calculated way she examined their moves, mistaking her serene expression for complacency.But the servants noticed the girl’s strolls through town, where she talked with any established businessmen she could – and their sons. She was never swayed by material things. Birthday gifts of jewels and silk managed a thin smile from her. And when she was presented with a meal, she ate alone unless it was required that she dine with guests. A guard posted outside her window had caught her pouring soup on the flowers below, a wastefulness that could never have been attributed to someone of her supposed origins. All their combined observations were, together, a coal lump of speculation. How could they explain the bone-chilling coldness of the girl’s skin, the strange way she smiled, as though unsure of how her cheeks would shift when she did? How she embraced her mother with all the affection of an undertaker, arms stiff as wood? For a while they entertained the notion that she was a demon – told stories to each other in the servants’ quarters about how often the Lady and Lord would get sick now that they’d accepted the girl as their own. Some days it seemed they were well and truly dying, with how skinny the Lady had gotten, though she insisted that she was fine, that she was getting better; she said all these things as she cradled the young girl in her arms, the girl who was squeezing her fragile mother tightly, latched onto her skin like lice.The conclusion came upon them swiftly. The girl had come when the House was at its weakest, the Lady at her most vulnerable, to drain every last drop of good fortune from them. And what would the servants do once their master was buried and gone? Where would they go? Back to the streets, every last one of them, begging as they once did, or working in the sweltering forges, or sewing cheap tarps in the shops. They had been nothing before and would be less than nothing now, the dirt that lined the irrigation canals.So they plotted, as servants are naught to do, and waited until the girl had departed to her own chambers – which took days, to the point where the cook had suggested they just pry her off, the Lady was too delirious to know, she’d probably appreciate the lack of weight pressing against her feeble lungs. At the behest of the maids, they waited for the girl to finally leave her mother’s side, all teary-eyed as she sullenly returned to her room.They caught her as she was about to climb into bed. Her eyebags were swollen and dark, and her skin paler than usual. She shuffled onto bed like a maggot, and asked quietly for the furs she adorned herself with before sleeping. The maid held the blankets above the girl’s head, intending to drape them over her shoulders, and with the other hand sliced her neck.The girl made a sound, something like a whine, an animalistic noise. The blood gushed from her in crimson ribbons, streaming down the bed. The other servants left their hiding spaces and circled the maid with the knife to watch the demon die. It twitched on the mattress, writhing weakly, fighting with a frail, human-like strength. It made slow motions with its mouth. What demon cried out mother with such a cracking voice?They all seemed to shake their heads at the same time. No, they thought, watching the little girl go still on the mattress, she was killing them all.
Fiction

PEARL HUNTER by Pablo Baler, translated from Spanish by Slava Faybysh

Before getting into bed, Gaspar Santos plopped his dentures into a glass of water. He adjusted himself into a comfortable position between the sheets, sinking into the softened mattress, and eased gently into his sleep.Back in his younger days he had been a pearl hunter, and in the wee hours of night he dreamt he was diving deep in the sea, exposed once again to sharks and fanciful currents. Darkness and silence besieged him, and no matter which way he looked, he could not make out an oyster. All at once he realized he had descended deeper than was advisable and his oxygen would run out before he could reach the surface. Gaspar Santos’s muffled scream was released as a burst of panic bubbles. He flapped his arms and legs, convinced he would not make it. Unable to calculate the distance, he felt he would soon capitulate, but in the exact instant in which he involuntarily thrust open his mouth, he emerged to the surface of sleep and gulped an unexpected mouthful of air.Soaked in sweat, he became aware of the clinic as his breathing slowly returned to normal. His eyes caught on the dentures. The bluish light filtering in through the window blurred the outlines of the glass, and he discovered a likeness that cracked him up. His prosthetic teeth, submerged in the bottom of his glass, resembled a marine oyster. Gaspar Santos’s laugh bounced against the walls and multiplied in the night of Mindanao. It was a laugh imbued with generosity and delight; the only thing missing was some teeth.
