Magazine Non Grata was releasing its new issue and throwing a party to commemorate it. was going and he let me be a barnacle on his hull. Brandon dreams big: he likes action and movement, he wants to travel, do interesting things, meet interesting people. I’m a miserable shut-in, but it’s important I get out of my own space, so if I’m going to hitch my wagon to anybody, it’s going to be him.

I arrived on a Friday. By Saturday, Westlake and I were walking up a flight of stairs in Williamsburg, on our way to a rooftop. I had a bottle of wine in hand, no glasses, I’d decided to drink it like a wino. I met unfamiliar faces, five of them, all sitting on the roof, drinking beer. I was introduced to and — nice folks, very welcoming. But nobody splits a room like I do: After ten minutes, half of any given sample will want to drag me out back and lobotomize me with an icepick. But talking to Marigold and Liam, we talked about books — we all liked the same books, that was good. I sat with the three others, men whose names I don’t remember. I have a story about an evening with a prostitute that ends with a man paying a methamphetamine addict $20 for a blowjob, even when, as he admitted, this was going to net him an STD. (That man is not me.) Everyone laughed and nobody threw me off the roof, so I guessed things were going well.

The party itself was at someplace called the Bowery. Should I know what this is? “The Ramones used to play here,” Liam said. “Patti Smith as recently as ’09.” Somehow or another I’d never heard of this place and every time I mentioned it to a local (“It was at someplace called the Bowery, if you’ve heard of it”), they thought I had brain damage. Of course they’ve heard of it. What kind of city is this that everyone knows of the Bowery? Do they all know Public Enemy? Has everyone listened to Horses?

Liam, Westlake, Marigold and I made it into the venue just as another party was closing down. It’s a small room, all things considered. Will over 200 people fit in this place? There’s a dance floor with a bar, an upstairs with a bar, but is there plenty of room? What happens when you get 200 Americans into a place like this and throw alcohol into the mix?

People started coming in right on time. Two of them I’d met the night before: and . Westlake and I had gone to ’s play Quartet and these two fellas were there. We went out for drinks afterward at a nice dive up the road. Anyway, they came in and familiarity enveloped me. Here were two faces I knew, whom I could start talking with, ask how things were, what had happened since last night, what the party was like for them.

People on the bottom floor danced, while people on the top, where I stood, ordered drinks and talked to one another. Everyone was either friends or knew each other from Substack or, perhaps insidiously, were there to network. There’s a feeling that takes over in the presence of social climbers: If you screw up, they’ll drag you through the mud, just to get you out of their way. Paranoia set in. I had to be on the lookout for anyone who wanted a foot in the door, but especially anyone with a desperate look in their eyes. Desperate people are like caged animals.

Over by the bar, I saw a woman tap her nose, a signal to her friend that they should meet in the bathroom and do drugs. Fifteen minutes later, they still hadn’t come out. The lineup for the bathroom was enormous: men, women, everyone crossing their legs, yelling out in a variety of American accents. Someone banged on the door, but there was no answer. It turned into a game, everyone betting on how long it would take for them to come out. I expected the floor would become a moat of piss before the night was through. When the women finally left the bathroom, they had no idea what they’d done — eyes swirling around in their sockets, licking their lips, sniffing. The crowd groaned, some people laughed. But amidst all of this, a man’s voice yelled out: “What the fuck ladies, were you having a big shit in there!?”

Listen: I’m from someplace that prides itself on politeness. You know what politeness means? “Fakery.” The world isn’t polite. Go out into the woods, see where politeness gets you. Politeness is what civilization looks like, and civilization is great and all but we need to balance Apollo and Dionysus, don’t we? Do you have a great society? Well, then it better be dirty and it better be vulgar, or what you have is a museum.

I grabbed a drink. A large man with a backwards baseball cap was there and I recognized him immediately. How could I not know ? But he was much taller than I’d imagined. He cut an imposing figure.

“What are you drinking?” Muka said.

“I dunno, Brooklyn Lager?”

“At least it’s not an IPA. You like that shit? I’m fucking done with craft beer, bro. Here’s everything you need to know about beer. Is it cold? Does it taste good? Are you with people you love? And that’s it. No more of this fuckin’ sommelier crap. ‘Ooo I can taste hints of bullshit…’”

“You know what my least favourite thing is? Everyone gets their beers, right? Someone takes a sip, their eyes light up. They hold their beer out and say, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to try this…’”

“Yeah! No I don’t! It’s beer! You know what we call those people where I come from? Pretentious assholes.”

It was strange, my Canadian programming had trouble reading the bigness in American personalities, but after a second or two I got on the wavelength. Americans, at least on the East Coast, showed interest by being expressive. They talked, they said things declaratively, they didn’t shy away from letting you know their opinion. Somehow, despite all the sheer bigness, I was among the friendliest people in the world.

A few hours later, the party shut down, then moved upstairs — ie to another bar, this one a wood-panelled Irish pub that stayed open extra late. The survivors included Westlake, myself, Marigold, Liam — a few women, I didn’t know who they were. The music there leaned toward AC/DC, Blue Öyster Cult — very good, I was more comfortable in this environment. I grew up in the country, everybody listened to AC/DC…

A woman sat across from me. I won’t say her name, she had dark hair, she was beautiful and friendly. She was flirting with the man beside her: She tried to make him laugh, she touched his shoulder, and he’d look down at his phone, fake smile, grab a drink and go for a smoke. Why was she doing this? She could have anyone she wanted, she was a knockout, she didn’t need him. Westlake said I should tell her that. He was right, but I was swimming in liquor by then. I could see it plain as day, me trying to explain what I was thinking, derailing myself. I would tell her about my favourite New York bands. I would tell her I think firearms are fun. At the end of it, she’d be asleep, and I’d still be rambling on, chatty as ever.

Somehow or another we walked out of there at four in the morning. The night was warm and the sidewalks covered in homeless people and drunks. I never knew bars stayed open this late. What a world New Yorkers live in — you can stay out all night, you can do whatever you want. I felt at ease, spent but as if after sex. Everyone said goodbye and we took cabs and within minutes of coming to the hotel, I flopped down on the bed and passed out.

As I slept, drug addicts crawled across Midtown, mumbling and begging for change. Sirens roared through the night; drunk women laughed and tried not to fall onto the sidewalk. It was the best I’d ever slept, and ever would sleep again.

