Interviews & Reviews

CHARLENE ELSBY RECOMMENDS: Books from the Void

January 21, 2025
Since I went to VoidCon 2023, I’ve pretty much been catching up on the books I acquired there. And the problem only got worse after VoidCon 2024. Organized by Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, VoidCon is a curated convention for weird fiction and weird horror, including literature, art and music. Art’s that, like, “wouldn’t it be nice if it found commercial success” but nobody’s expecting it to. The void aesthetic is irreverent and fun while dark and existentially horrid, and militantly encourages the participation of diverse voices on their own terms. So as an artificial way of imposing order on this “Recommends” list, I’m choosing to focus on Void-related works. Otherwise, there’s just too much out there to love.   Joe Koch, The Shipwreck of Cerberus (self-published limited edition, 2023)Joe Koch is known around the void as the “King of Horror,” and The Shipwreck of Cerberus is the perfect example of why. It’s adorably small, like a Filthy Loot book, and a Joe Koch limited edition. He was kind enough to set aside my numbered copy so I could pick it up at VoidCon 2023. The action revolves around Rex, who has some interesting sexual encounters with a green woman and an actor-father figure whose decapitated head Rex has an established relationship with. The magic of the book is how you can open it to any page and read a beautiful sentence that evokes an immanent and other-worldly image. Joe Koch gives zero fucks about making it easy for the reader, because he is more concerned with being superb.  Brian Allen Carr, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands (Small Doggies Press, 2013)I got this from Brian at VoidCon 2024 because it’s the one nobody else has and holy fuck, Brian Allen Carr is good. This is a short novel about a guy with very long arms just killing the fuck out of everybody, but the emotional sincerity of this character, his trials and tribulations, and his love for Edie ring so true. There’s a category of art that’s just the plain and simple statement of something soul crushing, and Brian Allen Carr is in there, along with Fred Eaglesmith, Neil Young, and Cormac McCarthy. I also feel a bit like Carr has tricked me into empathizing so hard with this long-armed murderer. But I am with him, for him, and I don’t care what he has done. I believe it was inevitable, understandable, and he should be lauded as a genuine hero in an unkind world—a tragic hero.   OF Cieri, Lockdown Laureate (Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I picked up this collection from Castaigne Publishing after reading OF’s Backmask, which I gather got a whole lot more attention than these stories. There’s one blurb on the back from Evan Dean Shelton, who is the publisher. But damn, people, read this book. It’s beautifully illustrated by Rachel Lilim. The paper is good quality, and the cover can take a harder beating than anything I’ve had printed on demand. And then there are the stories. It’s the kind of grimy literature that makes you feel the best and worst parts of being alive simultaneously. It’s isolation and social performance and an interiority you’d be privileged to access and oh wait you can if you just read the book. I read the whole thing on one plane trip. OF has style plus content plus a gracefulness of expression that propels you forward in the text. I loved every minute of it.  Michael Tichy, Wound of the West (Castaigne Publishing, 2023)I traded Tichy for this collection of “Four Harrowing Tales from the Draw” at VoidCon 2023, and goddamn, Tichy can write. The West is the old timey American west, and the wound is a scalping that the character in the first story survives. Tichy writes like someone who’s been scalped and left for dead and then come to accept it. There’s a gravity to it and a peace. Just read this: “Will is eating the same hare, drinking the same muddy water, sweeping the creeping sand out of a doorway that you stare at each day and hope, pray that some shadow comes to break the light apart. That someone will darken that doorway and kill you or save you, because you can’t do either yourself, and at this point both come to the same.” It’s devastating how at home with despair he is. Highly fucking recommended.  Justin Lutz, Give Unto Us (Ghoulish Books, 2024)I picked up Justin Lutz’s novella at VoidCon 2024, after I previously wrote a blurb for his short story collection Gone to Seed, at the request of Ira from Filthy Loot. Give Unto Us is a hole story—a family (mom, dad, and toddler) move into a lakeside house that turns out to have a sandpit in the backyard, and the sandpit exchanges items they drop in for items it acquired from the previous owner before his unexpected death. Of all the void books, Justin Lutz seems pretty normal, in the sense I could see this selling copies. I would definitely watch this movie, and I would gleefully watch the part where Trevor just fucking boots his toddler (away from the sandpit), because Lutz understands that it’s funny when children get hurt. What jumped out at me about this book and from talking to Justin is how much he loves his wife. There’s a capacity to write characters and plots that I think he gets from the fact that he just loves his wife to death, and it’s obvious from the first page all the way to the acknowledgments. I don’t know; it’s just so fucking nice to read a woman who was written by a man who actually fucking loves his wife, and I think that makes Lutz a better writer—and a better person—than a lot of other horror figures.  Rios de la Luz, An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints (Broken River Books, 2023)I will always associate the Broken River Collective with the void, because they were well-represented in its inaugural year, even though I didn’t meet Rios until a few months later at AWP. Her book of short stories feels like the rose+eyeball+anatomical heart being pierced by the fiery dagger that graces the back cover. Her prose is piercing, impossible, and bloody. The back of the book says that the stories within were inspired by motherhood, and she does not hold back. It’s the lyrics of music inspired by the heavens and the answer to the question of what if emotions had viscera.   David Simmons, Eradicator (Apocalypse Party, 2025)Simmons is a grotesque master of ceremonies with a heart of gold. He had the crowd mesmerized when he read a story called “Whole Time” at VoidCon 2023. (You can listen to it on the Agitator Patreon site for free.) After that, I read the Ghosts of East Baltimore and Ghosts of West Baltimore set, which tell the tale of Worm, a recent felon whose release catalyzes a series of absurd and gory events. So obviously when I had the opportunity to read the manuscript for Eradicator, I jumped at it. Simmons is hitting at the extremes with this one. It’s hilarious, disgusting, relatable… if you laughed at the end of The Substance, check out Eradicator, forthcoming 2025.   Alexandrine Ogundimu, The Longest Summer (CLASH Books, 2023)I feel like Alexandrine Ogundimu should be on every list. For me, she’s the third in a triangle of horror writing grounded in filth and despair, alongside Elle Nash and BR Yeager. This novel is hard to summarize, because its effect has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with the fact that Ogundimu’s sentences feel like they were only made possible after a hard run through a deep pool of pain and self-reflection. It’s biting and revelatory in a way that, “This is a book about someone accused of stealing from a store that seems very similar to but legally distinct from Hot Topic” doesn’t capture. Alexandrine participated in the void prompts leading up to VoidCon 2023 (This was a series of writing prompts using a word-of-the-day distributed by group chat on Twitter.) Maybe next year she’ll show up for real.  Stanley Stepanic, A Vamp There Was (Encyclopocalypse Publications, 2024)This book has three parts – the first part epistolary fiction about a man named Middy who falls in with a vamp who happens to be a vampire, and this fiction is supplemented by historically accurate facts about Fredericksburg, Virginia in the 1920’s. This is followed up by a scholarly essay on how the “vamp” character of the time is conceptually distinct from a vampire but certainly meant to recall the bloodsucker’s image. Rising feminism finally made women threatening enough to take on the role. The title is a nod to the 1915 film A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara as the seductress who ruins the life of an unsuspecting family man. The rest of the book gives short biographies of notable vamps of the time, which reminded me of Debra Nails’ The People of Plato. This book shines in how it provides the explicit historical context for its own story, and I’ll always remember this aha moment from when Stepanic is putting the pieces together for me about how, according to the historical record, woman becomes monstrous simultaneously as she becomes capable of exerting her own agency—that for a whole movement in popular culture, becoming master of one’s own fate and becoming a monster are the same thing. Honourable mentions to Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, whose books I blurbed. (You can go read about them on the publishers’ websites.)
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AUG STONE RECOMMENDS: Steve Aylett, Kevin Maloney, Madeline Cash, John Patrick Higgins

January 16, 2025
Steve Aylett, The Book Lovers (Snowbooks, 2024)  .Steve Aylett is back with a new novel that could very well be his best work yet. In The Book Lovers, Aylett’s fireworks are at maximum intensity – dazzling, dizzying, and coming straight at you. Launched from one of the all-time great opening lines – ‘A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best’ – the text is hilarious, profound, and just a delight to engage with. Almost every sentence is rich, full of meaning, and contains enough avenues of thought to construct a city around. The majority of these sentences lay out truths so deep one wants to sit and spend an afternoon contemplating them. The writing, however, sweeps you along, crackling with electricity, megavolts on their way to illuminate heart, brain, and soul. I’m not the only one singing such high praises, the cover – and the artwork is lovely – features similar commendations from Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, and Robin Ince. No one writes prose like Steve Aylett, or has quite such a singular worldview, ultra-cynical but way too funny to be completely despairing. His is a precision that appears out of thin air a millimeter away from its target. “‘It’ll get worse before it gets better’ – the fact that this statement is perennial should tell you something,” explains Sophie Shafto. Hugo Carpstein tells Inspector Nightjar “It’s your job to depict justice, isn’t it?” It’s that ‘depict’ that is perfect, saying so much about the surface level workings of government and its employees. As referenced above, there’s some of Aylett’s best character names too, and this is reflected in the version of 1885 London the book is set in, with locations such as Shroomsbury, Kimlico and Biccadilly. Another excellent joke I want to point out is ‘Albion holds its citizens in two cupped hands, and is sometimes so pleased it applauds.’The setting is quite literally a steampunk world. Steam being one of the three main forces that powers industry here. The other two being voltaics and the wonderful ‘denial engine’, which the human race has most likely been running on since the dawn of time. There’s more plot here than in a typical Aylett book, though one can be forgiven, what with everything else going on, for not catching every detail. Sophie, daughter of magnate Lord Shafto, has been kidnapped and Inspector Nightjar is on the case, interrogating a cast of personalities who, whether given the chance to speak or not, spout sidesplitting bizarre complaints often only tangentially related to the topic at hand. With the book being so much about, well, books, it is tempting to look for Aylett himself behind the masks of say Hugo Carpstein or Sir Percy Valentine, and a description of the writer Emmanuel Feste describes our author to a tee – “an obscurity with a sixth sense of humour who was said to have blown ‘a swarm out of a whistle’, shouting from one horizon to the next about how morality is not altered by altitude and annoying all by demanding that his pursuers keep up.” Sophie Shafto is a precocious youth who has sensed the importance of books from an early age. “In a box of sunlight by the window she tasted a vibratory honeychain of ideas confirming that human beings think and feel, a fact unacknowledged by the real people in her young life.” Books abound through the text, as they should in something called The Book Lovers, and there is a lovely bit of prescience in the fact that despite this being the late 19th century the population has become engrossed in ‘mirrored books’, complete with leather spines, held in one’s hand and gazed at all day long, an excellent dig at cell phone culture. And while these are an example of the superficiality of the masses, The Book Lovers is a testament to the power of books – in what it says about them and what it is itself.  Kevin Maloney, Horse Girl Fever: Stories (Clash Books, 2025)In Kevin Maloney’s fiction there is always something wondrous happening, often pop-culturally infused, and the narrator is keenly aware of both. They happen to and around him, and his retelling of such experiences is almost always hilarious. This is greatly aided by the hyperawareness of their own shortcomings and willingness to dive headfirst into them. Maloney’s narrators keep falling deeply in love with every woman they see, whisk the willing of these off to exotic locales, and will most likely at some point vomit over themselves from drink, drugs, or a cocktail of the two. That’s not to say these stories are purely comedy or that the frequently dark subject matter – suicidal strippers, surprise deaths, teenage drug addicts and dealers – aren’t handled with concerned care. And the tone itself is never too dark, even when worlds are completely falling apart. I won’t conjecture that this is Maloney’s reason for writing these stories, but there is a (often desperate) need on the part of the narrators to connect with another human being, body and soul, no matter what the cost. Fortunately, some of these objects of affection are aware this isn’t in his best interest. For instance in the final story, ‘Epicenter’, where – after he’s been tossed into the alleyway by a gigantic bouncer and there attacked and bitten by a rat – a stripper tells him he doesn’t want to date her. Maloney’s presented circumstances seem as much jokes as they are all-too-real possibilities. There’s a lot of ridiculousness but it’s the kind of ridiculousness that is life. And I can’t overemphasize how funny Maloney is. A lot of that is down to his killer succinctness. His ability to give a tight, honest assessment of a situation with optimal word choice is powerful indeed. The first three stories – ‘Ghost’, ‘Hannahs’, and the titular ‘Horse Girl Fever’ – all blend comedy and tragedy in the above manner and offer the widest range of emotions in this collection. Next up, ‘King Of The Pit’ is less nuanced, an account of seeing Alice In Chains during the third Lollapalooza, but it keeps getting funnier and funnier as undefined drugs crank up the mayhem of that strange bonding ritual known as the mosh pit. ‘Wrath Of The Red-Eyed Wizard’ is an ode to navigating work, alcohol, and sex after turning 40, while ‘Malaria Diaries’ sees the narrator and his whirlwind romantic partner cheating death down in Columbia. ‘The Informant’, one of the best stories of the bunch, takes things back to pure comedy, though the setting is still pretty dark – a dry run for drug smuggling gone very wrong. Within the humor, Maloney manages to throw in some wonderful descriptions of the U.S. Southwest – “spent the night whizzing across the mystical dreamscape that some people insist on calling Arizona”. The drugs keep on coming, and ‘No No’ is a first person recreation of Dock Ellis’ 1970 no-hitter, pitched under the influence of LSD. Given the subject matter, it fits right in. ‘Bloop’ is also a highlight, a few days spent experimenting with a drug called Lotricaine, an anti-fungal cream for birds. This new high goes beyond ketamine, which itself is excellently described as “makes you feel like you ripped the wings off a Pegasus and used them to fly over the city of your birth, laughing at your enemies”. The past few years have proved that autofiction can be very funny indeed, with Maloney’s 2023 novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim being one of the best of the genre. Horse Girl Fever proves a fine addition to his work.  Madeline Cash, Earth Angel (Clash Books, 2023)Speaking of hilarious autofiction, Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel is a delight. Cash’s prose is sharp, crisp, ironic yet real in a very pleasing way. Her dialogue is even punchier. Nothing wasted here. Her descriptions are always charmingly odd yet perfect to the situation. The humor comes from numerous angles – irony, a childlike wonder at the shit adults get up to, bemusement at all human interactions, wry acceptance of particularly puzzling aspects of modern life even while our humanness rails against them. In the first story, plagues have descended upon us, but at least this proves that God exists. This is followed by ‘The Jester’s Privilege’, an over-the-top account of a ludicrous though entirely-plausible-in-this-day-and-age PR job, changing the public face of a terrorist organization. While that’s happening the narrator also deals with a heavy friendship rivalry based on status, this derived from work and lovelife, and her own tepid uncertain romantic relationship. And kudos for a couple hilariously dark lines in a wedding speech. The two best stories are the title tale and ‘Slumber Party’. The latter being one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Nearly every sentence is a gem. The narrator wants to have a sleepover for her 30th birthday but after it becomes apparent how out-of-touch she is with her closest friends, she hires a company to create the experience for her. The corporateness of the affair is outrageously funny while the cost of the whole thing is simply outrageous. Cash has a unique sense of callback, always unexpected and, again, very droll. While Cash’s work is mostly comical, it’s not all so. There are keen observations about the awful way men too often treat women. One aspect of the title story is Anika’s truly horrific boyfriend, the famous actor Jake Willner, an ultra-violent control freak. While Cash details Anika’s attachment to him, Anika also of course has her own agency, the main part of the story being her interactions with the CEO of ‘Nosi’, a highly toxic and controversial fragrance machine manufacturer, who she’s tied to a membership program impossible to get out of. The different layers ‘Nosi’ operates on is bound to bring a smile.  Another arrow in Cash’s comedic bow is when she has characters drop matter-of-fact truths. There are many excellent uses throughout the book, delivered in sniper-esque single shots, and said CEO neatly summing up Jake Willner on page 76 is exceptionally devastating. Cash also has a great sense of how amusingly complicated anything can get, shown at the end of ‘Earth Angel’ when she explains why Anika’s little brother doesn’t want to press charges against the car that broke his tibia. All the best qualities of Cash’s work culminate in this story. And these seeds blossom across this entire collection. John Patrick Higgins, Fine (Sagging Meniscus, 2024)With his debut novel, Higgins capitalizes on the dark humor offered up in his short dental surgery memoir, Teeth. Fine is not strictly a comedy novel, however. While there’s jokes aplenty – and almost every chapter title is a pun – the prose tends more towards Martin Amis than Wodehouse. That said, Wodehouse is mentioned by name in the getting-to-know-me third chapter, as Leave It To Psmith is protagonist Paul Reverb’s favourite book, The Smiths his favourite band. So complete a picture do we get of Reverb’s likes and dislikes, it would be understandable to take this as more autobiography. Higgins, outside of the book, has stated this is definitely not the case. But top marks for making it so believable. Reverb is at work on a Young Adult novel about a hypnotist vampire by the name of Count Backwards. Interestingly, this pursuit is not the main focus of the story. Rather we see Paul as he comes to grips with uncomfortable parts of his personality and as he tries to be a better person. It’s just that in doing so, things tend to turn out pretty badly for him. Of course there’s other times where he’s not trying at all. One of the funniest bits in the novel is the ‘Through a glass, Barclay’s’ chapter, about a ‘dedicated wank day’ gone horribly and hilariously wrong. Much more wrong than you could imagine. And that’s not the only time in the novel there’s an issue with the same activity, the next being an incident which has the funniest description of a penis I’ve ever read – “furious and red, like a man arguing with a deckchair attendant”. It’s not all that obscene, though. There’s pop culture references galore throughout, for Paul has, as you might guess, a sizeable record collection and is very fond of film. As often goes hand in hand with these, he’s not so adept in the romance and socializing departments. These matters aren’t always played for laughs, though Higgins’ strong comic touch is never far away. There’s a quite touching funeral scene that nevertheless spawns a few good jokes. And without wishing to give anything away, the twist at the end is handled very well, especially considering how poorly it could have come off. But rather it is proof of Higgins’ talent that the denouement is so pleasing.