Interviews & Reviews

DREAMS OF EXURBIA: AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAH RYMER by Rebecca Gransden

Noah Rymer’s domain is that of the illuminated store, the lonely places on the outskirts of town, the back rooms of an America in thrall to the failure of its own myth. With denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025) Rymer envisions a peripatetic slumberland, surroundings subject to abstruse moods. Nowhere addicts succumb to an anaesthetised pulse, ensnared by the numb rhythms of a society gone ill on its symptoms. I spoke to Noah about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Simple place to start, where did denouement begin? It strikes me as a piece that has a lifetime’s worth of backstory and experience tied up in its making, but do you recognise a point at which it came to take hold, to form its current incarnation?Noah Rymer: denouement definitely has its roots from a lifetime spent in suburbia, but it’s hard to think of when it all came together. Most of it stemmed from a desire to explore the psychogeography and mythology of the American suburb, the misé en scene of what surrounded me growing up.I remember being very much influenced by classic Americana literature such as ‘The Swimmer’ and Don Delilo’s White Noise, the latter of which I stole heavily from. Reading Delilo really set things in motion, and helped flesh out a lot of what I wanted to do with denouement. Hearing The Specials’ “Ghost Town” for the first time was huge—it became the theme song for the book. I think reading Baudelaire was crucial to the story really coming together as well; my unnamed character quotes a bit of French in the graveyard scene, which is actually a prose-ified part of my favorite Baudelaire poem, “The Swan.” His [Baudelaire’s] understanding of boredom-as-vice plays a huge factor in how the story develops, because almost everything is arrived at because of an inherent desire not to be bored, to satiate a certain curiosity.RG: Your writing lives in suburbia, on highways, down supermarkets aisles. The places that are everywhere and nowhere. How do your characters react to these environments? There’s a background uniformity, a sameness, to the landscape that suggests a melancholic form of inertia, as there is no hope of a different place to escape to, even if a moving away is possible. How does psychogeography factor into your work?NR: I think my characters are suffused with an inherent sadness, a damning boredom from their surroundings. I know I was. There’s always been something sinister to me about suburbia, and I’ve carried that sense of unfamiliarity within me ever since I was a kid. They (my characters) are trapped in a state of limbo, a kind of purgatory, a labyrinth with no apparent exit. Psychogeography has been a fervent interest of mine these past couple of years, and denouement definitely wouldn’t’ve been the same if I hadn’t read Debord before working on it; reading the Situationalist International Anthology was huge for me. I love the dérive as well, although I utilized the tactic more so when I was in the city. I believe I unconsciously applied the tactic to the lives of my characters—they themselves are drifting through life, their whims their only guide, and so they move through the story semi-randomly, through their own desires. But I still think that, eventually, they will escape. Purgatory implies some progression towards the divine, a sanctification through trials, and that is what I intended for my characters. After I wrote denouement, actually, I understood it as part of a triptych—like Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights, or a literary trilogy—like Dante’s Divine Comedy. So this is my Purgatorio; I’ve just finished writing an Inferno, and right now I’m penning my Paradisio. So all of what I write is guided towards an ultimately hopeful and cathartic end, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first.RG: she moved like a ghost throughout the two-story and basement as if it were a decrepit Gothic castle, damaged by an unspeakable past with an uncertain future in permanent collision with the former, crashing in slo-motion. her voice came out scratchy and uncertain, like the movements of a deathly-rusted machine. The machine is a theme I picked up on, whether it be rattling radiators and air-conditioned rooms of suburban living or the gasoline gods that drift the roads of a ritualized America. There is a rhythmic force to your writing that parallels the propulsion of the machine. How do you view the machine when it comes to your fiction?NR: denouement is very much car-centric because it is a product of American culture. Yet