And yet, if this is so prevalent, so much the defining issue of our times, where are the phenomenological accounts of life inside it? Sure, we can point to our superhero films as wish-fulfillment semi-antidotes to the meaning crisis, and perhaps all the inward-looking poetry is the result of finding the world wanting and having nowhere else to turn. But as far as art that makes specific use of this problem goes, there is a noticeable lack of it.

Thankfully, Felix McNamara’s Atrocities covers this, and with the level of seriousness one would hope for in dealing with such a grand theme. It’s a work of experimental poetry (among other things), the result of its author’s probing the world around him to find places where meaning might still be. It’s diagnostic without being didactic; it balances the personal and the universal artfully, and above all remains a fascinating, engaging work. If modern poetry often feels diaristic, this is poetry reclaiming its status as the medium of profundity.

The first thing to note is this theme of alienation that runs through the book: he’s not at home in the world, none of us are, and some of our most famous figures are famous because their alienation is so profound. We’ll meet a variety of them, from Norm MacDonald to Steve Bannon, Michel Houellebecq to William Blake. All of them have made politics or art from the perspective that things aren’t the way they should be.

When these figures get talking to each other is when things get interesting. At one point, McNamara has William Blake interview Norm MacDonald, and then Tucker Carlson. MacDonald talks about his search for God and what it means to have faith, while Carlson shares a story about being attacked by a demon. For these sections, McNamara used actual interview texts and added William Blake as an interlocutor. That these are genuine stories is disorienting. Modern people, we think, aren’t supposed to search for God, and they’re not supposed to be attacked by demons. And yet, these sections seem to ask, is it Norm MacDonald and Tucker Carlson who are deluding themselves, or is it us?

It’s incredible what adding Blake into the mix does: Could it be that Norm MacDonald and Tucker Carlson, of all people, are living through something Blake would recognize? And why not? For Blake, God was found in the imagination, but he rejected the idea that progress had revealed the religious impulse as primitive. Instead, he knew that the past exerted its influence on us, and that history “progressed” in cycles. That the nihilism of modernity should give way to a religious revival would not have seemed odd to him.

Like Blake, McNamara explores the possibility that art is where meaning still resides. But at no point does he become a teacher and tell us, “This is it. This is the way.” Instead, he invokes Goethe and David Lynch to ask questions about the nature of art. Both of these artists treated art as a separate space, outside the rules and laws of the one we live in. It might be, then, that art isn’t so much a technē as it is a method by which we step into a holy place. Our “salvation,” such as it is, might require us to become artists, or to engage with art at a spiritual level.

And yet, we still live in this particular world, with all its demonic influences. Of special importance is the influence of Jeffrey Epstein, a figure who, in the final poem, casts a shadow over the present age, influencing it from the ground up as if the Fall of Man has happened again. He’s a symbolic figure, of course, but what he symbolizes is the profound degradation of the world. What is art to do against this? The book lets these two realities sit between the same cover, not wanting them to resolve. This is simply the world we live in, one not just of alienation, but contradiction without synthesis.

A word about its formal choices: Ezra Pound is a clear influence. McNamara moves between an elevated and a vulgar register, fragments the text, and often employs a technique resembling the ideogrammatic method. We’ve talked about how he references Goethe and Lynch, but he’s equally at home discussing South Park, Beavis and Butthead, Metal Gear Solid. This connects back to the idea of unresolving contradictions: the high and the low aren’t blending, one isn’t elevating or degrading the other, they simply exist in tension.

If a review is meant to recommend a book, consider Atrocities recommended. But a simple recommendation doesn’t convey exactly what makes this book so fascinating. Its primary effect was to call into question the essence of the era and the location of its escape valves. That essence is horrifying, the escape valves difficult to open. But maybe it isn’t that we’ve become too knowledgeable to find meaning, as we often assume; instead, it might be that we’ve fallen under a spell and can’t see past the illusion.

Atrocities is published by Hyperidean Press.

Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash

There are times, however, when the optimism slips, and something darker peeks out. In these stories, virtue isn’t strong enough to save you, evil is too powerful to contain, and human nature tends toward cowardice and vice. It’s in this category that we have Pet Sematary, where an ancient spirit puppeteers an infant boy’s corpse into committing murder, and Cujo, where invisible, almost Gnostic forces aimlessly shove a family closer and closer to doom. It’s not a side he indulges often, but when he does, the result is horror purer than anything this side of H.P. Lovecraft.

And it’s in this category that we find one of his lesser-known, but greatest works, Storm of the Century.

Aired on ABC in February of 1999, this three-part miniseries follows the residents of an island off the coast of Maine as they are hit by two life-threatening intrusions: a terrible snowstorm that will cut them off from the outside world, and the arrival of a mysterious, deadly stranger by the name of Andre Linoge. As Linoge’s reign of terror becomes more violent, dehumanizing and demoralizing, the townsfolk find themselves facing not just Linoge, but their own worst impulses. What follows is a morality play with implications that will refuse to leave you long after the story has ended.

Much of Storm’s strength comes from Andre Linoge himself, played by Stratford Festival veteran Colm Feore. From the moment we meet him, Linoge is memorable: Singing “I’m A Little Teapot,” murdering an old woman in cold blood, and allowing himself to get arrested. Feore plays him like a man who takes his time because he’s always in control, and you feel this every time he’s on screen. Linoge wanted to get arrested; he wanted everyone to know this, and whatever he plans to do next will happen just the way he wants it to.

That he’s supernatural becomes immediately apparent, which is not something the townsfolk are ready for. After his arrest, he begins systematically demoralizing the people of Little Tall: He convinces at least two residents to kill themselves, including one man who cuts his own head off with an axe. A woman is torn from the present and forced to live decades alone before being thrown back through time. And, most importantly, he knows everyone’s secrets and reveals them to the other townsfolk, the more criminal and embarrassing the better. But to what end?

He only says one thing: “Give me what I want and I’ll go away.” As for what it is that he wants, they’ll have to wait for when he’s ready to tell them.

The story’s hero, town constable Mike Anderson, is the virtuous counterpoint to Linoge’s evil. King’s heroes are almost always from a small town, vaguely Protestant, and have a family or a woman they love. The good people of their town recognize them as one of their own, but the corrupt city officials, the bullies, and the ne’er-do-wells don’t tend to get along with them. The hero is a man of calm restraint, who’s willing to set aside his own safety so that good can triumph.