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THE HAUNTED MEMORY OF A DEAD PLACE: An Interview with Derek Fisher by Rebecca Gransden

January 14, 2025
Is there something up with modern dread? Derek Fisher’s enigmatic collection Container (With an X Books, 2024) strokes the lid of contemporary malaise, and teases the release on stories that simmer like a broiling pressure cooker. This is writing cast adrift on strange currents, Fisher’s domain that of diseased architecture, where dark impulses meet bad vibes. I talked to Derek about this unsettling and dynamic collection. Rebecca Gransden: When did you write your first short story? Has your approach to the short story form evolved over time?Derek Fisher: Yooo. Hi Rebecca, my fellow Lizard Brain!My first short story, like ever? Uhhhh, I think I was in high school. I remember submitting little weird things to my high school’s annual short story publication. A couple of them got in. Then I was supposed to join everyone that got tapped and do a reading at a nearby bookstore and I most definitely did not show up. No way I was reading in front of people back then.For a while I wrote stories based on what I thought readers might want, based on what kind of style and voice trends you’d see in literature. Don’t do this. It’s the ultimate bad move. Over time I think I stopped caring about what the work would look like to others, and just wrote the stories I wanted to write. I found myself writing in a handful of approaches to voice and style that started to feel like my own. There are a few stories in here where the paragraphs are all blocks of text, no indentation. I write with this format more and more, as I find it tends to drive this ominous tone that I’m usually gunning for. Something about the fragmentation helps conjure the spooky vibe. I also think nowadays my stories are getting shorter. Soon they’ll just be two sentences long. “Jim went to the store to buy a bag of Milk. The severed fist was still in his ass. The end.”   RG: The collection shares its title with one of the stories included in the book. What led you to select Container as the title for the collection as a whole?DF: For the longest time I wanted to name the collection I’ll Only be Happy Once Everything is Gone, and had submitted previous versions of it with that title to other presses. But I hadn’t written the story “Container” at that point. Then one day that story spewed out and it was obvious that it would be the title track. I love that goddamn story. The way it grips tight like having your whole body wrapped violently in duct tape. That’s the feeling I get when I think of that story, so it seemed like alright why not just call the book that and hope the whole collection feels that way? Try to convince the reader that the whole thing carries that same tightness through the title, haha. Gotcha.   That story deals with desire on the verge of rupture. It takes place in constricted spaces. Cars, elevators, storage rooms. And maybe more than anywhere else, inside the obsessed brains of these two characters. Their thing threatens to rip open at the seams. I think the story itself feels that way, like it’s just barely contained. I really like this story. I think it constricts us into these spaces. Confronts us with the lust or obsession or self-erasure or whatever flood these characters find themselves in. RG: How old is the oldest story you’ve included in Container, and how new is the newest?DF: The oldest is “Scorch Earth.” I probably wrote that in late 2019, early 2020. The newest is “Rhino.” I wrote that like two seconds before I sent the collection to Jon at With an X. It came out in La Piccioletta Barca after the collection had been accepted. RG: The stories featured in the collection have appeared at a wide variety of literary venues. How did you go about selecting which pieces to include?DF: I went back and forth forever on what to include and where to stick ’em. The stories “David Lunch” and “Rhino” were last minute additions. The title story came fairly late in the game too. “Scorch Earth” and “Bird Eating Glass” and “I’ll Only be Happy…” had been around in the hard drive’s basement for a little while but I always knew those stories would be part of the deal. Whether or not they had been previously published didn’t factor in too much. It took me a while to figure out the order. That’s a fun exercise. Rearranging the pieces until they feel right, or as right as they’re gonna feel. I wasn’t sure about including the flash pieces at first. But then I figured who doesn’t love a one-pager? Easy work. Throw them in! I’m always interested in how writers arrange a story collection. Feels similar to how the tracks come together on an album. Or a set list at a show. Sometimes you read a collection and you just know why the final track was picked to close the show. Two of my favorite collections in recent years are Maggie Siebert’s Bonding and Sara Lippmann’s Jerks. Two entirely different gems. In both cases, you get excellent collections all the way through. But then they both end on such strong notes that it changes the complexion of the whole thing. In both cases, these final stories (Siebert’s “Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” and Lippmann’s “The Polish Girl”) imprinted the joyous experience of reading the collection with a perfect, final sledgehammer to my ribs. You don’t forget a thing like that. Good curation can sew the feeling of a story collection to your skin. That’s what I want to feel when I’m done reading a book. That, or a feeling of “What the fuck did I just read?”RG: In “Bird Eating Glass” you present a character named Mantle, who is a musician swept up in the modern fame game. For them, sound brings renown, brings the noise, brings powerful recollections and associations. Are there particular sounds that flood you with memory?DF: I constantly hear the sounds of trains in my head; that braking screech, of the train pulling into a station, or possibly derailing. I don’t know what that’s about. Like I have a subway stop full of dead people living in my skull or maybe in my house behind the wall like in that Robert Munsch book Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then he Heard a Sound.At all times I feel like I am hearing dead static, or electric feedback. Should probably get that checked out, right? Like someone is holding a microphone to an amp. I don’t know if I literally hear this, but it’s there in my head. Probably just been to too many shows. I enjoy it. It tunes out the world for me, which I don’t mind at all. I have what I think is a problematic compulsion to repeat songs in my head all day long. But not necessarily because they are catchy. Lesser Care’s “Finally Bare” has been on constant repeat in my brain for three or four weeks. I’m totally haunted by this song and I am losing my mind. It’s a good song! I enjoy it very much. But sounds and music often turn compulsive as they repeat for me. Every song I’ve ever heard just gets added to the jumble of infinite repetition. When I stop to think about all this constant music in my head I think I must have a tumor or a serious neurological problem. It hasn’t killed me yet so I guess it’s probably fine but who knows.  I always write with music on. Silence drives me crazy. Unless I’m beside someone I love. Then I can be ok with quiet. Their breathing is enough. Otherwise, I need sound. Mantle, in “Bird Eating Glass,” is the manifestation of this part of me. I’ve never played music, but I can’t live without it. Sound informs my ability to make stories. Mantle is what a character would look like if they were stripped of everything but sound-driven compulsions. An expression of pure noise, otherwise locked into the body and mind of a human. I think people can relate to the idea that our internalized noise not only has value to us, but is a reflection of all the sensory mania we absorb, and can be filtered into something quite lovely. The world is a fucked up place, right? Mantle’s noise is the meeting point between the world, and total sonic isolation forced outward. The conceit of the story is that harsh noise can become the world’s most popular art form. I am 100% confident that this is true. It’ll just take the right artist to deliver us.  RG: The story “Scorch Earth” makes repeated reference to a purpose-driven life. What does a purpose-driven life look like to you, and how does that manifest in your writing life?DF: If you asked me this question four years ago I would have had a whole spiel about how writing is my purpose and how my life is driven by it and as long as I have writing goals I’ll be fulfilled or some blah blah blah like that. But I’ve calmed down a lot with that shit. I don’t know if life (mine or anyone else’s) is purpose driven. I just do things I guess. Write, eat, work. I really like eating. Sometimes I watch these competitive eater YouTubers and think I should do that. That can be my purpose. To eat. Consuuuuume. Lily in “Scorch Earth” is a smart cookie but at the start of that story she’s still too young to understand what life means as something separate from her parents. She believes in a “purpose-driven life” but doesn’t fully appreciate the fact that this idea has been dictated to her from birth. I think there’s an undercurrent of spirituality in that story, where her parents probably believe that by killing, by devoting their lives to the pursuit of taking life, they are somehow closer to god, or the devil, or whatever nasty thing they worship. We don’t see this translate into Lily. She does not show signs of spiritual belief in pursuing her victim. She lives this purpose-driven life because that’s what she’s been taught to do. Sometimes this is how I feel about the rhetoric around this idea of purpose, that we are being fed a pseudo-spiritual concept and that if we live with purpose, we will be complete. But the more I think about this as something dictated to me, in YouTube videos or podcasts or whatever, the more it feels like snake oil, and just fodder for boot-strap narratives that exist only to feed the machine of capital. My true belief is that people just do things. We just do things. We will always do those things. Whether we like it or not. They are coded into us, and/or the influences around us lead us to do things. Eat, drink, lie, steal, kill, love, donate, write, play, serve, worship, make annoying sounds for no reason, travel, do drugs, smash our teeth out with a hammer, whatever. RG: I found many of your stories to be governed by strong undercurrents, as if the crux is brimming beneath the surface. This gives the pieces an enigmatic quality. Is this element one of conscious intent?DF: Oh, thank you! I like hearing this. It is conscious yes, but I never know if I’m doing it well. I am a giant fan of subtext in fiction, and so I prefer to try to work with undercurrents as opposed to surfaces, but I also like to write stories that are more vibe-driven than plot-driven, so I think these undercurrents you identify are part of my attempt to encourage certain vibes more than anything else. I’m a big fan of dread. Apocalyptic nothingness and the haunted memory of a dead place. Memory is the motif I’m obsessed with most. Almost all my stories are about memory. Humans are made of memory. I think these undercurrents are all attempts to explore the memory of a place, relationship, moment, etc. Often memories are haunted and uncanny. I like to try to get at these feelings in the subtext.I think about how this applies in the story “Progress.” The meat of the story is the dialogue between TurtlePhone and Positively Pete! It seems like such goofy shit. A smart-ass talking toy turtle with the mind of an up-his-own-ass PhD student and who also believes he’s a special ops super-killer. It’s probably obvious that I had a lot of fun writing this. But the part of the story I’m most drawn to is the abandoned, scorched shell of the town of Baker, California at the end. What happened here? Why this apocalyptic graffiti? What haunted hell is this? In some ways I see all the dialogue and silliness of the story as a colorful vehicle to get us to this apocalyptic end, this haunted memory of a place that existed until recently. As a reader I just love seeing and thinking about undercurrents. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is one of my absolute favorite books, because of how it tells a rich story entirely in the subtext. Laura Van Den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves us (I just typed that whole thing without Googling it) is a goddamn masterclass on subtext. Both of these books deal with subject matter that isn’t of high interest to me; both are books I stumbled on, but quickly came to love because of how strikingly they channel what’s below the surface. I don’t care so much about craft. Sure I like to see talented writers throwing down some nice moves, like watching elite athletes do their thing, but that’s relatively low on the list of things I look for in writing. But with subtext, different story. When I see a writer do subtext well, I get the full body shiver. I think Hemingway said a good writer doesn’t say what’s happening on the surface, but they have to know those details, and like, by knowing, the reader will get some kind of a sense of truth, a conveyance, even if they aren’t made explicitly aware of the details. I say, fuck off Hemingway. Don’t tell me what I have to know. I don’t know what TurtlePhone is up to when he’s sitting on the can. That’s his business.     RG: “Does Anyone Care How the Vegetable Oil Feels?” describes a technique you call method writing. Any examples of this in your own writing life?DF: Haha, no way. I used to think this idea was attractive as hell. To live the shit hard, as the narrator in the story says. But that sounds like a goddamn nightmare to me to be honest. I guess some nightmares produce some good writing. But it’s never been that way for me. I just have ideas and write them down and hope they work well enough. I think the idea of the artist living their art as authentically as possible is sexy to us, but it has problems. If we exoticize and romanticize all the violence, addiction, desperation, and evil that we see in our literary heroes, that forces us into a confrontation with our own values that I don’t think we particularly want to have. As someone who loves wretched characters, it’s a place I hesitate to go. I think of Al Swearingen in Deadwood, a magnificent TV character. To come up with a character like that I might have to become a murdering, deceiving, totally self-interested pimp? Well, shit. That sounds like a lot of work. I remember reading Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, about a literal starving artist, a favorite book of mine, thinking God damn! this poor bastard. Someone shoot his ass and put him out of his misery. Hamsun really lived off fumes, nearly starving to death in his early days. I guess Norway wasn’t so rich back then. Then he got big and famous and won a Nobel Prize and eventually became a Nazi sympathizing maniac. A bunch of them went this way. Celine. Eliot. I just want to write stories.I will say, I do gush at some examples I hear about of writers doing insane shit in order to conjure their art. Like Gary Shipley watching Begotten on repeat in a dark room for two straight weeks to write You With Your Memory Are Dead. That is the most batshit thing I’ve ever heard. Or, sticking with Inside the Castle books, their Castle Freak projects, where the writer has five days to write 100,000 words. These feel like experiments in what we might call method writing, putting our minds and bodies through extreme ordeals in order to test our creative limits and access the most unhinged, terrifying depths we got. I wish I had the discipline to attempt maniac stuff like this. I’d probably produce 75 words about stoned beavers wandering around the forest looking for wood.    