it is fetishistic in a different way than how Crash approaches it; it is fetishistic in the sense of ‘fetish’ as an idol worshiped. The car becomes the byword for ‘freedom,’ self-propulsion, to be one’s own person. The car is Promethean. In other moments, though, I can see and understand transit (the metro, the car, the bus) as a kind of modernization of Charon’s ferry, so there’s a duality there: that of self-propulsion, and of being brought to one’s end, in the teleological sense.As an aside, I also think that the rhythmic propulsion that you mention was influenced by listening to acid house during the writing process. It’s the kind of music that seeps into you, dictates how you pound the keyboard, how you understand the movement of your characters—both in their own gestures as well as how they themselves glide through the story by your own writer’s hand. And acid house, of course, is a perfectly machinated genre of music. It is thoroughly inorganic and plastic, and, as such, perfectly represents and replicates the prefabricated and artificial social structure of the suburbs.RG: denouement addresses the protracted decline of a culture enthralled by consumerist doctrine. Stores are meccas, a place subliminally signaling a religion substitute, a surrogate for the protections of family. Shopping is framed not as a task undertaken out of need, but as an experience, with store displays taking on artistic dimensions. What was your approach to the theme of consumerism for denouement?NR: Mere observation. I think that’s what most of the novella was, actually—making passive observations and then adding my personal commentary. I think I tapped into consumerism in particular because I used to work at a grocery store for a couple of years, and so I was completely inundated by it all. I used to dream of working, actually. I couldn’t escape the flow of commerce. I heard the machinations of product in my mind, at home, wherever I went, and it became an all-consuming force. It’s also because America has an inherently capitalistic framework: consumption is built into the American mindset, is as natural as breathing. It also helps that I’m Catholic, and the parallels between genuine religious experience and its secularized equivalents become just clear enough to be properly horrified at. We live in an age of substitution, of signifiers who have forgotten what they signify. All of the crosses become inverted. RG: There is music to the world of denouement. The beeps from cash registers, the humming of refrigerators, all serve to create an environment primed to lull your characters into a form of unconscious automatic functioning, sleepwalking consumers wrapped in a narcotic and dazed mindset. Music acts find a place at a dive called Rat King. Traffic flows. I understood your characters as possessing an unconscious drive to break free from the rhythm. How do your characters attune to the rhythm? What place does chance play?NR: As I mentioned before, I was listening to a lot of acid house during the writing and editing process, and I think that dissociative groove is very much baked into the story. My characters are smart enough to recognize the palliative aspects of all of these forms of machinated harmony, to point it out and commentate on it, but cannot escape feeling dehumanized themselves by their presence, alienated by what surrounds them. They can’t escape it. Intelligence cannot, and does not, grant salvation, so even if Julie can, for example, see the kids at the house party and recognize how completely dead inside they are as they perfectly synchronize in doing the Macarena, she still can’t escape from feeling dead inside herself. Chance doesn’t play too big of a role in the story for me, but I do think it leads to revelation. The first example of this is the unnamed character wandering to the bedroom where they’re having the orgy, and she is able to see it for what it really is: a desperate hedonistic escape, a fantasy that has collapsed in on itself and is now shown in all of its depravity. The second example is at the end of the novella, when she stumbles upon the old bluesman singing his little hymn and at that moment is shown the light in a small but meaningful way. And she realizes a form of catharsis in writing down the events of the night. RG: Small details imbue the world of denouement with its own energy. Your descriptions ensnare the background detritus and panorama of modernity. Advertisements, branding, flyers become beacons. When it comes to style, is that something you’ve honed over time or has it evolved naturally?NR: It’s hard to say. I think it’s a little bit of both. In the process of writing