The test of Anderson’s virtue comes from several directions at once. The first is from Linoge. But the more Linoge reveals about the townsfolk, it becomes apparent that Anderson is perhaps the only virtuous person on the island. We learn that several of the residents, horrified by their sexual attraction to a gay man, beat him near to death and blinded him in one eye. One of the older residents is a drug dealer. Another man was cheating on his wife with a prostitute while his mother was dying. Still one more, who occupies a position of power, is a child molester. This is a town of the worst people imaginable.

And the only thing Linoge has on Anderson: “When you found out you were failing graduate school and under threat of losing your scholarship, you cheated on your midterms.”

It’s in the end, when Anderson has to rely on the goodness of the town to stop Linoge, that he realizes what exactly he’s up against. These aren’t people willing to put themselves on the line to stop evil. And it’s this conflict that leads to a sequence of unbearable tension, where small-town virtue and the pressure to band together become something monstrous, and Anderson has to face the underside of what he thought was the best place on Earth.

Storm Of The Century is not available for streaming anywhere. The only physical copy is a DVD that comes with eight Z-grade monster pictures; no Blu-ray release, no plans for one, nothing. One of King’s greatest works, and one of his most obscure — an unfortunate circumstance that should be rectified as soon as possible.

King fans will appreciate the familiar small-town dynamics, the King archetypes, and the twisting complication regarding New England’s virtues. Everyone who sees it will be absorbed in the slow reveal, the increasing tension, and especially the final dilemma. In fact, the ending is so perfect that it puts the lie to King’s most common criticism, that he doesn’t know how to write endings. While there might be numerous examples of him flubbing it at the last minute, this one is strong enough to bury those others in an unmarked grave.

In a career filled with highlights, Storm Of The Century is a colossus.

In his new novel, Stranger Beauty, the culprit behind this malaise is technology, especially artificial intelligence. Its characters navigate real connections in a world of simulations, wondering at which point they’ve abandoned the world for something fake. It’s an excellent novel, ponderous and dark, that places our desire for meaning against the presence of a technology that upends our relationship to work and to each other. It’s humane, ambitious, and intelligent in a way that will stick with you.

The novel’s focus is on a playwright named M. His world is in the near future, technologically advanced but not drastically more so than ours. This isn’t a post-singularity world, in other words, but one in which technology forces us into more drastic confrontations with epistemology and ontology. The novel moves through his diaries, his relationships with his wife and daughter, and his struggles with a brother, who’s been confined to the psych ward. All the while, it demonstrates technology’s pull toward more fractured, simulated versions of everything. Plays are written by machines trained on M’s work; mechanical skills, like performing on the piano, can be offloaded onto AI; even people’s brains can be recreated to replace damaged neurological tissue, making them into a living Ship of Theseus. Where, in all of this, is there space for authenticity? Where can we experience art, love, and, perhaps most crucially, God?

Events occur but don’t progress: there’s a stuttering feel, a mindless wandering from one scenario to the next, mirroring the purposelessness M senses growing around him. Key events occur off-screen, and significant relationships are given a moment before disappearing. Almost every time something wants to develop, it goes away. The novel’s world is one where things are in constant flux, everything is outside your grasp, and whatever you think will be important is snatched away.

Much of the novel is taken up by M’s diaries, which have a similar feel to Gasda’s own Writer’s Diary. They’re aphoristic and nonlinear; they move between pure interiority, philosophical digression, and plot development. There are moments when the reader feels voyeuristic, particularly when M confesses to performing a role as a literary man. We wonder: Just how authentic is he? Is it possible that what we perceive as technology’s alienating effects is simply a clearer, external version of what we already do to ourselves?

Zizek comes to mind: There is no true self, only a performance within the structure of fantasy. But it’s hard not to think of McLuhan’s observation, as well, that technology is an extension of the self, not an alien outside of it. We are already alien beings, and the proliferation of simulacra has only made this more apparent. Despite the novel’s evident sadness at the loss of connection, it never quite settles on whether that connection was there to begin with.

In addition to the diary entries and narrative sections, there is also a screenplay, and, in an echo of Ulysses, a long, single-sentence monologue, except performed by a machine. The screenplay section — one of the more interesting choices — floats between surrealistic dream sequences and characters who, in real life, struggle to connect. It reflects M’s own existential anxieties, but within the novel, the only way for anyone to screen it is through simulation. As with everything in Stranger Beauty, it’s filtered, reaching for authenticity but not quite getting there.

The formal strategies aren’t merely decorative, either: they reveal the connection between the modernist world and ours. Like them, we deal with distrust in official narratives, and the sudden, perhaps lethal intrusion of technology into the social sphere. If writers like Pound and Joyce worked through the ancients and medievals through fracture and collage, perhaps the present requires a similar approach.

But if modernism often leans toward the cold and the abstract, Stranger Beauty is a work of mourning. M is watching the present disappear into an alien future. In this way, it’s like Houellebecq’s Submission, updated for the A.I. age. But where Houellebecq saw French values and traditions upended by foreign religious influence, Gasda sees art and connection replaced by signs and images that have little referent to the real thing. It’s as if Baudrillard’s vision of postmodernity found there were still parts of the Real it hadn’t touched, and digitized them to finish the job.

These are maybe well-trod themes for anyone following artificial intelligence. But the novel is largely about rendering the experience of loss, the uncertainty of the future, and the horrifying sense that history has made a great leap without our consultation. Far from engaging in muckraking, the book says not that there’s work to be done, but that this is what things are like for us.

Stranger Beauty is a significant work. Look for it when it’s released in September.

Photo by Robynne O on Unsplash

Here, we balk. We see the new attention span as missing something crucial, which means we’re now incomplete and fragmented. We need to return to the sense of reality as possessing depth. But in Ballard, characters don’t resist the monstrous; they submit. This makes him an uncomfortable conversation partner: Shouldn’t they fight back? What about Human Agency? Alas, none of this amounts to anything. They need to see car crashes as erotic; they need to give birth to half-mutant children; they need to inject cocaine and commit mass homicide. The Symbolic Order has new demands — how do we reject them?

The interpellation: Become Monstrous. It’s the announcement of a hurricane, and these people want to stay in their homes.

“But what about agency?”