RG: The office building is the tallest, thinnest in the city’s history. A man plummets to his death on the first day it is occupied, the day after completion. The sounds of children screaming are heard in the elevators, in the stairwells. On several of the floors. Throughout meetings. It’s much worse when the wind hits the building. A feeling of nonstop vertigo defines daily office life. The above quote from “Rhino” is a prime example of the ominous quality you can inject into environments. How do you use location when it comes to building atmosphere?DF: I think I’m obsessed with the haunted potential of a space, interior or exterior. I want to feel the imprint of a place, I want others to feel it. We might not know what happened in an empty room. Maybe nothing. Maybe somebody was tortured. Maybe a plot to commit a mass atrocity was concocted in that space, in a basement, over tuna sandwiches and old moldy coffee. Maybe all kinds of unthinkable things happened in this little desert town that used to function well enough, but is now burnt to the ground. I like trying to think about what a place feels like to someone stepping into it, and they know bad things have happened there, but they don’t necessarily know what or how or why.  I think “Rhino” is about the design of haunted places, as if their hauntedness was intentional, built into the space, rather than the space becoming haunted after the fact. The story seems to connect this spooky business to Lorna, the architect who designs them, as if she is the haunted one, and everything she touches turns to death. But we don’t know why. Is she plagued by this herself, or is she some kind of a demonic figure sewing chaos, getting off on diabolic design? I enjoy trading in uncertainty with these kinds of questions, and letting the reader decide. My first job outta undergrad I worked in a big ad agency. Way up on the 32nd floor. Could see the whole city. I had a meeting with one of my bosses and I can’t remember why but I started spouting off the heights of all the tallest buildings in Toronto. She said, “Uh, Are you… into buildings?” I said no, all embarrassed. But the truth was hell yes, I am. I am into buildings. All their vertical pathways and tunnels, elevator shafts, unseen dark corners, crawl spaces. I’m afraid of heights. But I lived on the 25th floor for years. All tall buildings are haunted spaces to me. The wind sounds like a screaming animal up there. All day, life accented by constant screaming.     RG: Your exploration of unconventional romance, featured in “Container” and “For Whom I Bare My Teeth”, presents an intense and, I found, cinematic take on sensuality. What is your approach to erotism in your work?DF: Hmmm, I don’t think I have an approach exactly. These stories are about desire. I think desire is dark, by its nature. I wanted to find ways to show that, but without being too on the nose. “For Whom I Bare My Teeth” is a bit more straightforward about it, but I do find that story to be funny, and maybe less serious about the darkness of desire. At least that’s how I felt writing it. I suppose cannibalism stories will always be funny to me. I really enjoyed writing both these stories, but they came from very different places. “Container” feels more serious, like it’s reflecting on something where for the characters the stakes are sky high. I don’t know if in other stories dealing with erotism I would use similar approaches. I just recently finished writing something about a couple so obsessed with each other that they begin to literally eat each other. There I go with the cannibals again. But the approach there is different from these other ones. I guess I just try to channel a question about what these characters’ desires look like, and what would happen if they took those desires to extreme, unreasonable places. I’m interested in making the unreasonable feel real, necessary. Unreasonable but necessary. Unavoidable. Impossible for them to avoid going there. Maybe that’s the approach.   RG: I remember when the terminally ill artist Anastasia Pelon brought her whole family to Neon for one last dinner together. We had been expecting a room full of eccentricity, full of chaos, full of the infusions that such a prominent artist would have inevitably left on her closest family members, especially in the shadow of her imminent death. But what we got was something much different; a room full of working-class, down-to-earth, polite people, who all happened to be this woman’s family. There was never an unsmiling face around the room. These parents, siblings, and cousins were so happy to be together. Anastasia’s sister helped her whenever she needed to use the bathroom or stretch her legs. Her sister would carry her oxygen tank as they walked together, holding each other’s arm. I remember the expectation that the whimsical and ferocious aesthetic that imbued her art would reveal itself in the room, but no. The bloody, bodily, confrontational, qualities of her work had no role here.The above quote is lifted from your story “Neon”. What has surprised you about the collection, either in the writing of it or in the process of releasing it to the world?DF: The fact that I have ever published one word of writing surprises me every day, let alone a whole collection.  RG: The elevator appears as a recurring motif in the collection, frequently as an uncanny space. Do you have any insights into why the elevator is attractive to you?DF: You caught that eh? I hadn’t anticipated a question about elevators, but I am happy to see this. I do think about them a lot. These steel boxes in which we spend a significant amount of cumulative time, those of us that live or work in tall buildings. The elevator is removed from the rest of the world. Such uncomfortable little moments can happen there. Yet such significant moments too. They test our humanity. Small talk. Claustrophobia. Fantasizing about the terror of being stuck in one. I’ve met people in elevators that became significant in my life. I’ve watched dogs piss and shit in them. In the height of the pandemic, the elevator became this place of mania, paranoia, and uncertainty. And total crushing awkwardness. Infection. All of these things factor into how I think about the floating steel box that hides us from the world for a couple minutes.I think elevators are crazy places. Intense, crazy places. Have you ever ridden in an elevator and had someone you don’t know stare at you the whole time? I picture the cables being cut, and the box plummeting. Everyone crushed inside. Impaled with shards of splintered steel the size of swords. I don’t think about this kind of thing when I’m in cars or trains. Something about this closed box brings these thoughts. No windows. Closed off from the world. I picture people in the elevator unable to control themselves. Strangers so attracted to each other at first sight that they tear each other apart. They know they are on camera but they don’t care. They know they only have a minute. That others might enter. But they don’t care. Elevators are crazy places. We can think these thoughts, for a minute or two, and then we get off on our floor and it’s over. The thoughts are gone.  RG: An undertow of dread and unease permeates your fiction. What attracts you to exploring this area with your writing? What do you dread?DF: I always think back on that Clive Barker story “Dread”, from Books of Blood. The character Quaid is obsessed with dread and experiments on people, forcing them to confront their worst fears. Great story. He leaves that poor vegetarian girl starving in a room with only rotten beef until she’s forced to eat it.There are some great vibes to be mined from dread. The well of dread is endless. The world is a dreadful place. We all are forced to confront dread in our own ways. I don’t always plan to write with dread in mind, but some stories just take on this tone. The undercurrents we spoke of earlier, the feeling of spaces being haunted with memory, this can be a dreadful feeling. Sometimes I do dread by accident because I write a character that is too flat or one-dimensional and in their flat silences there can appear to be things dreadful about them. Whoops, haha. I think the dread in my work tends to come from feelings of insularity, containment. Some of these characters are so locked in their own heads. We only see what they think. The rest is a mystery. I think this can be dread-inducing. They are containers; all we know of them is how they perceive a dying world, experience a violent sexual relationship, look down at the gun in their hand. Sometimes I think of dread as a feeling elicited by the knowledge that the world is filled with monsters that we don’t see. We know they’re there, but they live in the shadows. It’s the knowledge that they exist that breeds dread in us. We know terrible things happen. Murder, torture, human trafficking, genocide. And sure, we see these things on the news. But most of us don’t confront them for real. Most of us. This is of course a good thing, not to have to know these horrible realities first hand. The dread lives in the space between us and the shadow. I sometimes try to write as if considering the monstrous, even if I’m not describing it or writing about it directly. The writing is the empty space between us and the horrible thing. What’s uncanny about it is that we all recognize the smell, the sound of the empty space. We see a recognizable horror in it despite it being empty. That’s why that “Backrooms” picture is so scary. I think this is the driving force behind stories like “Bird Eating Glass.” A character who is plagued by the unfathomable knowledge of the world. This character is a mystery to us. We don’t know what they’ve seen. We just see some whisp of it reflected in their intolerable music, in the scars on their face, in their severed voice. The fact that their music happens to be popular in spite of itself is the signal that we all recognize the terror in this empty space. You ever read Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps? I think that is the best book ever written about dread. RG: “Reasons to Stay” addresses the vagaries and vacillating tensions of a relationship forced to factor terminal illness. How did you decide upon the approach to structure for this story?DF: This story is pretty much entirely based on a true story. I don’t love to admit this, because doing so interferes with the pretense of fiction from which I feel we must always approach books billed as such, but in this case I make an exception. I’d been trying for a couple years to find a way to write about the person that “Reasons” is about and I kept coming up flat. I tried much longer works that were more formally conventional, but hated all of them. Then one day I sat down and wrote this and it just felt true. I like to think of this story as being pretty good at expressing what memory feels like – all broken up and fragmentary and mixed up between the good and the painful. I didn’t exactly set out to write the story in this fractured way, it just came out like this, and I knew that it was the real story as it was coming out. It ended up being much shorter than any of the previous versions, which also felt correct. My memory of this relationship feels compressed and frenetic, hard to pin down yet clear as day in some parts. My memory is engraved with ambivalence and longing, but as time goes by, those elements are further compressed and reordered, slotted into this larger chaos that is the sum of all memories. I wasn’t thinking any of this as I wrote it, I just wrote. And then after the fact, it just made sense that my mind was processing these feelings and memories through this fragmented ambivalence. I don’t know if any of that shit makes any sense but I think it makes sense to me.  RG: Container is released by With an X Books. Why have you chosen to work with them for this collection? In a wider sense, how do you view the small press scene?DF: It has been a total pleasure to work with Jon and Traci at With an X. They are so diligent, generous, and professional, I could not have asked for a better experience. I had an intuitive sense that With an X might be a good fit for a couple reasons. I felt that the vibe of some of their books of photography connected with the tone of the title story “Container,” in an abstract but not insignificant way. As it happened Jon had read that story previously when it was first published in Maudlin House, and said he was taken by it, so I think there was already a seed planted there, unbeknownst to me at first. I also felt that a previous collection they’d published, Drew Buxton’s So Much Heart, had some similar sensibilities to my work, the mixing of the real and the hyperreal, some darker stuff but not lacking in heart, that the vibe felt right. Far as I’m concerned, small presses drive literature. A few weeks ago I drove to Portland from Vancouver just to go to Powell’s. I spent like three hours in the small press section, examining every single book. Anyone watching me woulda thought I was a lunatic. Dennis Cooper always says that all the best writing in the world comes from small presses and he’s ten thousand percent right. I love the small press scene. I couldn’t live without it. I do have favorite books that were published by big publishers, we all do. But the vast majority of the work that interests me as I grow as a reader is from small presses. I get an explosion of joy every time I think about some small presses, just knowing they exist. It’s like, I know that the true, raw, unfiltered voices will find their place in the world. The most uncompromising writing is available to us because some of these small presses exist. I am eternally grateful.RG: “Do I fear for the future? Hell fucking no I don’t. Hell no. You know why? Because fear is dumb wasted pussy shit that serves no purpose. That’s why. We’ll figure this out like we figure everything.”Do you think about the future? If so, what does the future look like to you, with regard to your writing, or anything else?DF: Oh ya, I think about the future. I think about it all the time. I think about burnt buildings penetrated by hollow winds. I think about cities washed away by floods. I think about vast landscapes marked by emptiness, with little fossilized remnants buried beneath the surface, hidden signs that we were once here. I love thinking about the time beyond the end of us. It gives me a blissful chill. I don’t care if that’s a cliché. I don’t like being told not to be cynical. I embrace feelings of cynicism and nihilism. I don’t care if they absolve me of having to work for a better future or not. I don’t care if it is a privileged position to think like this. It’s just the way it is for me. I get creative fuel from thinking about what the world looks like when we’re gone. I also think about all kinds of nice things, future-wise. But I keep that shit to myself.   