denouement, I surrounded myself with a particular set of influences that would help me nail the aesthetic and the atmosphere: Gregg Araki films, Euripides’ Bacchae, Dub Housing by Pere Ubu, Jim Morrison’s poetry. So in that sense it was honed. But I do think my style has also evolved naturally, because I’ve always been writing about the dark side of suburbia—denouement represents the sum total of that. I think all the themes and ideas that I had experimented with prior find their fullest expression here. It was something that I was unconsciously working towards.RG: A character that stands out to me is The Milkman. He’s a purveyor of illicit substances, and the persona he’s invented for himself toys with the idea of drugs as a healing or palliative measure. He refers to his clients as ‘patients.’ What medicine is The Milkman delivering?NR: Milk was actually a cameo for a character I originally wrote in a short story, ‘Dead Los Angeles’. But in denouement he’s a lot more sinister, Luciferian, the closest thing to an antagonist within the narrative. I think it’s a negative healing that he delivers, that he ultimately wants to ensnare people within that palliative haze. But at the same time the drugs he administers to the unnamed character provide the opposite effect to what recreational drugs usually do. Instead of masking reality, he reveals it as much as he revels in it; The Milkman is physically a person, but spiritually an insect, a disgusting cockroach-like beast whose layer of humanity peels off as soon as my unnamed character takes the drugs. And so she sees things for how they really are—everyone becomes a manifestation of their own vice, and so their ugliness is presented on the outside as well as on the inside.I tried to reveal the spiritual reality through a material monstrosity the way that Flannery O’ Connor utilizes the grotesque in her stories to the same end. Milk was also inspired by the passage in Genesis where the serpent tempts Eve to eat of the fruit of The Tree of Good and Evil, and in a sense, the unnamed character has a certain innocence that Milk completely shatters. But to be completely honest, I originally wrote him in as an excuse to write the Burroughs-esque/Cronenbergian scene that follows. So I had a lot of fun writing my interpretation of a bad trip. But I’m also glad I found something to say with it as well. RG: the doors flew open with a quick BANG and quickly slammed against the wall as a robber, in an act of nervous bravado, announced his presence in a voice that was strong and shaky, the first-time tremor of a decent kid hard-up and down on his luck. his dialogue was clearly influenced by all the gangster movies he watched, his actions betraying famous scenes and heists studied carefully on the screen. but in his execution, it all fell to pieces, like a bad theater student trying their hand at improv.Your writing poses the question of what part the cinematic plays in culture, and to what degree the screen simultaneously reflects, infiltrates, or guides. Is film an influence on your work?NR: I’m glad you asked the question, because I used to be a film critic! Film is perhaps the biggest influence on my work, and I always imagine my writing playing out like one. I’m always thinking in terms of lighting, cinematography, staging, etc., and tend to think of my stories on the visual level, as opposed to in terms of plot, dialogue, or anything which would be more literary than filmic.I’ve always been interested in the mimetic qualities of film as well, which goes all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics and his understanding of tragedy as something that we imitate, that we take on the emotions of the tragic hero and thus experience catharsis—the evocation of fear and pity. But, as you point out through the excerpt, mimesis can tend more towards the copying of actions, the erasure of the boundaries between real life and media. I think American Psycho influenced me in this way—there are scenes where Patrick Bateman is watching a horror movie before he kills someone, or pornography before he goes to pick up a prostitute. And then there’s Emperor Nero, who thoroughly blurred the distinctions between real-life and the stage throughout his tenure as ruler. I couldn’t tell you what all of this means, exactly—either in relation to my own work or the culture as a whole. But there’s definitely something there, something dangerous and revelatory. RG: Immediately, an intense, suffocating silence was draped over the masses like a burial shroud, stifling the slightest whimper or roll of a solitary tear with the immediate brutality of what had just been said. Death was supposed to be