You cover your ears and move on. You scowl at the creatures surrounding you. You’re better than they are. At least you can focus…

Forget resistance for a second. Forget that the new configuration is monstrous. Everything becomes surfaces under conditions of diffuse attention, because we’re not spending the necessary time to find depth. We experience a lifetime of watching. We watch porn, play games no different from advertisements, watch short videos, watch half an hour of a movie and then forget, watch people eat lots of food, watch people talk about their routines, watch atrocity videos, watch politicians make mistakes.

A man pokes his head through the veil. He imagines bright lights, Monica Vitti with a jar of KY jelly. Instead, a voice says, “Doctors are begging you to try this one simple trick.” A series of objects — pens, dryers, fans, BookTok’s 10 most recommended novels — fly past him. The grinding noise of office labour mixes with digital burps and AI agents telling him his product has expired. The man hangs himself in the closet, but this was unnecessary. His naiveté is the culprit.

There is no One in this understanding. Multiplicity abounds, but not the multiplicity of diversity seminars: this is sheer, uncontrollable chaos. The Truth coheres for a moment, dissolves into foul-smelling gunk, then coheres elsewhere. The transcendent is protean sludge. Bataille: “the universe is something like a spider or spit” (Visions of Excess, “Formless”).

There’s no longer space for illusion. Our attention doesn’t fill the world with ghosts.

The low and constant hum of eternity was always a boiling vat of blood.

Photo by Sandro Katalina on Unsplash

Meanwhile, the Christians who debated them often appeared ill-suited to the task. They defended Young Earth creationism, literal interpretations of the Bible, and other, frankly, difficult positions to take. As the world had faced the effects of religious fundamentalism during 9/11, and the subsequent debate in American schools over teaching creationism as a science, these apologists were on their back feet from the start. What’s more, they resorted to bizarre forms of argumentation that led more to laughter than to new converts. To all appearances, the New Atheists seemed not only to be fighting ignorance but winning.

In hindsight, the picture is more nuanced. The debate format is designed for maximum self-aggrandizement: It prioritizes big moments, incentivizes participants to “dunk on” one another, and allows speakers to manipulate their audience through emotional appeals. Regarding the videos themselves, some of which became quite popular, the prescience of this virality cannot be ignored: Much of what passes for political discourse these days involves trying to recapture the energy of these moments, or similar ones that occurred on The Daily Show around the same time. The influence of this movement, in other words, is ambiguous at best.

But my main point of contention with them is their naive humanism. This could be an issue of temperament, but there have been several recent instances where I’ve found their beliefs on progress and human nature to be out of step with how I understand both. I could be wrong, of course, but I contend that the forces underlying our nature are much darker and more transgressive than humanism allows.

Let’s start with progress. Sam Harris, speaking on The Cosmic Skeptic, says the following: Some states of mind are more desirable than others. Belief systems can be understood as states of the brain. Behaviour is downstream of those states. This means that undesirable behaviour, or behaviour that impedes progress, is the result of states of mind that are themselves undesirable. He says that if we can convince people to take up positions favourable to progress, progress can be achieved. Furthermore, the more we learn about the brain, the better we can influence states of mind, and thereby create a world where progress, reason, and liberalism prevail.

But what we desire in no way resembles the world Harris proposes, and so much so that he might as well be describing an ideal world for aliens. We are constitutional pleasure-seekers. The thrill of the unnatural, the immoral, the deviant, is part of what makes us human. We pretty up our desires in moral language, and sometimes we’re persuasive. This changes nothing: Even the stated desire to “improve the world” is a desire for power, control, and the narcissistic impulse to make the outside world conform to the logic of the inner. This is so foundational that to change it would mean becoming a different animal altogether.

Furthermore, Enlightenment humanism is an ideology. It creates a fantasy landscape for the minds it has taken up residence in. The host engages in motivated reasoning and misinterprets information that challenges the ideology. But more than that, the ideology wants to spread to as many people as possible, so that it can bash the world into its desired shape. An ideology isn’t a tool for determining the truth, but a meme that wants to gain control.

Enlightenment humanism specifically desires a world of rational agents, living within the bounds of liberal democracy, engaging in scientific inquiry to promote the common good, and freeing ourselves from the bonds religion placed on us. This is utopian thinking. None of it speaks to our desire to engage in irrational frivolity, for starters. It requires an animal different from Man.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard is a sensible antidote to this way of thinking. It takes place in a luxury apartment complex, which includes a pool, a bar, a grocery store — everything one would need. Rationally, there’s no reason for conflict. But the residents go crazy nonetheless, becoming more and more alienated, murderous, and sexually deviant. They drown a dog, engage in incest, urinate on the floor, and throw people out of windows. And for what?

Just as Freud said in Civilization and Its Discontents, taking care of people’s needs is not the way to eliminate conflict. We desire conflict — more so, conflict is structural. If we eliminate it in one arena, we’ll displace it onto another. Ballard knew this, and dramatized it again and again: Cocaine Nights, Running Wild, and many others, shove characters into ideal environments, only to watch them create the conditions for murder, rape, and mayhem.

Harris could respond that these are mere examples of undesirable states of mind. But if they’re constitutional, then ridding ourselves of them is a fantasy. More to the point, if we did have a machine, say, that could gift us with the state of mind necessary to create an Enlightenment-style utopia, would we want to? What if the trade-off is the death of the imaginative faculty? And if not, are we willing to sacrifice our desire for violent mayhem solely to bring about utopia?

New Atheism had its place, and much of what it accomplished was to the good. But in its promotion of humanism, it promotes a fantasy of human nature.

The goal here was to reach a kind of enlightened state, although what that looked like was understandably vague. I was nonetheless undeterred by this and pressed on ahead, trying a variety of rituals to see if they worked.

One of these involved communing with the Greek god Hermes. The idea there was to begin with his associations — quickness, inspiration, and so on — and use those to invoke him. What I did was I drank as much coffee as I could, sat down with images of that god on my computer, as well as Flash comics. I breathed quickly, made my heart go faster, and then closed my eyes and said: “Is these anybody out there?”

Nothing happened. I tried again and the result was the same, except now I was wasted on caffeine and horrifically anxious.

Next, I did some tinkering with a Ouija board. The planchette moved, which was surprising. But I found that I would think a sentence first, only for the planchette to spell it out for me after. Was I the one making the planchette move? Was a ghost speaking into my mind first and then spelling out the message? How could one tell the difference?