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David Simmons Recommends: Brian Evenson, Charlene Elsby, Kelby Losack & J David Osborne

January 9, 2025
Brian Evenson, Good Night, Sleep Tight (Coffee House Press, 2024)Brian Evenson is my favorite author of all time so I make it a policy to read whatever he writes.Some of you may already know Evenson as the innovator and pioneer of the this-house-we-just-moved-into-has-more-windows-on-the-outside-than-on-the-inside-so-now-I’m-going-to-burn-it-down-with-my-family-still-inside horror genre. Whether it’s the crime noir-religious cult-horror-mystery Last Days or the schizophrenic-Mormon-fever dream of The Open Curtain, all he drops are bangers. His short story collections are my favorite though. Fugue State and Windeye are two of the best collections I have ever read. So you already know I was too hype to get Brian’s latest collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight.One time, I heard Brian described as “too literary for horror” and “too horror for literary” and at the time, I remember thinking to myself, damn, that’s lame as fuck, so I stopped listening to whatever podcast it was and just drove in silence for a minute. What does that even mean? He can write really well so he’s too good for horror? TF? That’s disrespectful.And yet, I understood what they meant in a way. Brian’s command of language is uncanny, and I imagine it has to do with his time growing up in the Mormon church and then his position in the church itself before he left/got kicked out. (You can read about the Brian Evenson origin story in like every article about Brian ever, and other people have done a way better job of breaking it down than me, but TL/DR, back in the day he got kicked out (?) of BYU and like, excommunicated (?) from Mormonism (?) because his first collection Altmann’s Tongue was way too gangster (not sure if this part is 100% correct but it’s how I imagine it happened) and some lame-ass student filed a complaint. I think. What I’m saying is that he uses language and pacing in a way that makes it read like a reverend from a strange religion in a different time and different universe wrote it. He will use unfamiliar words, or familiar words in strange ways. It’s something to do with the rhythm. And you’re never quite sure where you are exactly, as far as setting. You could be anywhere or nowhere.Take this for example. There is a story in the collection called “Vigil in the Inner Room” and it opens with: By midday father had sickened again, and by nightfall he was dead.This is already a crazy opening line, typical of Evenson. We know that the father has been getting sick and this time his ass died. But it’s the use of the words midday and sickened and nightfall that makes this line hit so hard. He could have used afternoon and got sick and night and the line just wouldn’t have hit as hard. But he didn’t, and because of this, his writing takes you to a different world, a different time. His specific combination of words is like a password that unlocks something inside of you that makes you feel like an early-9th century Chaldean peasant when you read it, eating a hard loaf of bread and sipping wine you made yourself. Maybe I’m not explaining it right. Hold up, let me try again. Brian Evenson’s writing is like the first time you try PCP. That empty feeling where you don’t know who you are, that liminal space where suddenly your clothes begin to seem too small for you, so you wonder if your clothing has actually gotten smaller or if you have gotten bigger, and then you have crazy cotton mouth so you attempt to spit but you can’t spit that far so your spit lands on your North Face sleeve, and then you try to wipe the spit away with your bare hand, and you realize that you have lost the ability to sense things using touch, because you can no longer tell the difference between a spit-covered sleeve or the bare, dry material of the spit-less sleeve, and this makes you wonder if you will still be able to do your job when you clock in at work on Monday, and the whole time you have been thinking this you have been curled up in fetal position in front of a Panera Bread, so now you have to burn your house down with your family still inside it. This is how all of his short stories make you feel. Like you are trapped in a dissociative nightmare that never ends.OK, but whole time, everybody writes book reviews about Brian’s shit. I want to do something a little different. I want to talk about just the opening lines to his stories and how he is the straight up GOAT of openers. In rap music, this is called an opening bar. The opening bar makes the whole song to me. If you don’t come with something so hard that it immediately makes me run around the room in concentric circles screaming “OH SHITTTTTTT” then your music ain’t for me. I feel this way about books too.An example of a great opening bar can be found in the classic motivational record “Cheese and Dope” by Project Pat. In “Cheese and Dope”, Project Pat begins the song with:Out here slangin on this blade prayin that I don't get cutBy these police makin raids, jumpin out and checkin nutsImmediately we are transported to North Memphis, in the summer of 2001, where we have sequestered dope under our ballsack, praying that the police do not throw us up against a wall and frisk us, and we must know what is going to happen next to our hero, Project Pat. Will the nefarious MPD catch up to our hero? Will he make it off the blade in one piece? We have to know.I feel the same way when I read Brian’s work. Take any story from Good Night, Sleep Tight. In “A True Friend”, the first line is: There are times when it hurts to be alive.GYAT! That is a crazy opening bar. The reader has to know more. ISTG if somebody interrupts me before I find out what happens to the narrator I am going to CRASH OUT. Hold up, I’mma quickly flip to another story in the collection. OK, this one is called “The Other Floor”. Sometimes at night–not every night, only rarely–the transition between being awake and dreaming would stretch long enough to become its own sort of time, a time in which it was impossible to know whether he was awake or asleep, a time in which, in the end, it didn’t really matter.WHAT THE FUCK! That is nasty work. First of all, in anybody else’s hands that shit would have been a run-on sentence, but not Brian. That shit is CRAZY. We have to find out what’s gonna happen! We have no choice. This time-shifting weird almost-sleep-purgatory thing he is talking about sounds very interesting, but also, in the end it didn’t really matter. Why didn’t it really matter? Does somebody get killed or some shit? So it doesn’t really matter that this person experiences a dream-like state since they are gonna get bodied anyway? We have to know.In conclusion, Brian Evenson’s Good Night, Sleep Tight is a healthy, homeopathic, all-natural alternative to smoking PCP and I implore you to get trapped in that dissociative nightmare as soon as you finish reading this. Charlene Elsby, The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty (Apocalypse Party, 2023)We define people according to what’s been done to them, not what they have done.I have read this book a couple of times and this quote always stands out to me. Because I agree with it. At first, it sounds brutal, unforgiving. Unfortunate, even. That this is the way we are. And perhaps it is. But that doesn’t make it untrue.In The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty, Elsby asks the question: which is worse: working in the food industry or getting fucked to death/giving birth to millipedes? Just kidding. But not really. The part I found the most horrifying is the abuse the unnamed narrator—living below the poverty line with a dead-ass mom—takes regularly from the people she encounters at school, in the trailer park she lives in, and in the terrible diner she works at. She links up with a few other troubled youths and they explore the psychosexual. And then some REAL serious shit goes down and she embraces her true nature and becomes what she was always meant to be. And all along she is keeping track of the people who wrong her, this poor girl on the margins of society. But where Elsby truly shines, is how we find ourselves really rooting for our narrator, cheering her on, even (ESPECIALLY) when she is burning down her trailer park with everyone in it.   Kelby Losack & J David Osborne, Dead Boy (Broken River Books)Brian Schuck’s girlfriend has just committed suicide and Brian is a mess. He has no job and owes money to a perverted gangster with an affinity for dog fighting and sexual violence. And then Brian’s dog—who is devastated from the girlfriend’s suicide—decides to stop eating. When Brian’s dog dies from self-inflicted sadness starvation, his buddy Handle has a brilliant idea, a way to bring the dog back to life. All they need is a bathtub of Monster energy drinks (for the electrolytes, flavor doesn’t matter) and some electricity and our boy can have his best friend back. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the girlfriend.I’m a fan of Osborne and Losack’s solo writing, but when they get together it’s like Bun B and Pimp C. Eightball and MJG. Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine. It’s a classic out the gate.  In Dead Boy, you learn a lot about dog fighting while getting hit with the darkest punchlines. I love how all the characters just acknowledge the craziness, the zombie dog, and agree to never speak of it. And all of it gets recorded for Brian’s TikTok. Because that’s the only thing that really fills the empty hole inside Brian. The attention. The engagements. The likes. It’s also very touchy subject matter, suicide, dog fighting, dogs dying and all that. Reading it makes you feel like Osborne and Losack were trying to outdo each other with every line. I asked them about that and Kelby texted me back: when you’re tryna make your homie go “broooooo that’s fucked up” you write crazy shit lol Also, the dog’s name is Mike Jones.
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THE TERROR IS THERE: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY COSTA by Kevin M. Kearney

January 7, 2025
Emily Costa’s debut story collection GIRL ON GIRL (Rejection Letters, 2024) isn’t a book of horror, at least not in the traditional sense. These stories can be horrifying, sure, and there’s a palpable uneasiness in nearly every chapter, but Costa’s premises are notably banal: girls at an ice cream shop deal with their shitty boss, two moms take their children on a playdate, high schoolers drink warm High Life in a half-empty basement. That’s not to say they’re boring. Costa’s fiction interrogates how those seemingly innocuous interactions are so often charged with aggression and violence—how quickly a welcoming smile can turn into a menacing smirk.Like Bennett Sims’ Other Minds and Juliet Escoria’s You Are the Snake, two other collections from this year, Costa’s GIRL ON GIRL is subtly terrifying, exposing the unsettling realities lurking beneath our common experiences. I’m not surprised at how great the book is—I’d been a fan of her fiction for years, and loved UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT (Autofocus, 2022), her memoir of undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder—but I was still amazed at how seamlessly she pulled it off.I called Costa on GIRL ON GIRL’s official release date to ask her about developing as a writer, assembling a story collection, and figuring yourself out through fiction. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.  Kevin M. Kearney: We’re talking on the official release day for GIRL ON GIRL. I know you’re sick, but are you doing anything to celebrate?Emily Costa: I’m…not. I am not teaching today—I had my last class yesterday. I’m all caught up on grading and that is a reward in itself. I’m going to watch a movie tonight and my husband did get a cake, which was really sweet. That’s the extent of it, though.KK: That’s awesome. Does the cake say anything about the book release or is it just a cake?EC: It’s just a cake. It’s from a really nice Italian bakery, so I’m excited about that. It says, like, “Congrats!” or whatever on it.KK: I would imagine if he asked for the book title at a bakery that might lead to problems.EC: [Laughs.] Yeah, not a good idea.KK: Were your students aware of your book?EC: I don’t think so. I finally just switched to the English Department after 10 years and I’m teaching Comp. We’re talking about arguments and all that. But a student just told me that she dropped out of Engineering major to become a Creative Writing major because she really enjoyed the class. So, that was really great to hear. But I don’t think they know about the book, although I am planning a reading. I teach at the school where I got my MFA, so my mentor, my MFA advisor, is planning a reading for the spring. So, they can figure it out. I guess I’ve got to be careful about what I read.KK: A lot of these stories don’t take place in college, but they do take place in high school, or they’re centered on people thinking back on high school. Were you writing much fiction when you were a high schooler?EC: I started writing then. It was really bad. I was attempting to write books about dogs when I was, I don’t know, 8 to 12. I don’t know why. Finally, in high school I thought, “Wait, that’s not just some stupid thing I was doing? I could actually get good at this? Or try? Or take a class?” I was writing. It was really embarrassing. I still have some of that stuff, and…I won’t be revisiting it anytime soon.KK: Was it a very early version of what you’ve now developed? Or was it just Dog Fiction?EC: [Laughs.] I quit the Dog Fiction! That stuff was more…I remember when everything clicked for me Junior year. I had a really good English teacher. I think this happens to everybody. We got to this one portfolio where we got to do all these different writing assignments, showing different parts of ourselves. I guess it was essentially CNF. It was just fun to write in that way. Freshman year, me and my friends were trying to put together a little magazine and it didn’t go anywhere. None of it was really serious, but it was cool to see there were opportunities to do this. And people were encouraging, so that was really nice.KK: When did you start taking writing more seriously?EC: I was an English major, but I didn’t take any Creative Writing classes until I went to grad school. I was just writing here and there. It was fun, but I didn’t ever really know what to do with it. In college, there was a class where we read short stories and wrote essays about them. But one of the assignments was we could write a short story based on one we’d read. I wrote one based on “A&P” by John Updike. It was a lightly fictionalized version of an awful job I had. This is a recurring theme for me. I worked at an amusement park as a 16 year old. It was just bad. But my teacher was really nice to me about it. So that was always in the back of my head: “It’d be really fun to do something with this. I enjoyed this a lot. I don’t love writing essays about Henry James.” So then I eventually decided to pursue the MFA.KK: I’ve never assembled a story collection, so I’m always interested in the process behind putting one together. It seems like everyone has their own philosophy. What was yours? EC: I really just went by vibes, but I wanted to vary the length and the points of view. But there’s so many of the same themes that I didn’t know where to put the one where the cat goes into space. [Laughs.] In conclusion, I didn’t put in a ton of thought and I really just went by feel of whether it felt right together. KK: Reading it felt more like a novel. I struggle with reading through a story collection because I feel like I need to stop at the end of each chapter knowing the next will be wildly different. There are a lot of distinctions between your stories, but it felt like you were always driving at something larger. One of those things is the past—the woman in “Ethan Marino” can’t move beyond the social hierarchies of high school, the mom in “Dead Mall” is fascinated with old toys, the girl in “Balefire” is still processing a traumatic episode from years earlier. What draws you to characters like these, who are so focused on the past?EC: I think that’s me trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. [Laughs.] I don’t know. It’s really just me trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to the past and can’t move forward in a lot of ways in my life. I don’t think I ever figure it out and I think most of these characters end up in trouble because of their focus on the past. There’s a lot of feeling stuck and not knowing how to move forward, and getting it wrong, over and over. What’s been interesting in talking about these stories is I have to be aware of what I did, and a lot of it I didn’t do on purpose. I didn’t know I was writing all of these stories about these people who are really stuck in the past until D.T. [Robbins, publisher of Rejection Letters] was, like, “Write a synopsis.” [Laughs.] Then I realized it and thought, “Shit—what do I do now?” Maybe, by getting it all out on the page, I can move forward. Like I’m lifting some curse. I really don’t know.KK: Like you said, I’m rarely aiming for something in my fiction. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a moral or a theme I’m trying to develop over the course of a story. It’s just a story and I try to make it as interesting as possible or as fun as possible. And then I go back to read it and I can see all these kernels that it feels like my subconscious has planted along the way.EC: Yes. Yes.KK: It’s my brain screaming at me, “You need to deal with this thing.”EC: That’s exactly it.KK: I revisited your memoir about outpatient therapy for OCD, UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT, in advance of reading the collection. At one point, you write, “I know this whole thing, this whole disorder, is about trying to control the uncontrollable, scrambling around in the unknown for footing.” I underlined that immediately and wrote in the margin: WRITING. [Laughs.] EC: I think now it’s starting to feel clearer that it was my subconscious doing it. I don’t know what was going on before. But now I’m looking at the stories I put in and what’s going on in them. I was talking with my friend about CNF versus fiction; about what freedoms you have in fiction versus where you’re stuck in CNF, trying to use what you have in real life and put clues together to figure yourself out. I think I’ve been trying…it’s so navel-gazy and self-absorbed, but I’ve been trying to figure myself out in the fiction, too. I didn’t think I was. But I was drawn to certain things and I was drawn to them because I couldn’t figure them out in my life. What’s been fun in writing fiction is you can do whatever you want. You can choose something you wouldn’t have done in your real life and see what the consequences of that are. You can take it as far as it can go. It sounds so obvious, so many people have come to this conclusion before, but I was really keeping those worlds separate. I have a friend who didn’t know I wrote fiction because they only knew the other stuff, the CNF, but to me I guess they all now just seem intertwined. The stuff I’m working on now is this autofiction stuff—or whatever the hell you want to call it—and I’m calling it that because I was writing it as memoir and felt so stuck, so bogged down and bummed about the past. It felt so sad to me, like trauma porn, and not anything I wanted. I talked to another person about it and they were like, “Just make it fiction.” Oh, duh, okay, obvious. Ever since then, it’s been fun. That was the key that unlocked everything. I’m seeing that they’re not as separate as I was keeping them in my brain.KK: Is this the novel about your dad’s video rental store? EC: Yeah, it is. KK: Is it stylistically similar to your short fiction? Is it at all like your memoir? Is it completely different from both of those?EC: I think it’s similar to the short fiction, but…and this might change, because I don’t know how much mileage I can get out of it…but I’m doing it from a child’s perspective. First person. Starts with me—or the character of Emily, or whatever—at six years old all the way through high school. We’ll see how long I can sustain that. Or if anybody would ever want to read that. [Laughs.] It’s been fun because you’re limited by the age. “Would this character use these words?” That kind of stuff. That part of it is fun. I have a child who’s seven-and-a-half, so I’ve been studying him. If he would say it, then it’s fine. I’ve also been using my own home movies and my grief journals from when I was five to see what I said or what I was interested in. [Laughs.] This is where I’m showing you how clearly stuck in the past I am. Really, really deep into what was going on in 1993.KK: There’s a slight terror simmering in the background of a lot of the stories in GIRL ON GIRL. If the settings were different, someone would maybe call it “gothic.” I know “horror” has been used to describe it. Or maybe genre’s made up and it doesn’t really matter. Is that terror something you were actively aiming for or is that something that naturally seeps into your fiction?EC: I guess it’s just something that naturally occurs. The terror is there. I can see it now. Not to sound like a complete idiot, but I wasn’t aware I was doing that. Maybe it’s because that’s what’s there in real life. But what can we do about it? How can we interact with it? How can we pull it to the forefront?