something far from our own reality, something that only happened to the elderly, or a distant relative. Now the truth had appeared, uninvited and unwarranted, with horrific immediacy. Class was dismissed for that day and the next. In “The Book of the Dead” a string of deaths brings a dose of weirdness to a small town. It is a place where conspiracists stir a form of religious apocalypticism and the residents look for a mystical driving force behind events. What is your approach to the strangeness of suburbia?NR: I think the strangeness is most defined by not delving into Lynchian territory (or trying not to, at least), even though Lynch has always been a huge influence on my work. So I write the alienation that I personally feel, and how that alienation can manifest outwardly. But I usually take cues/steal from horror movies and weird fiction in order to fully realize the ‘suburban gothic.’ I think of what I do as inherently expressionistic, that the inner world of my characters is reflected in their environments, but I do think it also goes vise-versa. RG: denouement will be released by Anxiety Press. How have you found the process of working with them, and what is your opinion of the small press scene in general?NR: It’s been pretty chill, honestly! I just sent over the manuscript to the E.I.C. and he said it looked cool, that he’d like to work on it. He sent over the cover art some time ago, which I liked, and that’s all there’s been so far. I haven’t spoken to the guy since August, but I figure he’s pretty busy as is, so I’ll try not to bother him. I am a little biased, since I run a small press myself (Pere Ube), but I do have a lot of love for the scene—at least, the handful of indies that I prize above the rest: I gotta give props to joints like Ex-Pat, BRUISER, and APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL. I usually have a more adverse reaction to the other presses and mags, particularly the ones that are seeking to serve an agenda, to fill a quota. From what I’ve seen in a lot of contemporary indie presses, there’s a belief that fiction must have a social purpose, must be representative of diversity, must be didactic, and that all seems like such a drag to me. The small presses that I mentioned, that I like, are good because they prioritize the craft of the writing rather than the identity of the writer, and I respect that more than anything else.RG: Do you consider how someone who reads your work might react to it?NR: All the time! But it’s less of ‘will they like this’ and more of ‘will they understand what I’m trying to say.’RG: There is an idea that once you live long enough in the same place, it begins to turn sour the more you try to identify it, understand it, dissect it—ants swarming over the bloated corpse of a crow or spiders eating the insides of a caterpillar in well-trimmed lawns and clean-cropped woods, that very soon every house becomes a haunted house, even the one you grew up in and have lived in your whole life, and yet it all comes to a conclusion within the simple realm of psychology, paranoia, mental illness and the like, residing within little else but Zoloft-hallucinations and cough-syrup.The above excerpt is lifted from “Prom”. Does denouement haunt you?NR: Everything haunts me; denouement is just an attempt at putting it all on the page. 
Fiction

SPRING FORMULA by Tom Snarsky

I notice some crocodile cracking near the bend, which is already pitched the wrong way—against the turn, so as a car’s tires point left the road’s normal force pushes it right, recipe for a rollover—and think somebody’s going to get killed. So I go to the municipal office to complain, but no one’s there. BE BACK SOON says the sign. So I grab one of the envelopes and start to write on it, just right on the envelope, my name is Ryan Pendleton I live at 29 Keep Tryst Rd in the Hermitage and someone’s going to get hurt and then the woman comes back, hi can I help you? And I say yes who can I talk to about some alligator cracking in the road, and she says pardon me, and I say I mean there’s bad damage, something really terrible could happen, I grew up by that bend and I know how kids drive on it, it’s dangerous even without the cracks, who can I talk to about putting a sign up? and scheduling some maintenance? And she says sir that would be traffic, or well hold on, paper shuffle, to be exact you’d probably have to talk to the sheriff about the sign, and the maintenance would be the state department of transportation, and by now I’ve been here ten fifteen minutes, all in the wrong place, so I’m starting to get a little short with her, not her fault and I’d like to think not mine either but I say