I decided to consult the tarot. I was having money problems, so I did a prayer to the Egyptian god Thoth, shuffled the deck and took off the top card. Lo and behold, it was the Ten of Disks, which represents money and wealth. I was sufficiently spooked to keep trying, but after a while I forgot about them and gave up.

The problem was that no matter how much I experimented with the occult, I didn’t believe it was true. The idea that a human being can control entities through his speech, for example, seems like a gross overvaluation of human agency. This is even truer when we look at sigil magick, which involves you, at the moment of orgasm, hurling a desire into the aether, ensuring that it will come true if and only if you manage to not think about it afterwards.

I’ve never returned to my interest in the occult. I have yet, for example, to revisit Phil Hine, whose work even then struck me as delusional. I attempted to read Peter Levenda’s book The Dark God a few years ago, but he and Hine both share an interest in the occult possibilities of Lovecraft’s mythos which is at least superficially inseparable from grown men who believe Star Wars is real.

The whole thing, in other words, felt too much like a pose. I was fascinated by the prospect of willing my life into being, which, as a mentally ill, drunken wreck of a twenty-two-year-old, offered a way out of the endless terror that was my day to day. But it wasn’t a natural fit and so I set it aside and moved on.

Despite this, I have to admit I still think about Aleister Crowley. Maybe it’s the man’s biography, which involves mountain climbing, engaging in magickal wars with rival sects, and getting kicked out of Fascist Italy for bestiality. There’s also the story that he gifted Ian Fleming the “V for victory” sign, which was then given to Churchill, as counter-programming to the Nazis’ well-known memetic imagery (salutes and goose-stepping and the like).

His magickal system too appeals to the social libertarian in me, with its “Do what thou wilt” ethos and tendency toward transgression. His work as a poet, meanwhile, is fine enough as it goes, and he wrote occult detective stories for pulp magazines that are interesting if not ground-breaking. But his writings on the occult, and his specific practise of it, turned out to be quite sticky.

It would be foolish to try and summarize his system here, since not only is it too complicated for a simple blog post, but I’m not sure I understand it enough to even try. He’s notoriously difficult to read, relying as he does upon a thousand different magickal and philosophical systems; but also, it’s rarely obvious how seriously you’re supposed to take a given passage, since it’s often suffused with puns and dirty jokes. An example of this is his famous Psalm 69 in The Book Of Lies, which is titled “The Way To Succeed [Suck Seed] And The Way To Suck Eggs”, and ends with the line “Little children, love one another!”

There’s also the problem of whether he believed his system was real in the scientific sense. In an early chapter of The Lesser Key Of Solomon, Crowley makes the case that magick involves manipulating the magician’s sensory and mental experience of the world. “The spirits of the Goetia [i.e. The Lesser Key Of Solomon] are portions of the human brain. Their seals therefore represent…methods of stimulating or regulating those particular spots.”

To perform magick, then, is to enter into an altered state of consciousness, which is a far cry from the popular understanding of occultism as involving literal conjurations and curses and so on.

And yet, Crowley was more than happy for people to see him as a literal conjurer of evil. He was a mythologizer who understood the value of bad publicity. He referred to himself as “The Great Beast 666.” If a tabloid ran some sensational story about him forcing a goat upon a woman he’d fed drugs too, he’d lean into it.

One of the great challenges with Crowley is whether to separate this side of his life from his writings. On the one hand, you can engage with The Book Of The Law as the main, if ambiguous, teachings of a new religious movement; on the other, you have to ask whether Crowley’s performances are extensions of these teachings. It might be too that Thelema is little more than a preacher’s son’s attempt to shock late Victorian England, all to support both his obsession with deviant sex and increasing dependence on cocaine and heroin, in which case the whole project becomes hopelessly juvenile.

The irony here is that despite the considerable controversy around him and his teachings, Crowley has become a strangely impotent figure. Nobody reads his poems, let alone his novels; and even his great works, his religious texts, have largely fallen into obscurity. All that’s left is Crowley as a mythic Devil-worshipper.

And yet, who’s bothered by this? Most people couldn’t give less of a fuck about Satan, let alone the paganism Crowley’s work is much closer to. We live in an age where a not-insignificant number of people are attending Burning Man, reading tarot and discussing the animistic spirit of nature. We’re becoming pagans again ourselves, through a widespread return of the repressed. This has depleted the essential darkness in his work. Too bad for him, but for us as well: We can’t, at this moment, enjoy what must have been a terrifying experience — that of reading Aleister Crowley during his heyday.

What’s left is a strangely empty body of work, all written by a man who’s become nothing more than a face on a t-shirt. Maybe a future religious revival will resurrect him. But unless there’s a widespread return to Christianity at its most oppressive, there’s little chance of his work regaining the power it once had.

That his techniques don’t fucking work isn’t helping his cause either.

We’ve seen versions of this scene a thousand times, so we know — or we think we know — how it’s going to turn out. In a Friday the 13th, this is where Jason appears, smashes his fist through the glass, rips the man through the window and crushes his head between his hands. The woman would run into the woods, pursued, only to meet her end with a harpoon through the stomach.

But in City Of The Living Dead, although the villain — the ghost of a priest who’s hanged himself and thus opened the gates of hell — does appear, his appearance heralds something different. He stares at the woman, who’s transfixed by him. She opens her mouth. One by one her guts come up through her mouth until, we can only assume, her body’s hollowed out, and she collapses. Her boyfriend vomits and tries to leave. But a creature in the back seat grabs the back of his head, crushes it, and tears out part of his brain.

That’s the most memorable scene in the film, but there are plenty of others. There are also teleporting zombies, a storm of maggots, and a live burial. “Apeshit” might be one way to describe it, but that would ignore its sepulchral atmosphere, which it manages to balance with the relentless violence.

This film, and Lucio Fulci in general, came out of the Italian exploitation tradition, which produced such directors as Sergio Leone, Mario Bava and Dario Argento. For several decades, these films gave us: bloody, ravenous cannibalism; unsimulated, deviant sex; and the actual, violent deaths of animals. They were made for no money, often under less-than-ideal conditions, and proudly displayed their rough-and-readiness for all to see.

Fulci died in 1996. His biggest successes, judging by popularity (who the hell knows how much money they made), occurred between 1971 and 1988. Many elements of his movies — a zombie fighting a shark, for example — would strain some people’s conception of “good.” And, alas, he’s famous for extreme violence more than anything else, earning him the nickname “The Godfather of Gore.”