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KEVIN CHESSER HAS A HEADACHE: AN INTERVIEW WITH A POET WHILE WATCHING AN ORIOLES GAME by Dalton Monk

December 3, 2024
Kevin Chesser lives above a candy shop in Thomas, West Virginia, which is a historical coal mining and railroad town with a population of less than six-hundred people. I met Kevin almost a year ago when he came to Huntington to read from his poetry collection, Relief of My Symptoms, at a reading series I host called Ham’s House. Kevin read his poems, played the banjo, and made people laugh. I’ve thought of him often since the reading, and so have others who were in the crowd—they’ve asked me about him. He has that effect on people. He makes them feel special.We met at his apartment as the cool, end-of-summer evening swept over Tucker County. He had just gotten off a shift at the Invisible Art Gallery and looked just as sprightly as he had when I’d first met him. His apartment was dimly lit and decorated with nostalgic relics: framed drawings of Garfield and Charlie Brown, childhood photos stuck to the fridge. On his bookshelf were multiple VHS copies of Twister. His partner, Carina, shook my hand and exuded a similar nirvana as Kevin. He offered me a cup of tea, which I took, and then we sat down in his living room while, on the TV, the Orioles played the Tigers. Dalton Monk: Did you grow up playing baseball?Kevin Chesser: I played baseball until I was about thirteen. I was not… I’m not very athletic. When the kids started hitting their growth spurts, I didn’t hit a growth spurt. That’s when I went to my dad and was like, “I’m not doing this anymore. These kids are seven feet tall and two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds.”DM: Did you grow up in Thomas? KC: No, I grew up in southern Maryland. I lived in Elkins [WV] for like fifteen years before I moved up here. I went to school there and stayed.DM: How old were you when you moved to Elkins?KC: Eighteen. I moved up here [Thomas] in 2020. Kind of at the height of COVID.DM: The last time I saw you, you said you see the same people every day. Who are those people?KC: Well, I see my coworkers. I see my downstairs neighbor, which she’s only here half the time. I see my next-door neighbor out walking her dog. She’s usually out walking her dog at the same time I’m usually out walking. I like to walk after dinner every night because I have trouble sleeping…I see a little bit of everybody. Honestly, I run into a lot of people in the alley back there [points in the area behind main street]. Back there is where a lot of people live in these buildings, and the alley is where they actually hang. It’s actually really nice on a walk. I can come across four or five different pockets of people out chilling. Because there’s that big retaining wall over there it kind of makes it feel like you’re in a place that’s separate from town, like it’s kind of secreted away. So, that’s nice. That’s nice right there.DM: In what ways does this town influence your work?KC: I first started coming up here to do readings and shows probably around 2016 and started spending more time here in 2018 or 2019. There’s a really dense concentration of different kinds of artists who live here because this place has become a magnet for all kinds, like transplants and tourists. People up here have always just been really encouraging of stuff that I do. I think that if you’re a local and you live here and you know everybody—if you approach somebody who has one of these spaces here and say, “I have an idea for this,” they will likely give some time and energy to help you with it. If they recognize your face, if they know you, they’re like, yeah. It’s easy to make shit happen. That environment is really good for me. Once you get your boots on the ground here, you get to know people pretty quick. It’s not super competitive. There’s a lot of people doing creative stuff, and there’s a lot of support. If you’re a transplant here, you’re probably looking to be somewhere that doesn’t have too many people but feels funky and creative… I find it inspiring for my work. It’s beautiful. I like that there’s a lot of open space where I can walk and not see anybody. There are trails out in Davis that I love to go on—camp 70 trails. There’s a whole lot of boggy sods type terrain. Different times of year there’s amazing colors and it’s all muddy and weird and there’s trails all through it. I love being out in that stuff. It’s good for my brain.DM: As I was reading Relief of My Symptoms I felt that there had to be an influence from David Berman or James Tate. Then I came across “Self-Portrait at 35”, which is dedicated to David Berman. How did you first come upon Berman? Was it through his music or poetry?KC: His music first. Poetry shortly after. I was a big Pavement fan in high school so I sort of knew about Silver Jews. I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Chapel Hill and I went to some awesome record store in Chapel Hill and I got The Natural Bridge by Silver Jews. I put it on and was like, “I don’t even know why I exactly like this so much but I do.” I got really into them and got his [Berman’s] book a couple years after that. I still love his book. I read Actual Air once a year. Very few people—musicians or artists of any kind that I listened to when I was seventeen—have stood the test of time. He’s something to aspire to. The references, the way that he phrases things. That kind of flat humor that runs through everything. I just love it, and I think it’s only gotten better with age. That poster [pointing to a Silver Jews poster on the wall behind him] is from the liner notes of The Natural Bridge. My girlfriend my freshman year of college gave this to me and I’ve had it in every place that I’ve lived since I was eighteen.DM: What’s your favorite song on the album?KC: The first one [“How to Rent a Room”]. I love that the band is really not trying too hard. The production is pretty middling. He’s not an amazing singer. He writes great hooks and melodies. He writes amazing lyrics. It just all kind of like—it just has some magic.DM: Do you read or have you read James Tate?KC: Yeah, I like him a lot. I feel like his older stuff, like the Worshipful Company of Fletchers, that stuff is a little more interesting to me. As he got older, the stuff was always good, but he had really locked into one thing that he was doing. He and Russell Edson were the two guys who kind of taught me how to write a prose poem.DM: Relief of My Symptoms has several poems in which the narrator details a rich interior life—maybe even isolated at times—but there are also poems in which it’s clear the narrator is around others, maybe too often. Tony Paranoia, or Tony P., shows up a few times. Is Tony P. an amalgamation of several people? Is he made up? Is there an actual Tony P.? Tell us about Tony P.KC: Tony P. has like a seed of maybe a couple people who I grew up with. He’s not really based on anything super specific. I came up with his name in the moment. In that poem that’s called “No Mercy” his name kind of popped up out of just working on that. That poem was written well before I had any idea to make that book. So he was already in that poem and as I was putting together the book I realized I should just bring that guy’s name back in so it would be a character. He’s really just there as one of the people that the speaker is speaking to. Most of what I write is first-person, so I will admit to having a lot of one-dimensional creatures orbiting around me. DM: As a reader, I got excited every time Tony P. showed up. He felt like a friend.KC: Yeah. He really doesn’t do very much. He’s in the hospital and he’s in the baseball game and he’s talking about wanting to play the pipes. I realized that that’s what I wanted to do when I was reading Bud Smith. I was reading Double Bird, that collection of stories. They’re not supposed to be super strongly linked, in terms of characters or narrative. But, for example, in multiple stories there’s references to a store called Food Universe. It’s such a great touch, just a really simple way to add some continuity. In order for me to do that with my book, it was just a cosmetic change. I already had that stuff written. That was something that clicked for me as I was going along. I was like, “Well, I’ve got a couple characters that are mentioned by name and since the family stuff comes up over and over again, I’ll give them all the same name and it gives it a little bit of continuity.” But it’s a cosmetic change. I just repeat people’s names a couple times and I love the effect. It’s like a trick.DM: When did you know you had a cohesive collection? Was that the original goal?KC: I just put my balls in my hands and prayed. I didn’t have an editor on it. I had Carina and my friend Séamus Spencer give me some basic notes. I think when I figured out when I was going to have recurring characters and names, I was like, “This can work.” Before, I was putting the manuscript together because I knew I was definitely going to put it out with my friend’s press. My friend Jen Iskow is the one who runs Ghost Palace Press. She’s a designer and visual artist mostly… Oh, oh my god [talking about the homerun just hit on TV]. And he caught it in his hat! This bullpen guy, when guys hit homeruns into the bullpen, he’s caught about four of them in his hat. This is a momentum shift that we’re seeing happening on TV right now. They have not been scoring like this in two months... Sorry. I don’t even remember what I was talking about… I knew I was going to do the book. I went through about maybe three years worth of whatever I had and I found the stuff that seemed like it was somewhere in the same ballpark, as far as tone and the shape. It ended up being more prose than anything. I knew I had a cohesive thing because I said, “This is about as cohesive as it’s going to get.” Because we had already planned the party to release it and it’s got to go to press at some point. I need some kind of external pressure to finish something like that. I’m kind of bad about letting go of it. DM: In addition to writing poetry, you make music under the name Wizard Clipp. What got you into playing music?KC: I started playing guitar when I was ten. We had my mom’s old Epiphone laying around. I really loved music at a young age, so I naturally wanted to play around with the guitar. I kind of half-played it all through high school. The guitar is something I’ve never really been good at. Playing five-string banjo is my main thing. I started playing the banjo when I was twenty, living in Elkins. There are a lot of old-time musicians there. I found a really good banjo player to take lessons with. The banjo just made a little more sense for me. Something about the tuning and picking was something my brain could grab a hold of.DM: Everyone loved hearing you play at Ham’s House. We need more Kevin Chessers.KC: A lot of the people I know who are musicians first—almost all of them do a little bit of writing. Maybe not so much the other way around.DM: I’ve seen on Instagram that you’re doing Tarot decks. KC: Not yet. I’ve got a Tarot installation up.DM: And you’re possibly coming out with a Halloween chapbook?KC: We’ll see. I’ve been sort of restless on social media lately just trying to get somebody to gas me up. I’m going to try to put together a reading up here in early November, and my friend Cole Fiscus—who I’m going to do the reading with—he’s going to try to get a chapbook out. And I thought, “Man, I wonder if I should try to slap together a little chapbook.” I was fucking around with those little haunted house haikus and I thought, “I bet I could write a bunch of these.” I did a haiku chapbook one time.DM: Is it important that you always have a project to work on?KC: It’s helpful if I have an idea of a finished product that I’m working towards, but I don’t always get it done. That’s not always a bad thing. That’s the thing that’s cool about living in this town. It has made me a little more focused and constructive because of getting encouragement from people here. Knowing people who have got spaces where you can hang some art on the wall or put on a show... And they’re approachable people who will be like, “Yeah, sure.” It has made it so that I’ve gotten more constructive with finishing stuff. But generally speaking, I feel I’ve always been a little aimless with it. I like doing it and just kind of scratching away at it all the time because it comprises ninety percent of my interests. If I don’t have a project I’m working toward, it doesn’t necessarily keep me from working on stuff. Sometimes I like it better if I don’t have a project.DM: What are you reading right now?KC: I brought these in from my bedroom. [Gestures to a stack of books on the coffee table: a Richard Brautigan anthology which includes Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, and So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away; Small Moods by Shane Kowalski; and Nature, Man and Woman by Alan W. Watts.] I really love all of this [talking about the Richard Brautigan anthology]. I’m almost done with it. I liked it better than the three-pack that has Trout Fishing in America… My friend turned me onto Shane Kowalski. It’s really good. [Picks up Alan Watts book.] I love Taoism and Chinese philosophy so I’m reading this Alan Watts book. DM: What’s next for you?KC: I think we’re going to try to get tarot decks printed. I drew all the cards on 5x7 pieces of mat board. There’s seventy-eight of them. It’s this big wall installation. Earlier this year, I was playing a lot of music and I was feeling like I was getting enough material together to do another record. But I don’t have the money for it. So, right now, I’ve been writing a lot, just trying to build up the biggest heap of poems that I can get. Just trying to generate so I can do another book and maybe send it out to presses with a little wider distribution. I don’t know if that’s worth it or not, but if I came up with a manuscript that I was excited about—especially because I’ve got a better idea of what I want to do in the future—it would be cool to get it further out into the world. But historically I’m kind of bad at that. I love finishing projects and putting a bow on them and polishing them and getting them how I want them. Once they’re out in the world, though, my interest in them really drops off precipitously. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Or maybe not. Poets can relate to that. Maybe musicians can’t. Musicians have to maintain some enthusiasm for their material because performing is so essential to being a musician, whereas being a writer, performing is more of a minor part. You could much more easily write a book and disavow it, but if you’re a musician, you can’t get up on stage and be like, “This stuff sucks.” I’m hoping to have another draft of a manuscript next year. And then I want to see if I can screw up my courage enough to send it out to a bunch of places. They’re all just shots in the dark… which is frustrating. But that’s also what I like about it. I think I like the fact that it’s such a fucking headache. It’s a headache when I’m sitting down to try and focus and then it’s a headache to send out the submissions. And then it’s a headache to try and go back and revise what I’ve written.DM: That should be the title of this interview: Kevin Chesser has a Headache.KC: I actually suffer from chronic headaches… [Now, looking at the game on TV] Corbin Burnes is about to strike you out. Yeah, and that guy’s shaking his head. He just roasted you, you fucking idiot, and you just stood there looking at it. Order Relief of My Symptoms:Ghost Palace PressAmazon(Or send Kevin a DM).