okay, the sheriff as in across the street? Or across town? because I can’t remember if it’s the cop cars that say Monroeville Police that park across the street and the cop cars that say Duquesne County Sheriff that park across town, or the other way round, and she says as in across town, and I say I walked here, you know, I don’t have a car, I can’t walk all the way down Main Street and still get there in time, can you call him? And she says okay sir but I’m sure he’ll ask you to set up an appointment, maybe for Monday but I’m not certain, and that’s when my fist hits the desk, involuntarily really, I am just six layers deep of not getting this simple fucking concern addressed, and as I’m trying to level my voice back out Is There A Problem Here? and I turn and no-sir one of the Monroeville Police’s uniformed officers, not even the correct side of town but he’s eyeing me, he’s right by the envelope I put down, just trying to get some information here sir as regards a road near where I live and of course he picks it up and reads it, and the woman’s face doesn’t not register fear, and secondly I may or may not be a known Concealed licensed entity to some among the Duquesne blue so suddenly Monroeville’s More-or-Less Finest is doing some spring kinematics in his head, one hand hipped and one hand in the kind of palm-forward configuration that’s meant to calm but really feels like he’s trying to summon some kind of invisible force power to get you where he wants you, at the very least down and disarmed, and while he’s getting closer I’m thinking of Eddie, that girl from high school’s little brother who didn’t wear a seatbelt when his sister’s friends were whipping around Long Pond Road and lost control and it was only Eddie who went through the windshield, only him, probably saw the most amazing shower of glass before he lost everything, upside down blood in his head and shiny shards in the late afternoon sun, maybe he heard his science teacher Mr. Bonner saying something about the states of matter, how glass is not exactly a liquid but it’s not entirely right to call it just a solid, either, it is an a-morph-ous solid, which I always remembered because it sounded like Animorphs, and just like Tobias glass was always ready to change, to break, and it didn’t have any long range pattern either, glass is random and it’s not brittle like a crystal it can be blown and shaped into something like the big thick tempered mostly bulletproof window I fell into, after, BE BACK SOON, the blood eddying behind my tongue, sunset coming and the bamboo shoots still growing silently silently towards the road, an inch and a half per hour, and when they’re wet they bend down, they’re so easy to hit, you have to pay attention—
Fiction

Wonder Meadow by David Hayden

The night trees were blue by the Wensum. Eels seethed in a ditch. In the flint wall of a garden a door trembled. A green man sat naked on the riverbank, his feet in the water, head nodding, vines and tendrils ran down his chest. A swan guzzled between his legs, blood flowed down his mossy thighs. Twitching and jiggling, burning ropes suspended from the boughs of a hawthorn tree. Across a playing field the cathedral rose, all spire, dissolving sour yellow into the sky, drifting towards the moon.Cakes were scattered in the mud by the Watergate. The girl guides were elsewhere, in bed. The guides’ carers were in bed also. Or sitting at a kitchen table with a mug of malted milk staring at their reflection in the black glass of a garden door.A walking stick, made from a shark’s backbone, floated down the river. A leprous-white hand attached. And to the hand, an arm, a body. Lids flickered; eyes opened; large, luminous green. The man was a watcher. Watching himself looking out for others to whom he could attach his gaze.Andrea tucked the hospital gown into the waistband of her jeans. She sang a song of her own making. She smiled, which made her think of teeth, her teeth, and she smiled again, broader this time. A plaster covered the puncture mark in her left hand. The hand was sore, and several of the fingers were numb at their tips. She stopped and looked at her hand, fearing, for a moment, that it would become another thing, shears or claws or jaws, or another’s. Another’s perfect hand, unscarred, cold and steady with silver fingernails and dry palms. Andrea wanted to be sure that she would not change any more than was necessary.Men came down the path. Three men. One stared, eyes out of his head. One sang and leered. One walked with a swinging stride, hands in pockets, his face two tiny eyes, a red gash of wet lips. Three men taking possession of the night.Andrea knew the moment