So why am I writing about him?

***

I have a firm belief that there’s no artistic hierarchy between what’s highbrow and what’s lowbrow. To me it’s a matter of emphasis, meaning certain techniques are prioritized over others. Lowbrow art tends to focus on plot, move quickly, and attract our attention with, often, unseemly subject matter. But these are techniques that can be mastered like any other, and failure to implement them properly results in low-quality art, just the same as a failure to implement mood, theme and depth of characterization produces the same result, except in the highbrow sphere.

Fulci was a true master of the techniques required of him. When he needed to be gross, he was disgusting. When he needed to be weird, he was the weirdest. The emotions were all over the top and the plots were ludicrous, but at all times he was memorable, which was what he needed to be.

And yet there’s something else about him as well, something that only a handful of Italian horror directors accomplished: When you watch a Lucio Fulci movie, you know it’s him behind the camera. Many of the others blend in together, working with a variety of shared techniques until whole movies become indistinguishable. But when the director is Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci, there’s no question whose movie it is.

He was an auteur in that sense. His obsessions, his worldview, it all feels like it’s right there in front of you. He managed to elevate the exploitation film without turning it into homework.

On the one hand, then, I’m arguing that to be dismissive of lowbrow works is to miss out on some of the great craftsmen in any medium. But I’m also saying that amongst the lowbrow, there are geniuses working in that register, who manage to produce exceptional work without sacrificing what makes the work lowbrow in the first place.

In other words, just because the director is an auteur doesn’t mean they won’t thrill you, disgust you, titillate you. It’s possible for them to deliver the goods.

***

New York Ripper is, for me, the sleaziest of all his movies. Much of it takes place in the grosser parts of Manhattan, including a sequence in a live sex club; the violence is extreme enough it will challenge even a hardened fan of exploitation cinema; and the whole mood is that of pervasive filth, with sex and violence colliding in ways that elicit novel forms of discomfort.

And then how’s this for dream logic: The killer’s voice is like Donald Duck’s, quacking in that back-of-the-throat fashion. The lead detective refers to him as “Duck,” which makes for some funny exchanges (“Alright, Duck. You better tell me where she is.”)

I’ll speak from experience here and say that I love this movie. I love the stupid Donald Duck voice and the nauseous filth of it all.

But I’d also ask how this movie could have improved by any other director. Should it have been less filthy? Should it have been less gory? What would the effect have been had the footage quality been higher, or the actors better trained? Are we to believe that a New York Ripper directed by James Wan, written by Jordan Peele and starring Michael B Jordan would have been a better movie?

Is there not something transcendent about how fucking cheap and gnarly and exploitative this movie is?

***

Now, Fulci was a master craftsman. So he didn’t only work in the sleazy, gory register. He made classier movies like The Psychic and Don’t Torture A Duckling. The latter film in particular is a much more thoughtful and introspective movie than you might expect, even if it does end in a man smashing his head to bits falling off a cliffside.

And yet whether or not he’d done that kind of work, he would be worth talking about. A master at making gore films is a master nonetheless. This is where the issue of taste really does rear its head: it might not be to your liking, and it might only be a niche skill, but it is a skill. Some exploitation films are better than others, and the reason often comes down to which filmmakers are better at handling that type of material.

If you don’t believe me, watch Fulci’s The Beyond followed by HG Lewis’ The Wizard Of Gore. You’ll see.

But even if the details of his craft are of no interest to you, there are still the films themselves: Surreal, nihilistic journeys into pure horror, such as: Zombie Flesh Eaters; The House By The Cemetery; Manhattan Baby. Each of these is unique, strange, unsettling. Even when they’re tough to watch, they’re never not entertaining. You can more or less pick one at random and find something unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Look, I love him. I’ve been watching his movies since my late teens. Many of them, like City Of The Living Dead, I come back to regularly.

Maybe you have to bring some creativity to his movies, so you can see past the occasional cheap effect. But if you can do that, I promise you’ll find a body of work that argues for the greatness of the lowbrow, and of cinematic depravity, better than 1300 words by yours truly ever could.

And this is a shame. Because Bloch’s output is one of the most readable, enjoyable, and varied of any writer in any period of literary history.

Early History

I first read Psycho when I was a young man. My best guess is I was about twelve. I still have that copy, which is a small paperback with a red cover and Janet Leigh’s black and white screaming face on it. I hadn’t seen the movie at that time, so I got to experience the great twists and turns in a pure and virginal state. I remember being floored by the revelation that Bates was dressing up as his mother and doing the killings himself and immediately seeking out the movie to see how it compared. (I still prefer the book.)

(Source: https://milwaukeerecord.com/city-life/bloch-buster-milwaukees-connection-to-psycho-h-p-lovecraft-and-robert-bloch/)

At some point, long after my first encounter, I became aware that not only was Bloch an astonishingly prolific writer, but that Psycho, although influential and great beyond measure, isn’t representative of his body of work. In fact, Bloch didn’t just write psychological horror, or crime, but also science fiction, supernatural horror, and much else. He wrote for the page, the screen, and television. He wrote for magazines and he wrote novels. He was a rare kind of working writer who you could put in virtually any scenario and he’d come up with something worth spending your money on.

To begin with, the man was a protege of H.P. Lovecraft and originally wrote cosmic horror in that style. These stories can be found in the collection The Opener Of The Way, among others. One of the stories in that collection is the famous “The Shambler From The Stars,” a Lovecraftian tale that features an invisible space vampire — one who, comically, kills a character modelled on H.P. Lovecraft himself, by breaking open his neck and drinking from it. (Lovecraft thought this was so great that he killed Bloch off in one of his own final tales, “The Haunter Of The Dark”.)

At some point, Bloch became one of the most popular writers at Weird Tales, the same magazine that gave us not just H.P. Lovecraft, but Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, as well as stories by Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber and Joseph Payne Brennan. (If you’ve never read these three, you should correct that ASAP.) He published an unthinkable number of stories in that magazine and others, all in his late teens and early twenties.

But he first broke out with a story published in the July, 1943 issue of Weird Tales. That tale is known as “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper.”