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EVIL, EVIL, EVIL: CHRIS KELSO’S ‘THE DREGS TRILOGY’ by Matthew Kinlin

November 26, 2024
“They say you can hide from Blackcap if you burn all your dreams.”- Alfie McPherson, Ritual America Chris Kelso’s The Dregs Trilogy (Black Shuck Books, 2020) is a triptych of novellas: Shrapnel Apartments, Unger House Radicals, Ritual America; where each part deepens and troubles its sibling. The book moves backwards and forwards through time and space, from the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a backwoods area near Winnipeg, to Louisiana and a number of other locations; some terrestrial, others interdimensional. Kelso’s trilogy revolves around a series of ritualistic killings. These murders appear to contain their own psychogeography and initially gravitate towards a televised realm called Shrapnel Apartments, inspired by a snuff-movie-cum-art-movement known as Ultra-Realism, before rippling outwards through its grainy unknowable corridors. The victims of these murders are given a voice and often describe their own execution in direct, deadpan fashion. The central victim that is returned to is a young girl called Florence Coffey. Her suffering is recurring and endless. The bodies of these ritualistic killings are delivered to an entity that links the many strands and subplots of the book. The name of this entity is Blackcap. Assisted by another being known as King Misery, their multitudinous appetites flow and feed upon human consciousness. Kelso’s trilogy evokes a watercolour painting called Hands of Fire from American artist, hospital janitor and recluse, Henry Darger, which shows a group of young girls waking from their beds at night. Frightened, they look up as two enormous orange hands descend from the ceiling. Darger’s mythical world-view presents his children of Abbieannia, or the Vivian Girls, fighting against evil Glandelinian overlords, but the hopeful youths are often slain in battle or brutally tortured. Darger is mentioned once in Kelso’s trilogy, in the central novella Unger House Radicals. This story revolves around a young filmmaker Vincent Bittacker who, after falling in love with a serial killer called Brandon Swarthy, moves into the Louisiana house of child murderer Otto Spengler. Unger House becomes a neo-Nazi fort for their burgeoning homosexual relationship and exploration of the artistic practice known as Ultra-Realism: the act of committing murder on film, cinéma vérité taken to its furthest limits. Their initiation into Ultra-Realism involves the killing of a girl known as Janice. Kelso later writes, “The Glandelinian race sought inspiration from Darger’s text and set out to be the scourge of Abbieannia.” Here we have an inversion of Darger’s myth where the radicals of Unger House identify with the monstrous Glandelinian race. Bittacker and Swarthy devour a thousand sources and realign them to intensify their brutality and fascism, extermination dressed up as avant garde. After the murder of Janice, “The sky has a milky hue. Vince realises that he can no longer appreciate the beauty in anything except violence…” He then compares the image of Janice’s half-dissected body with Andy Warhol’s five-hour film Sleep. Warhol is filming his lover John Giorno, “We can see up his nostrils, see the triangular mound of philtrum and septum.” Like a fly crawling across a corpse, the image on the screen offers both a source of voyeuristic pleasure and physical revulsion. Bittacker responds with, “I hate this movie. I hate all Warhol’s movies. Why do I do this to myself?” Why do these men commit unspeakable acts? There’s an ambiguity to their Glandelinian philosophy. As Sartre writes of Genet, his thugs invent an artistry to their savagery: “The criminal dances his crime as the ballerina dances the dagger step.” At first, Bittacker and Swarthy seem to delight in the irony of their position: their so-called Ultra-Realism is deeply performative. They even go on to pronounce, “We wanted to make Unger House the new Grand Guignol.” Evil has become simply vaudeville, a ghostly cabaret of sexual pathology. As Sartre writes, “It is Evil which is a ballet. We now see the matter more clearly: if the world of Evil is only a play of appearances and conventions, it depends on the consciousness of the spectator who contemplates it.” Bittacker and Swarthy have invented an audience for their Nazi snuff pantomime but it soon implodes into jealousy, paranoia and mental collapse.Throughout The Dregs Trilogy, its many killers feed on the mythology of Otto Spengler and a white power, misogynistic band known as King Misery, named after a murderous and malevolent being. However, their voraciousness finds its apex in the cosmic entity of hyperstition called Blackcap. Who is Blackcap? Blackcap is no one and everywhere. Dr Wilson describes him as: “A nocturnal, bat-winged monster exiled to the stars. Appearing as a gelatinous mass extruding razored tentacles to some, and as an itinerant showman to others.” Dr Baker offers, “He looks sort of like a jellyfish. Three-lobed burning eye all flared.” Blackcap weaves his way through all three sections of the book. There is no escape. One of his victims, Lydia Pittmann, explains, “I soon came to realise that if you reject the philosophy of Blackcap and his gang then you wind up here. In the demi-plane.” Orange hands descending from the ceiling. Blackcap is interdimensional and swims through the nightmares of all his accomplices and victims. In Male Fantasies 2: Psychoanalysing the White Terror, Klaus Theweleit writes that the fascist male sees the general population as hybrid, unclean and often animal: “It has a thousand legs, a thousand heads, it can generate a thousand degrees of heat. It can metamorphose into a single creature, many-limbed: rat, snake, dragon.” Blackcap is like an octopus inside the brain. Its fluid nature is feminine and multiple, or as Theweleit conceives, “the belly of the erotic woman menstruating or ‘ruptured’ in childbirth: the Hydra, the head of the Medusa, the Gorgon.” Theweleit argues the fascist male’s central fear is one of disintegration so, “his role is the builder of dams, as killer, exterminator.” Is Blackcap an alien entity from outer space or an unconscious projection? Murderer Beau Carson tells us, “Blackcap doesn’t come from the sky, or the woods for that matter. He comes from somewhere else, down there. In the aquatic arena of the gods.”Lydia Pittmann is one of Blackcap’s many victims from Amber Acre and taken to a place known as Shrapnel Apartments, overseen by homicidal landlords. Prior to the suicide of William L. Bentley, we learn, “When I left for Shrapnel Apartments, I took Florence with me,” where, “I have a decent-sized fridge, two bathrooms, a shower and a WC. My apartment had direct access to the balcony and a view of the abyss and surrounding blackness.” Throughout the whole of The Dregs Trilogy, Florence Coffey is the victim obsessively returned to again and again. Similar to Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, Florence’s body becomes a recurring site of interdimensional torture and abuse. Like one of Darger’s girls, she is running amongst the Glandelinians and Blengigomeneans: gigantic winged beings that can take part-human form. A disturbing feature of Kelso’s work is the inclusion of autopsy reports, similar in style to Warhol’s clinical filming of his dreaming subjects. A report states, “Ms. Florence Coffey was a 13-year-old white female who was reportedly found by law enforcement in a bathtub and unresponsive.” We then learn, “Her arms, a portion of sternum, heart, and left lobe of liver were found wrapped in a plastic bag in a laundry basket.” What makes these episodes even more disorientating is that we also hear from the victims during their own autopsies. Florence explains, “Everything you’ve heard about autopsy dreams are true. And the roughness of the doctor working on you.” The thousand-year-old Tibetan text Bardo Thödol, translated as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, states that after death the human soul occupies an intermediate space between death and rebirth. Following her brutal killing and dismemberment, Florence floats in limbo in the post-mortem state of Bardo. Her suffering is multiplied and glorified in the hearts of Blackcap’s followers, ad infinitum.Dr Baker explains further the endless appetites of Blackcap, devouring, “children, unmarried women and people who have died of leprosy or snake bites... These people are set afloat down the Ganges, where the tribesman from the Aghori Babas retrieve their corpses and ritually consume them. This is Ritual America and our sacraments can be equally barbaric.” We have the meeting of barbarism with the holy. Atrocity serves a higher god that resides inversely in the bowels. In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes, “The holy mystery of sacrificial death is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god.” They are cleansed and connected to Blackcap in their consumption. Florence Coffey is the totemic animal of Blackcap that must be ritualistically slaughtered and eaten again and again to reinforce their fascist hygiene and their holy bond. They are so clean in her blood and sorrow. They feel much stronger. As William Blake, a visionary that complements Darger’s dichotomous worldview, writes, “Evil is the active springing from Energy.” The madmen of The Dregs feed and renew themselves on Vivian Girls but this energy soon fades away, the spilling blood of Florence is short-lived. Bataille writes that the goal of Sade was, “enumerating to the point of exhaustion the possibilities of destroying human beings, of destroying them and enjoying the thought of their death and suffering.” The energy of Evil soon gives way to boredom. Bittacker glamorises his sadism with Aryan mysticism but it quickly falls into childish games of delusion and misery. A Darger painting of a horned red dragon looming over a pile of dead children. As one character drily remarks, “People always feel the need to conjure up these ugly spirits as a way of rationalising the bad things that happen in the world and the awful things human beings do to each other.”
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Dave Fitzgerald Recommends: Etiquette, Shit List, and The Berlin Wall

November 5, 2024
It’s election season! Of course, it’s always election season now. And for anyone young enough to not remember life before the internet, it’s pretty much always been election season, and maybe always will be. The very idea of it being a discreet “season,” separate from some other stretch of time in which elections are not happening or being talked about, likely makes little sense. I’m actually a few months older than current Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance (a first for me), and even I can only vaguely recall the pre-infinite-screaming-doomscroll-chyron version of our American Democracy in action. What’s more, the further we get from that simpler time, the easier it becomes to question my own memory of it. Were things ever actually better than they are now, or was I just younger and less cynical, with more future ahead of me to feel optimistic about? Were candidates actually more genuine and respectful toward the institutions of which they were vying to be a part, or were we just more susceptible to accepting biased official narratives as fact? Were things ever actually simpler, or did we just know less?Today, implicit bias is a given. There is so much information not just available to us, but thrust upon us daily, and so many avenues down which we may pursue it further according to our own personal tastes and prejudices, that even if a truly objective news source did somehow exist in the world, it would be all but impossible to identify it. And though we have certainly seen a fracturing within my lifetime of not just information or “the news,” but of reality itself, such that political leaders and those who cover them are no longer operating in good faith, or even from a shared understanding of the issues, we’ve also reached a place where it feels like most people know that too, and it doesn’t change a damn thing. As one of the authors I’m discussing here today – David Leo Rice – has posited for a while now, the zeitgeisty notion that we can somehow escape the matrix is not a particularly useful one. The systems within which we live – vague enormities like society, identity, and reality – do not have meaningful exteriors; only waveforms we might surf; permutations we might engage. When even the once-unifying concept of common sense no longer has a common definition, there is no out; only through.Enter Joey Truman.If you told me that the original draft of Truman’s Etiquette was a single typewriter scroll delivered in a shoebox along with some scribbled-on diner napkins, bodega receipts, and NYC subway maps, I’d absolutely believe you. Truman’s terse, incisive prose reads unfakably off the cuff (likely of a thrift store corduroy jacket), and yet still feels as lived-in as a Lower East Side squat. In this loosely organized catalog of personal anecdotes and common social situations – each appended with numbered directions for, yes, proper etiquette in same – he nimbly identifies the cracks in our foundations – the infrastructural niceties that we’re letting crumble in the name of technological advancement and capitalism run amok – and sets about duct-taping, and plastering, and slapdash painting over them as fast as he can manage. This slim volume had me laughing out loud with both its seemingly simple observations about 21st century humanity, and its palpable impatience at having to explain such seemingly simple observations to anyone.Covering everything from waiting rooms to crowded bars; cohabitating to co-parenting; dinner parties to book events (in between many, many screeds on common subway courtesy) Truman possesses a lowkey, DFW-esque gift for breaking down monolithic ideas about modern society into their most basic, component parts, such that they look so quaint and manageable that you’ll find yourself scratching your head in disbelief that no one’s ever quite addressed them in this way before. And more than that even, it feels as though he’s almost doing it by accident; like he’s not “writing” so much as just thinking on the page, and allowing us to watch as he dissects his daily routines – those of a proudly working-class small fish making his way in a big pond life – with a charmingly grumpy sincerity, and more honest-to-goodness heart than I’ve found in just about anything else I’ve read this year. With short, punchy chapters full of humor and ideas, Etiquette is a great book to read in those in-between moments, because every time you look up, you’ll see some way to apply its lessons right in front of you. It could just as easily be titled Don’t Be an Asshole: And Here’s How! Maybe take it on the subway.Alright. I know what some of you might be thinking. “Hey. Wait a minute. Isn’t Joey Truman a Whiskey Tit author? And didn’t they publish this Fitzgerald guy’s book too? What the heck? Who’s feeding us biased opinions now?” And you’re not wrong. Etiquette was, in fact, the first book I ever read from what is now my beloved small press home, and the above two paragraphs constitute the first review I wrote, at least in part, in hopes of introducing myself to them while shopping my own debut novel Troll. Guilty as charged. Now, none of that is to say I didn’t mean what I wrote, or that I don’t stand by it, because I absolutely did and do. I love Joey’s work. I probably wouldn’t make that Wallace comparison again today, but that’s more a product of my growth as a reader and reviewer than any kind of intentional deception or disingenuous flattery (knowing Joey, he’d probably prefer I hadn’t made it