they noticed her from the thickening of the air in her throat, from the return of pain to her left shoulder, from the sudden heaviness of her boots, the stickiness of their soles. The men called. They told her what they thought she was. They told her what they wanted to do. They told her what they were going to do.Andrea stood still in the middle of the path. The river slowed and stopped. The river speeded up. The men came closer, growing smaller all the while. Andrea reached into the gown pocket and took out a gross anatomy knife. The men came on, their sounds more distant, their forms shrinking away. The handle was plastic, lemon yellow and warm. Andrea drew long lines where they might have been. The air parted with a sucking sound, again and again. The men whispered in the grass; they had not passed but they were gone.She tossed the knife into the river, wet before it hit the water, picked up her tune and followed the way towards the road. The trees shivered as she passed. Canaries with glass beaks fussed and chittered in the air a few feet above and behind. Andrea reached in her pocket and found the knife. Safe.Wavering orange light was visible through the trees, cries drifted with the smoke from Lollards Pit across the river. The path warped to her left, ran through a wicket, past a cottage and out before a tower. The Cow Tower. The place she would meet her friend Judith. Andrea walked on but could not see her. She passed round the tower to a tall iron gate and looked through. On a green silk divan reclined a large woman in a great fur coat.‘Aren’t you terrible hot, Judy?’‘I like to be cosy, don’t you know, old girl. You’re looking less than marvellous, if I might say. You made it here all right?’‘A little local difficulty. Nothing to speak of, darling. How did you get in there?’‘The ladies from the Adam and Eve carried me over. Would you believe it? Big girls the lot of them. My kind.’‘It’s been quite some time since last orders, Judy.’‘A long dry season, my friend, makes kindling of us all.’Judith reached over and switched on a tall standard lamp. Yellow light projected upwards, illuminating the canaries that swirled above where the upper floors used to be, making their beaks sparkle.‘How should I…’‘Just give a good firm shove, love.’The gate moved, shifting a mound of dried leaves forward with a hush. Andrea looked up and around. A dark circle of blue, the sky, a ring of gun ports, another of arrow loops, pellitory and red valerian grew in effusions on every welcoming surface.‘The armchair is for you, sweetie. You must be exhausted after your troubles. No one was less deserving of troubles than you, dearest. Curse the deserving, the bastards.’‘You wouldn’t have a cup of tea, would you?’‘Haven’t I flask? And a hamper too? You’re starved, of course.’Andrea took a melamine willow-pattern plate out of the basket and raided the same for gala pie, potato salad with chives, for asparagus spears sopping with butter, for sweet tomato chutney, for a salad of endives, marigold leaves, watercress and sorrel soured with vinegar. She was a long time eating and all the while Judith watched her contentedly, pulling from time to time on the pipe of a port sipper glass. Andrea poured herself a mug of tea and settled back in the armchair.‘Did you tell them at the hospital before you left? That you were going to leave?’‘I did not.’‘Might they look for you?’‘I suppose they might. But I’m here, aren’t I? Where they aren’t. And I haven’t done anything wrong.’‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’Andrea took a fat gulp of tea.‘Have I done something wrong, Judy?’‘You haven’t done anything wrong, my love. Not a thing.’‘Only to myself.’‘Only to yourself.’‘What did I do that for Judy?’‘You know why, honeybear.’‘I can take care of myself now.’‘You should.’‘Do you love me, Judy?’‘I do.’Judith patted the silk heavily raising a small cloud of dust out of the horsehair. Andrea dropped the mug and rose, the plate fell on the stones, she approached the sofa, Judith opened her coat and her arms and embraced Andrea, enfolding her, pulling her close, stroking her hair. Scents of parma violet, of turpentine, of chypre, of wet slate, of old leather, of smoking peat. As Andrea began to fall asleep Judith reached out and turned off the lamp. Judith could feel the knife through the gown.Andrea woke, blinking, alone on the divan, swaddled in fur. Six girls in brown and yellow uniforms crowded around the gate, gazing down at her, their faces bright, shiny and serious.‘She’s awake.’‘We can see that…’‘Would you like a cake, lady?’‘Shutup…’All but one of the girls laughed. The one who had offered the cake.‘Cake for breakfast?’ said Andrea.The girls danced, singing: ‘Cake for breakfast! Cake for breakfast!’Andrea walked, smiling, to the gate. The unsmiling girl pressed an open pink toffee tin forward. It was crowded with fairy cakes, each topped with a thick, vermicular swirl of buttercream and a scattering of blue and yellow sugar stars.‘Take one…’Andrea took one.‘Take another.’She took another.‘Thank you,’ said Andrea.‘Bye! Bye!’ said five of the girls, and they skipped off.The unsmiler stood still. She returned the lid to the tin.‘We’re picking up rubbish today. Along the river.’‘Oh…that sounds…’The girl interrupted her with a solar, yellow-toothed smile. She held the cake tin up at a distance from her uniform and marched away.Andrea shuffled off the fur. She stood looking up to the new sun and raised an arm to protect her face from a shower of hard bright objects; birdless glass beaks. Andrea squeezed through the narrow gate gap, turned back to the river. She walked down Ferry Lane towards Tombland.A lone horse passed by slowly, pulling an empty cart. In the shadowed window of a house was a rocking horse with a mouth too large for its head and ivory slabs for teeth, as if it had not quite finished eating a piano.The lane sank and river water flowed rapidly along the deep channel. Andrea stepped to one side and a large boat with a tall mast under a single sail came on, one man fore and another aft, throwing, pushing and pulling on long poles.Roped together on deck were two vast pieces of roughly dressed creamy limestone. The water flowed back to the river and the channel filled in.Andrea stopped next to a gate in a black iron fence. A sign read: Browne’s Meadow. She stepped in and onto the large bituminous rectangle of a car park bounded by red brick walls and, beyond these, by willows and sallows that nodded and soughed in a soft breeze. A fine, many-handed chestnut roan stood at the centre, its haunches facing her, its tail flicked as she approached. She made a wide circle round to face the horse, which she patted and then embraced around the neck. The ground became soft under her soles. The cars were sheep. The tarmac was grass and sweet briar, bramble and mulberry, whortle-berry and holly, juniper and gorse, cornelian and hazel; bilberries, redcurrants, gooseberries, dog’s mercury, barberries and bittersweet grew in random profusion. Andrea released the horse’s head and it plodded into the distance.Andrea sat in the wonder meadow. She felt the similitude of her limbs to the various parts of nature surrounding and thought of how she might be joined to them more completely, more fruitfully. Her skin was bark to her. Her body south-facing always, a spirit searching for union, for extension, for vegetable tranquillity; unpractised in green ways, in rootedness, but sapful, exalted and germinal. She might, with the aid of an artful incision, grow atop a hawthorn, or an alder, an oak or a hawthorn, or entwine herself for life within a gorse bush, a thousand shining yellow eyes, spiny green fingers, tough branched arms, scenting the air by day and night.Memory is an arsonist, setting fires cell-deep at ungovernable intervals of time and space. Lights go on, searching out pain. The hands of another. The mother voice, singing to block out the noise. Titanic laughter and with it confusion. Clouds, white, grey striations, disposed across the eye. The folded heron in the reed bed, the river drifting deeply, its world mirroring still. Judy sat on the orange plastic seats in casualty. And again, Judy waiting on the orange plastic seats in casualty. And later, Judy waiting on the green plastic seating in casualty. For Andrea to return, clean and swathed.It might be the deep chill damp of the earth rising or her body warmth sinking into the meadow but there is a gradual cooling, a dimming, an extinguishing. For the first time since memory began these hard fires, their successions, their wasting, their consummations, their miseries, go down and out and mindsmoke drifts, drifts away. The dark, at last, is light.The suffering blue of the sky called her back from the green, the hard tar and grit beneath her gown; a sheep, a car, beeping its horn.Andrea stood and brushed herself down. The driver spoke some sour words out of their window and reversed to park. Out in the lane Andrea headed for the cathedral close through a crowd of grinning, blue-uniformed boys. She sat on a bench and looked up at the pink-tinged spire, at a falcon stood distantly on the air aside its uppermost taper.‘When I rise,’ she said. ‘I shall be free.’

by Mike Topp

$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″

Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.

–Sparrow