The plot centres around the idea that Jack the Ripper may be an immortal being who periodically surfaces in order to sacrifice people so that he can prolong his own life. The story became famous enough that Bloch adapted it for radio, and for the rest of his life remained associated with the Ripper: He wrote a story for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions on the subject, and in the 1980s returned with a novel called Night Of The Ripper. Also, for Star Trek fans, the episode where the Enterprise encounters the alien intelligence they realize is Jack the Ripper, was penned by Bloch himself. (He wound up writing three episodes for the original series, all of which are worth checking out.)

Once he transitioned to writing novels, his interest in aberrant psychology led him to writing more realistic crime stories. His debut, The Scarf, is notable here: The story of a man becoming a writer, selling his first stories, getting a job in Hollywood — but he’s a stone cold killer, who strangles women with a ladies’ scarf.

Even reading it now, the quality is undeniable: The plot is fast-moving, the prose clean, the characters well-developed. Bloch’s first novel, in other words, is a bit of a ripper.

The Scarf was published in 1947. For the next decade, he wrote a number of other crime novels, among them The Kidnaper and Shooting Star. He also wrote science fiction, including This Crowded Earth, and a number of short stories.

Psycho was published in 1959. In 1960, Hitchcock adapted it. And Bloch’s career took a turn.

Movies

In the wake of Psycho’s success, Bloch found himself sought after as a writer for the big and small screens, producing both originals and adaptations of his own work. His first was titled The Couch, the story for which had originated with Blake Edwards, famous for directing the Pink Panther movies. (Fun fact: The second Pink Panther movie, A Shot In The Dark, was co-written by William Peter Blatty, future author of The Exorcist.)

The most notable from this period is a film titled Strait-Jacket. Directed by William Castle of House On Haunted Hill Fame, and starring Joan Crawford, this is a proto-slasher about a woman who comes home one night to find her husband in bed with another woman. She kills them both with an axe, cutting their heads off, all in full view of her young daughter. She’s placed in an asylum and twenty years later, enters into the world again, meeting her daughter for the first time since being put away. But coinciding with her arrival are a series of axe murders, all involving decapitation. Has she begun killing again?

(Source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058620/)

What makes this movie special is how character-focused it is. Crawford’s Lucy is a fish out of water, unsure of herself, worried about embarrassing her daughter while wanting to impress her. When she recalls her time in the asylum, there’s a palpable agony in her emotional displays; when she embarrasses her daughter, we feel her shame.

Diane Baker, who plays daughter Carol, is sweet as can be. She wants her mother to feel at home but often resorts to the parental role when Lucy loses control of her emotions. But there’s more to Carol than we might think — a much deeper, traumatic wound. Diane Baker plays this quite well, and shows off an impressive range, but she’s working with Bloch’s material.

The pairing of Bloch with William Castle is quite inspired in itself. One of Bloch’s signatures is an interest in the lurid and sensational, but in a way that never loses sight of its entertainment value. Castle, meanwhile, was essentially a carnival barker who made movies, often employing a similar mixture of horror and humour to attract attention.

They would collaborate again on a movie called The Night Walker, which is inferior but still enjoyable. After this, Bloch moved on to work for British production company, and Hammer Films competitor, Amicus.

With Amicus he produced six films, three of which are anthologies adapted from his own short fiction. It would be much too time-consuming to go into all of them here, so I’ll simply say that every one of the anthology movies is worth watching (and can be found on the streamer Shout TV). In addition, there’s also the surprisingly awesome The Deadly Bees, which is, as you may have guessed, about a deadly type of bee, swarms of which which seem to be targeting and murdering people. It’s an insane premise, but with Bloch’s tight plotting it becomes not just entertaining, but rewatchable.

Downturn… Or is it?

After his final film with Amicus, an anthology film called Asylum, his screenwriting career went into a spiral. He wrote a few TV movies that weren’t well-received. At least one of them, The Dead Don’t Die, can be found on YouTube. Bloch was supposedly not happy with how these turned out. They were to be his final forays into the field.

Of course, he still wrote novels, many of which are among his greatest. Night World is another proto-slasher about an escapee from an asylum; Strange Eons is a return to Lovecraft, written in his mature style; and Lori is a wild tale, one which may test your patience until the final reveal — but that final reveal is shocking and horrifying enough to retroactively make the whole book into something much scarier than it had appeared to be.

And yet, Bloch’s work eventually went out of fashion, until, Psycho aside, his books went out of print. Finding his books now can be something of a challenge — I had to get them through eBay, which, once I became more or less obsessed with collecting them, turned into quite the expensive habit. Even then, many of them are in terrible condition: My copy of The Couch, the novelization he produced of his own screenplay, broke into several stiff pieces the second I opened it.

Luckily, Valancourt Books announced not so long ago that they were putting Bloch back in print. So far they’ve produced new editions of Strange Eons, The Scarf, Night Of The Ripper, as well as the story collections Midnight Pleasures, The Opener Of The Way and Pleasant Dreams. These are salutary editions of these books and well worth checking out. (They’re also much more affordable than the originals I bought a few years ago. You can find them here: https://www.valancourtbooks.com)

And yet, Bloch remains, at this moment, a strangely marginal figure: once a titan of horror, now long usurped; known largely for his attachment to Alfred Hitchcock and little else.

Maybe it’s time to fix that.

The Pitch: or; Why Should I Read Bloch?

The short pitch is that Bloch was an extraordinary writer.

Purely on the level of craft, he was all but unbeatable. There’s never a sense that he’s wasted time or space. His characters come to life with only a few deft touches. Even in the short form he could be incredibly suspenseful, and his surprise endings are among the most memorable in history (and often quite funny).

(Source: https://suntup.press/authors/robert-bloch/)

The reason he may seem quaint today is because horror fiction is a different beast than it was even a few years ago. Its focus is on metaphor and the quality of the prose, in addition to other, more ideological concerns. Bloch never worked in this mode, and likely would have found it annoying. He told stories, he was entertaining. Judging by his work alone, he didn’t have a pretentious bone in his body.

His work is a reminder that a focus on craft, and an interest in storytelling, yields incredible results. With these tools at his disposal, he wrote memorable story after memorable story, in a variety of media, and in every genre one could think of. He worked for decades, slugging it out through the good times and the bad.

If you’re a reader, you can start just about anywhere. Psycho is a great novel. The Scarf, Night World, and the H.H. Holmes-inspired American Gothic are all home runs. For short stories, you might seek out The Best Of Robert Bloch, but any of his collections will do.

For movies, go with Strait-Jacket, The Deadly Bees or any of the three anthologies.