to begin with). But more than anything, I love that Joey doesn’t give a shit what I think. Or you. Or anyone. Just about any writer you talk to has a spiel about how they don’t care if they ever get famous – how they do it for the love, or the craft, or because they simply can’t do without – but deep down, I think most of us harbor at least small, quiet dreams of more traditional success. I’m not sure Joey does though.Having grown up in the DIY punk scene of Wyoming, Truman understands better than most what it means to have no audience, and no income, and just keep at it no matter what. He knows what he’s about. He lives his principles hard. And somehow, he still finds time to write like a busted fire hydrant. Etiquette is only one of nearly a dozen projects he’s published with Whiskey Tit, and that’s on top of his long-running SubStack Screed City. The dude legitimately can’t turn it off. And his bullshit-free brand of conviction can feel cleansing amidst the barking of the 21st century attention carnival. It’s not that he’s unbiased. It’s that he’s all bias. Which in the end, kind of amounts to the same thing. One gets the sense he’s not trying to convince you of anything except to think for yourself.As for me, if I write about a book, it’s pretty much always because I want you to read it. I won’t deny a partiality toward Whiskey Tit, or a propensity toward reviewing kindly the work of people I know and like, but I’ve never written anything I didn’t believe, or couldn’t back up if push came to shove. Indie Lit is a community, and not a huge one. Nothing is automatically tit for tat – ask anyone you like about that – but we’re all out here hustling in very similar boats, and there is unquestionably an incentive to be our own rising tide. Indie publishers do yeoperson’s work on infinitesimal margins. Every book they take on is a bet against the Big 5 house. A surprise sensation on the order of B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space or Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke can single-handedly keep a small press afloat, and all of us would love to be that for both our benefactors and our peers. As such, praise tends to be effusive, and truly uncharitable reviews are rare – generally reserved for books whose hype and/or financial backing are perceived as being undeserved, if not disqualifying toward the “indie” label altogether. All of which is to say, if I don’t like a book, I tend to just not write about it. As with our modern political climate, things can be simplistically binary in this regard, and there exists an ongoing discourse as to whether or not that’s a problem – the “praise or ignore” debate. If indie lit really is a community (as we so often claim), or an underground artistic movement of merit (as we hope to be seen), then how can we expect to be taken seriously when we’re not willing to provide each other, and our readers, with meaningful, nuanced critique? How will any of us become better writers – or even understand the ways in which we might need to – if we only ever talk about how great we all are? These are fair questions, to which I can see both sides. As an author, I’m practically a poster child for this conundrum. Having written a novel that courts controversy on every page, I fully braced for and expected some sort of negative feedback upon publication. I would, frankly, have welcomed the chance to engage. But a year-and-a-half later, I’ve yet to read a bad word about it. Another thing most any writer will tell you is that they want to “start conversations,” but again, just as with our us vs. them, all or nothing politics, honest, open-minded debate can be hard to come by.As a reviewer, on the other hand, I totally get it. Writing negative reviews is no fun (and just as much work as writing positive ones), especially when it comes to books barely anyone’s reading in the first place. If that makes me biased, then I guess to a degree, I’m biased. There’s a reason this column is called “Recommends”.Likewise, my fellow Whiskey Tit author Dan Hoyt wears his political biases right on his sleeve. His new novel Shit List is both an unapologetically broad, and line-item specific evisceration of the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Through barely-disguised caricatures of the whole unseemly cabal, as well as a kooky supporting cast that includes a clear stand-in for LeBron James, a hapless stand-in for that stand-in, and a guitar goddess turned unwitting cult leader, Hoyt attacks that tumultuous stretch of recent history like a man in the throes of an apoplectic trance (in NBA parlance, you might say he was writing lights out).Evoking nothing quite so much as the cockeyed absurdity of the great Tom Robbins, Hoyt’s characters pinball madly around Cleveland and DC, their disparate stories periodically pinging against one another by way of that adorable little critter on the book’s cover: a Whitehead’s Pygmy Squirrel that elicits intense bouts of empathetic shame and remorse in any person it comes near. As the grotesque President Kukla and his satirical (but again, only barely) sycophants work feverishly to seal borders, separate families, and repeal healthcare laws, the book slowly but steadily reconstructs the relentless dread of its era – that low-simmering, “oh God, what now?” nausea that accompanied each new day – until even the funniest one-liners stop being funny.And that’s the real power of Shit List. It may start off feeling a little goofy – a little immature even – but as it piles on the infuriating headlines, it reveals itself to be a honey-coated bear trap; an unhinged SNL sketch that drags on for months, until all the players have broken, and everyone just wants to go home. It’s not so much about parodying Trump as it is about the Trump Presidency marking the death of parody. No matter how many pointed jabs Hoyt takes at the Donald’s limited grasp of the NBA rulebook, or the Bible, or the English language, he never quite breaks through to a joke that feels outsized or over the top – a gag that goes “too far”. It’s all just a little too believable to laugh at, and that’s kind of the point. For Gen X’ers like Hoyt, and millennials like myself, who’ve relied on detached snark and “Tweeting through it” for decades to manage our political ennui, Shit List demands that we examine ourselves, and the world we’re leaving to future generations, more deeply. To ask what it says about us if we decide, as a country, to run this particular experiment back. Sure, it’s ok to let through an incredulous, inappropriate chuckle from time to time – we all have to stay sane somehow – but at the dawn of this still-young century, where events that happened as recently as last week can already start to feel fungible, and the powers that be are constantly working to revise and shape “the narrative” – wrestling for that 51% controlling interest in our fractured, shared reality – Hoyt refuses to let us forget a single, despicable detail.It’s hard to know how the extreme specificity of Shit List will play in another 10-20 years. So much has happened since that puts those first 100 days to shame, and even much of that has already been spun, spoonfed, compartmentalized, and forgotten by the endless churn of the 24-hour news cycle. For God’s sakes, the man was nearly assassinated twice in the last 100 days and we’ve already almost completely stopped talking about it. So if you’re having a hard time this election season laughing to keep from crying like Dan, or screaming on street corners like Joey, then perhaps your best bet is to step through the looking glass with the aforementioned David Leo Rice, and his revelatory The Berlin Wall (also from Whiskey Tit).Rice notably remarked in an interview he gave to this very site a few months ago, that he has always endeavored to “be a genre” unto himself, and speaking as someone who’s read most of his work and written fairly extensively about it, I feel pretty comfortable coming right out and saying that The Berlin Wall is both his most expansive, and most accessible novel to date. Zooming out from the spooky small towns that populate his previous books, this latest finds Rice operating on an international scale, vacuuming up whole countries like a late-stage Katamari and folding them back in on themselves in service of his cycloramic grand design. Indeed, The Berlin Wall could easily have swallowed up all 3,000 words of this article too, such is its ambitious, omnivorous scope, but to nutshell, in Rice’s alternate-timeline Europe, the non-italicized Berlin Wall is a living entity whose disparate chunks (including Uta, one of several rotating narrators) are working their way across the continent in hopes of reassembly. Whether their intention is to usher Europe into a newly divided era, or return it to an old one, is somehow beside the point. They simply feel drawn toward the accretion of solidity. Meanwhile, a wayward young man named Gyorgi is burrowing deeper by the day into a burgeoning eugenicist putsch (led first by a kind of method-acting troll demagogue, Ragnar, and later by the shapeshifting, teleporting, semi-corporeal figure of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik), in search of his own version of the comfortingly concrete. Concurrent to these, we also get Anika, a history professor descending into a kind of self-imposed Bavarian nostalgia cocoon as she attempts to rewrite German history so convincingly that she effectively alters German reality. Lars Von Trier also makes a brief, memorable appearance. This book is nuts y’all.With the fascism creep of the past decade clearly top of mind, Rice sets out to fasten signifiers to a whole host of ominous vagaries – to give form and shape to these nascent dangers in our midst, and in so doing, better map their ongoing self-sustenance. For regardless of all the reprehensible thoughts we read passing through the minds of his wandering players, with the exception of Breivik (who, despite his being a real person – or perhaps even because of it – behaves here more as the avatar of an idea than a functional character), none of them ever feels exactly evil – only lost, or compromised – and Rice finds a powerful empathy for all of them within the nexus of larger forces they’re simply trying to react to and survive. It’s a case not so much of the characters serving the plot as the characters being the plot – each of them a cog within wheels turning predestined, but which we still desperately hope to see them find a way to break.Rice’s nonjudgmental rendering of Gyorgi in particular, with his hardcoded longing for a traditional masculinity the world no longer values as it once did – the ways in which leaders like Ragnar and Breivik prey on reasonable insecurities felt by many men in the 21st century, only to insidiously slow-walk them toward a darker radicalization – make for some of The Berlin Wall’s most moving insights. There are passages wherein Gyorgi despairs at his physical and intellectual limitations, and his more existential lack of purpose, that feel near-universal in their human relatability, and when he joins a mob of Ragnar faithful in chanting “All hail the absolute!” it drives home exactly what such movements offer people, and what all of the book’s characters are ostensibly looking for: clarity, simplicity, certainty in a time of constant upheaval and complex change. Despite the Eurocentrism of the narrative, it’s impossible not to see in Gyorgi, and his persistent suspicion that he is operating entirely within the framework of some kind of globalized VR game, the scores of people emboldened into storming the U.S. capitol four years ago, only to be abandoned, dumbfounded, by their perceived leader as their fever broke and they were met with real world consequences on the other side; shocked that anything they’d done might actually matter.This breakdown between physical and virtual spaces, and the stratification of our shared reality, are themes Rice has explored throughout much of his previous work (most notably in his seminal essay “Long Live the Heroic Pervert” – maybe my single favorite piece of writing to yet emerge from this now half-cooked decade), but where the heroes of Angel House and The New House make their way toward enlightenment or ascension, the cast of The Berlin Wall seems harder pressed to find any path outside its deepening rabbit holes and rising seawalls. Tonally, the book can often feel like a psychedelic come-up – all rippling roots and skin and Déjà vu – that just refuses to peak. One gets the sense of being in the midst of something that hasn’t quite happened yet, and possibly never will. It sometimes takes characters hours to cross entire countries by car, while others walk for full days only to end up right where they started, their paths in physical space outlined behind them as though they were traipsing through Jell-O mold. As our existence becomes less concrete and more permeable, Rice’s writing grows ever less constrained by conventional narrative structure. At times, the book feels like it’s editing itself right in your hands.With both the plot, and Europe, fast folding in on themselves, Rice nimbly weaves together the threads in his tightening web of homegrown semiotics – the hard and soft illuminati, the Black Forest and the taiga, the Iron Curtain and the Living Wall – every piece encroaching inward like Birnam Wood on their own inexorable timelines until, with one deft final pull of his drawstrings, he cinches everything up tight – a surrealist cat’s cradle of past and future collapsed into a single, perpetual present. No matter how far Uta travels, one gets the sense she’ll someday return, in one form or another. No matter how beautifully winners like Anika and the Chancellor write their latest revisionist history books, papering over the past only dooms us to repeat it. “The communal forgetting that it’s happened before mingling with the communal hope that, soon enough, it’ll all be alright.”And so it’s election season. Still, forever, and always. There have been times in recent years when I felt certain that the rhetoric couldn’t get any uglier, the divisions any starker, the stakes any higher, but to hear the candidates and their most vocal opponents and supporters tell it, that never quite ends up being the case. Each election of my lifetime has been “the most consequential election of our lifetimes.” Each President we’ve ever elected has, for roughly half of us, spelled certain and irreversible doom. And yet, here we are, doing it all again. I’m not here to tell you who to vote for (though anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written can likely guess my thoughts). I’m just here to tell you what to read to get through it. I may be biased toward Whiskey Tit, but that doesn’t mean our books don’t rock, or that I don’t rep other presses I love every bit as hard (anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written knows that too). The indie lit review economy might be a little insular and self-congratulatory, but through the process of writing this article I think I’ve talked myself into being more mindful of that going forward. After all, at the level I, and the authors I write about, are all hustling on, pretty much all press is good press; all engagement is good engagement. And the kinda sad, but mostly common sensical truth of the matter is, everyone’s trying to sell you something here in late-stage capitalist America, pretty much all the time. All any of us can do is to take a cue from Dan Hoyt, Joey Truman, and David Leo Rice – to try to understand our own biases, and ride our chosen waves. Whether that means tuning in, dropping out, or burrowing on through to the other (which is also maybe the same) side. To quote Rice one last time, we can but hope that “The future will not resemble the present forever.”
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I SEE A FIRE AND I TRUST IT: An Interview with Charlene Elsby by Matthew Kinlin

October 29, 2024
Matthew Kinlin: In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Death states to Max von Sydow as the medieval knight: “Most people think neither of death nor nothingness.” Your new collection of stories, Red Flags (House of Vlad, 2024), offers characters the opportunity to think about their own deaths as experienced, often occurring in gruesome and funny ways. What motivated you to write about this confrontation with death and non-existence?Charlene Elsby: Hello, Matthew! It’s funny I should hear from you just now, which I’ll explain in just a moment. But first the answer to your question. I was at home when the Facebook group for the neighbourhood started showing up in my notifications, as a woman had been hit and dragged at the intersection outside my apartment. Now I’ve always been a little taken aback at how we’re all able to go about our lives, given that death threatens us nearly constantly. And it reminded me of a pamphlet that I was given at a palliative care house when we were watching my stepmother pass. For a couple of weeks we were there nearly constantly, my father sleeping in a chair next to her bed, and I going home nights and returning in the day to bring food and allow him time to go home to bathe. The pamphlet told us that we should not expect our loved ones to have any new or profound thoughts or insights as they approach the other side–and that while we often expect this of the dying, it is unfair to impose upon them like that. Thus I wrote the first story of the book, and the other seven following the same general theme.Now it’s interesting that you should bring this up now, as I’ve just awoken in my chair and, in that space between sleep and waking, I saw my stepmother’s head in what turned out to be a scarf bunched around a hanger on the drying rack. A psychic told me three months ago that there was a woman with short, curly hair watching over me, and I believed that it was her. When she passed, I used to have dreams that she was calling me from farther and farther distances away, until one day she appeared in full opacity, to tell me that she was fine. Those dreams completely ended after that final encounter, so it was strange to be thinking of this when you wrote to me.Does the air seem to have a strange scent where you are?MK: There are some strange coincidences in what you have just described. As we are speaking, there is a thunderstorm. It is the first one in a long time. This week has been unusually hot for England in September, I assume due to the climate crisis. It was really hot this week and that changed today to an intense heaviness and a charged smell in the air, some atmospheric tension. I can hear thunder breaking. I am staying at my boyfriend’s family home today and as I got out my laptop, his mother’s scarf fell off the end of the couch. I have been having vivid dreams over the last few weeks but they are hard to recall. It’s emotional to hear about the dreams of your stepmother calling you and her then telling you she was OK. Do you believe in coincidences? The narrator of your story “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” states: “I was supposed to be here.” Are the most trivial of details, such as a crease in a scarf, part of some predestination? I’m also thinking of the initial name for August Strindberg’s Occult Diary, which was Strange Coincidences and Inexplicable Events. Today’s date is Saturday 21st September. When I look at Strindberg’s diaries, he writes on September 19th, 1896: “Letter from Hedlund about the Cyclone in Paris… The night after this a storm broke out at midnight and lasted until 2.” He writes nothing again until September 23rd. Strindberg often seems to link scarves and death. He writes: “In the morning when I awoke I saw Harriet life-size dead on my sofa. She had a white scarf across her mouth; in a white blouse with a black skirt.” Like yourself, he saw a human face in a scarf: “On Tuesday 28 April in the morning I saw a skull (made of my scarf and petit Larousse).” Finally, he writes, “A woman by the stream when we were about to leave: she had a scarf over her head but a light band across her forehead with a red circle and a half moon; looked like a blood stain.” Upon reading this, I thought of the photograph of yourself in Red Flags, completely covered in blood.CE: I do believe in strange coincidences. I believe we are supposed to be here, discussing scarves beneath Magritte’s The Lovers II. I bought the print after seeing it in Belgium and according to the curator’s note at the museum, the people in Magritte’s paintings are covered in cloth because they are dead, and one of the people in this painting is his mother.That same journey, I happened by accident upon the portrait of Strindberg by Edvard Munch in the Museum De Reede in Antwerp. I recognized it immediately from the cover of the Penguin translation of Inferno and From an Occult Diary I used to carry around as a teen. But never before had I noticed the spelling error in Strindberg’s name–and it’s because it wasn’t there. At some point, the error in the lithograph was corrected but in person, there it was, or rather, there it wasn’t–a missing R. I’d like to know where that symbol has gone. Does a missing R mean anything to you?The blood has been there since Hexis, Matthew. I filmed a reading and put the screenshot on Youtube. A still from that video was already used on the cover of Excuse Me Mag. This is another still that Brian took from my Instagram. The blood is still there, Matthew. Get it off, get it off, get it off. Do you have a scarf I could borrow to wipe it away, or are your scarves woven with death in the fibres?The coincidences increase in frequency the closer to our fate we become.MK: I can feel these coincidences intensify as we speak. I have the same Penguin edition with the same Munch cover. This week, I have been watching over and over a scene from a 1980 TV movie of Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven about a man whose dreams can distort past and present reality. In this scene he is put under hypnosis and told to have a dream about a horse once he hears a specific word. The word is Antwerp.I keep thinking about the dream you had. I keep thinking how red flags are technically the same as red scarves. Maybe all scarves are woven with death.The missing letter R has meaning to me. When I was a teenager, a dog in Mallorca tore my hand open. There was blood then too, Charlene. When I think of R, I hear the growling sound of the dog. I think the nurse in Romeo and Juliet (two dead lovers) calls the letter R, “the dog’s name.” When I look in Strindberg’s diaries, he puts dog, horse and Munch all together in two lines on 21st February, 1896: “The carnassial tooth = the horse’s hoof fell after much noise during the night. The dog in Munch’s yard.”His next line is: “The magic whip in Luxembourg.” I’m starting to feel afraid. Are we being punished by some unknown daemon? In your story “A Little More Spontaneous”, the narrator states: “Fate is laughing at me.” What is this conspiracy? Are we being whipped? I’ve just found out that the first German and Portuguese editions of Le Guin’s novel translate as Die Geißel des Himmels and O flagelo dos céus, which literally means: “the scourge [or whip] of heaven”. The second edition translates as: “the other side of the dream”. Maybe the dead live on the other side of our dreams.CE: I refuse to dream of a horse. I won’t have it! All that sobbing. The coachman will continue to beat the horse as soon as you let go of its neck. It’s all in the unseen.You’re right that we are being whipped, and I think maybe it’s because I’ve been missing something. I have always supported the concept of an other side that is the unseen aspect of the visible / conceivable. But the way in which someone or something appears in a dream is another form of presentation. If that’s where the dead are, it would explain a lot. A lot of a lot.In the dream, there is some other form of action in which we are not engaged. And by that I mean that while we act, the action is passive, and I seem to have no control over what is occurring or what it is that I do. If consciousness is the realm of activity and there is another realm where the activity is passive, then that explains how death as the ceasing of action finds its place on the other ends of dreams. But what if we pulled the cord?(I think we have to.)MK: I’m afraid again, to pull the cord. It would be like unravelling the thread of a scarf and I am not sure where we would end up. Where the scarf ends or the air begins? There’s so many molecules in heaven. I remember finding a paperback copy of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata in a second-hand shop as a teenager. It filled my mind with a strange green fog.Nietzsche wandering from his residence to the Piazza Carlo Alberto on 3rd January 1889. It was here he saw the horse being whipped. It was inside this elegant square that his mind unravelled in red threads. Is consciousness a square or a circle? Only a few months before Nietzsche met his pale horse of Death, he started writing letters to Strindberg in the winter of 1888. Nietzsche wrote to him, “I believe that I have become familiar with more evil and more questionable worlds of thought than anyone else, but only because it lies in my nature to love what lies apart.” What is this land of exile where death dances with madness? What is this realm where activity is passive? I am trapped inside my dreams. I have dreams of the dead too, like you told me before. In the dream, I am by the sea. I have never lived by the sea. But in the dream of the dead, there is always water. Where are we floating to? In your story “A Little More Spontaneous”, you write, “Being a dead person was as free as it gets.” A person at the moment of death. It’s like waiting to fall asleep; we are unable to pinpoint the moment when the sea sweeps us away. I wonder how it felt when the azure sky came crashing down in Turin. CE: If consciousness were going to be any shape, it would be a sphere, but I can’t help but wonder at the next step that goes beyond our three-dimensional representation of perfection. You know that the code for all that is, is contained within the ratio of the diameter to the radius, and that the “heavens” as they were called (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc.) are embodiments of the equidistance from centre that defines material perfection. The human head approximates their shape as best it can and tries to reach those other spheres in the skies, sitting atop the human body as it does. I’m tired of this emaciated notion of causality that puts all precedence in the past. The future is as much a cause of the present as anything that’s happened before, and it is what chains us and confines us in all present actions. The threat of it drowns us in limitations and contrives to bury us in limitations–the fact that it does not exist is not a limit to its power. We must instead conclude that what does not exist is a primary and immediate cause of all that is. Have you read By the Open Sea? I’ve just opened it to a random page that makes me concerned for you: “He slept badly in spite of all his attempts to regulate his dreams by strong auto-suggestions before falling asleep. Sometimes he awoke from a dream that he was a bell-buoy, drifting and drifting in search of a shore on which he could be thrown. And in his sleep he had pressed close against the bedstead, so as to feel the contact of some object, even if it were an inanimate one.”It seems very lonely.MK: I’ve not read By the Open Sea but will do so. Strindberg is a strikingly lonely figure. I think about The Ghost Sonata where spirits appear in bright daylight. My dreams are lonely realms. I think Deleuze spoke about the aim of his teachings was to reconcile ourselves with our own solitude. The open sea brings me back to Bergman and to the opening of the interview where a man meets Death, which brings me back to Red Flags. Consciousness encounters non-existence for a few fleeting moments which are like an eternity upon Death’s oceanic cloak, the endless crashing of waves upon a stone beach. In this interview, we have come upon the following possible points:

1. The dead exist on the other side of dreams.2. Death, like dreaming consciousness, as a form of passive activity.3. Death, like the future, as a form of non-existence acting on the present.4. Death corrupts the metaphysical rules of causality.

What is the solitude of death? I think of the stars above the sea, globes of fire that as you say, mirror the imperfect human head. Archimedes writing On the Sphere and Cylinder, which mirrors the human head and trunk. Cicero cleaning away the overgrown bushes on his tomb. Every equation is like a grave. Where are the stars leading? In Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly, Karin explains: “The door opened, but the god was a spider.”One door at the end of a corridor. What do you see?CE: I see a fire, and I trust it. It is unlike the fires that consume materiality, that burn us. This fire consumes the psyche, and relieves it of our bodies. It is contained in the room where I left it and the only flame that hasn’t yet disappointed me.Go for a walk?MK: I will trust the fire too, for it is like a mirror or an ocean. I am walking beside you. With burnt hands, Strindberg writes: “Seven roses, Seven fires and a white dove.” Any final thoughts?CE: Just that we might summon the doctor, as did the Strindberg of June 1908: “Dreadful days! So dreadful, that I shall cease to describe them! Pray God simply to be allowed to die! away from this horrible bodily and spiritual pain!”Doctor summoned.Exeunt.Order 'Red Flags' by Charlene Elsby here
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ECOPOETICS AND COMICS: a Book Review of Carolyn Supinka’s ‘Metamorphic Door’ by Ryleigh Wann

October 23, 2024
Carolyn Supinka’s debut poetry collection, Metamorphic Door (Buckman Publishing, 2024) examines and imagines the more-than-human world—through stones in rivers, geese in flight, wildfire season in the west, and the concern of making a plan for the looming climate crisis. These poems are introspective, as if the speaker’s inner monologue and cyclical thinking are displayed on the page—similar to reading someone’s journal. They also remain all too relatable for anyone carrying the weight of environmental concerns. That said, this collection isn’t all doom and gloom. It balances anxiety-inducing climate changes with poems that marvel at the awestruck wonder this planet provides, even in its burning. The poem “Can you wake me for the meteor shower” begins with ‘At two AM, staring into the city-bleached night / I saw one and screamed at the sudden dazzling.’ Metamorphic Door holds poems of worldly curiosities, thoughts on relationships, and self-reflection. It beholds something for everyone. What I find most engaging about Supinka’s collection is how it’s paired with her artwork. Metamorphic Door is a book of poetry and poetic comics, bringing these words even more to life. While reading this collection, I kept wondering: how does artwork intertwined with poems impact the language? How does it further give these poems power? Are these comics their own poems, or do they only hold power within the context of the words on the next page? To me, it felt like an act of trust to read someone’s most intimate thoughts on the page, and the comics made it feel even more vulnerable by showing a reflection of who the poet/artist was at the time of writing this—it offers a deeper understanding of the way she views the world. With this collection, Supinka is saying, “This is how I see our world—do you see it, too?” The collection opens with a comic that sprawls across a few pages and shows infinite linework featuring things like houses, legs, moths, and wine glasses. The final words of the comic set up the tone for the rest of the poems: ‘I am done with writing / the word remember. Instead, / here is a road.’ The drawing spills from a square frame onto the next page, with rocks (circles? Tiny planets?) getting smaller and smaller before the white space.I first interacted with Supinka’s work while serving as the comics editor for Ecotone, the award-winning literary magazine that reimagines place. I found Supinka’s comics online and knew I wanted to solicit her art for the lit-mag, which had started publishing comics again. I remember being compelled and somewhat unnerved by the artwork and language—these were concerns that were constantly on my mind, especially during the height of the pandemic. I was doom-scrolling on my phone or wondering about the logistics and skills I might need to someday live off the land—I can barely start a fire and lack a green thumb, and these worries infiltrated my thoughts while trying to sleep at night. Supinka’s fine-lined artwork contrasted with the daily expectations of operating under the long emergency of climate change, which was something I hadn’t quite experienced in poetry before. Her debut delivers on these themes with an identifiable voice and craft of comics; they consider our existence on this big rock, and her poetry comics in tandem with language are a refreshing, honest, and inspiring way to articulate a concern that is occurring in real time. Ecopoetry, in simplest terms, is a poem that delivers a message and is focused on environmental concerns. While this is not a new way to write poetry, the term has gained more attention in recent years. There are plenty of excellent sources on ecopoetics out there, but John Shoptaw’s essay in Poetry Foundation does a good job of exploring ecopoetry in detail. To summarize with a quote: “Ecopoetry doesn’t supplant nature poetry but enlarges it.” Metamorphic Door is a book of enlarged, nature poems with a delightful pairing of artwork. The collection is split into parts with comics planted throughout—artwork that feels like it spills off the page and into your lap. The comics are chaotically at ease in the sense that the linework is scribble-like in some moments (a woman with an infinity line leading to a table, a lamp, the things going on in her mind) but evoke relatable emotions, and I continue to find new meaning within the art. These drawings are exploring, sprawling, searching, and reaching out to the reader, providing a sense of comradery and comfort in this landscape. For readers who are interested in research, Metamorphic Door also includes an index in the book. When was the last time you read an index in a poetry book that wasn’t a book on craft? The index is poetic in and of itself—a full catalog of terms and pages, of course, but also poetic definitions and ponderings. Take the word “Dune” for example: “The difficulty of abundance, a life in which the landscape is transformed as soon as you are in it.” Words like “ghost,” “karst,” and “night” have micro-poems beside them and lovely, little comics, like a spilled mug releasing butterflies—or moths—depending on how you choose to interpret it. The definition of “Threshold” has a drawing of a doorframe on fire, followed by page numbers. I’d recommend Supinka’s collection to anyone who likes to read multiple books at once. I found the conversation between Metamorphic Door and Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (HarperCollins, 2022) to be both heavy and cathartic. These poems beg the question: what does it look like to love the world around us? US poet laureate, Ada Limón, recently edited and wrote the introduction for an anthology of nature poems titled You Are Here (Milkweed, 2024). Nature poetry or ecopoems are needed now, perhaps more than ever. Air pollution from bombs, food waste, ocean acidification, deforestation, technology that uses resources at alarming rates, and global warming from fossil fuels—all rampant problems. I don’t have an answer to combating all of it, but I do have an enormous amount of trust in readers and writers to accomplish meaningful, action-oriented work. Knowing that poets are concerned with the environment—and will continue to use language as a tool to spread urgency and awareness—makes me feel hopeful and inspired for what’s to come, despite the challenges writers face in an industry that feels like it is, at times, against us (thanks, AI). To read a collection like Metamorphic Door makes me grateful to know there are writers who value the natural beauty of their surroundings to such an extent, that they will never stop celebrating and defending it. Artworks excerpted from Metamorphic Door, published by Buckman Publishing © 2024. Used with permission.Buy 'Metamorphic Door' Here
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