There’s much more to Bloch than Psycho, and it’s time he gets the respect he deserves.

Horror movies, no matter their reputation, are never as scary as you think they’ll be.

I know, not really shocking. And actually more or less intuitive, when you remember that what you don’t know, what you can barely imagine, is always scarier than what you see in front of you. Films, being a visual medium, are constantly on their back foot here, since they necessarily have to show you something. This is why most movies will delay the reveal of the monster until later in the runtime, relegating it to the shadows, and the imagination, until absolutely necessary.

And then, we’re often met with something like this.

This is partly why horror is so much more effective in prose literature, generally speaking. Authors in the Weird tradition, like Machen and Lovecraft, made entire careers out of hinting at the supernatural, revealing its presence through its effects, and the uncanny. A story like “The White People” horrifies precisely because so much of what’s happening occurs just slightly out of frame. And Machen, the author of that story, can get away with this because the medium doesn’t require him to be explicitly visual. He uses stream of consciousness (what S.T. Joshi refers to as a “child’s babble”), and a Russian nesting doll structure, in a way that’s impossible to replicate on the screen.

But what if a movie did borrow the techniques of Weird fiction? The risk of boredom is high. I’ve certainly seen movies that lean too hard into subtlety and ambiguity, where the result is a total slog.

A movie that did so successfully, however…?

Might that not be the scariest movie of all time?

Noroi: The Curse

I watched this movie a few days ago more or less on a whim. I have a subscription to Arrow Player, which, if you’re a fan of cult movies and exploitation and so forth, is one of the best, along with Shout TV. I scrolled through until I stopped at their J-horror collection, saw that some movie called Noroi was the first in the playlist, shrugged and threw it on.

For the next couple hours I was glued.

In the opening minutes of this 2005 Japanese film, we’re told that a paranormal investigator has gone missing. This man was working on a documentary, which is connected to his disappearance. What follows, the movie tells us, is the footage he collected through the investigation, and leading up to his disappearance.

So, yes, a found footage movie, a mockumentary. We’ve seen it all before, we think: Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield. Some of us may have even seen August Underground’s Mordum. (If you haven’t, I dare you.)

Believe me, this is something different.

To describe the plot in detail is to spoil one of the most skillful aspects of the movie, which is the slow, agonizing reveal of the supernatural intruder’s nature. Every scene gives us a little more and every new piece of information is creepier than the last. If you think it can’t get worse than missing children and “ectoplasmic worms,” you’re wrong.

Noroi is about encountering the supernatural as something utterly alien. It, the supernatural, has a logic we don’t quite understand. When it manifests, it’s largely as the uncanny, such as when people become suddenly stiffened, as if in a seizure, and begin moaning raspily. One of the central characters is a psychic, and his life is a complete mess: He covers himself and his home in tinfoil, because he wants the visions, the voices, the intuitions, to stop.

The psychic has a vision on camera: He screams, grabs at his head. The camera glitches and we see faces, alien and cold. Strangers share the same dream. Sleepwalkers twist their bedsheets until they look like a magician’s linking rings — or, perhaps, worms, one locked within the other. An epidemic of suicides breaks out.

And on. And on. A slow motion avalanche of horror.

This movie grabbed hold of my brain from the first second and hasn’t let go since. I’ve seen ‘em all, folks, but believe me, this is the creepiest fucking thing imaginable. Even if you’re bored of found footage, you haven’t seen anything like this.

Not just unsettling.

Profound. Terrifying.

***

Interestingly, although it was released in Japan in 2005, it’s only become available in North America recently. As far as I can tell, the streaming service Shudder was the first to release it in Canada, in 2017. Arrow Video also has a boxset of J-horror movies that includes it, called J-Horror Rising. Before this — again, so far as I can tell — its availability outside Japan was severely limited.

They must have thought there was no market for it. In a way, this is understandable: It’s not bombastic, like with slashers or supernatural movies like The Nun. And it’s not “elevated horror” either. It doesn’t lean into philosophy or allegory or use arthouse aesthetics. Its whole raison d’être is to be fucking scary.

Noroi is the first movie I’ve seen that replicates the unbearable dread of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. To the next person who says that Lovecraft can’t be filmed because all of his horrors are said to be “indescribable,” this movie is the rebuttal.

It’s not like the kinds of movies we usually get in this part of the world. It’s something different.

The thrill I felt at imagining these characters, while being much too young to see the movies, was all-consuming. I had to think about them, because I didn’t know what they were like.

Since then, there hasn’t been a week of my life that hasn’t included horror fiction in some capacity. I’ve seen almost all of the major films, and many hundreds of the minor ones; I’ve read most the major novels and short story collections; I’ve read the magazines, gone to conventions, taken part in making short films myself. Even as I’ve taken a dive into literary fiction, art films, science fiction and classical music, the machinery of horror has always been running, sometimes quietly in the background, but never ceasing.

And yet, “inheritance” doesn’t quite answer the question of why it is that I’ve stuck with it for so long. There’s something about this genre that appeals to me on a deep level, just as it had with my grandmother, and many other members of my (apparently Addams-like) family.

But what is it? What is this thing about horror that makes me so obsessed with it?

***

Let’s start with a different question: What is it that a horror story does to us when we read or watch it?

There as many answers to this as we can imagine. For some, scary stories allow us to face our fears in a way that’s safe. This might also allow us to transpose our fears of the real world onto a fantasy environment, so that while we’re afraid of war and disease, we instead watch movies about ghosts and zombies: we feel the fear, but over something harmless, and so horror offers an escape.

But then S.T. Joshi, in his book The Modern Weird Tale, points out that someone like Lovecraft opens up new dimensions of horror for us, and in such a way as to reshape our understanding of things outside the story. Lovecraft’s fiction shows us that reality is something worse than we’d thought: cold, indifferent, passively hostile. To read Lovecraft isn’t to sublimate your fears, but to develop new ones, and come away more terrified than you’d been before.

In addition to the above, there are works that expose the fragility of the body, which would include many gore films; works that use the supernatural (or the “weird,” as it’s often called) as a psychological or political allegory; and works that are antagonistic to social norms, such as David Cronenberg’s film The Brood, which portrays motherhood, that sacred of all sacred relationships, as something domineering, threatening.

Horror can argue for the preservation of the status quo — and, in fact, does so quite often. Consider this oft-used setup: Someone, usually an academic or some other nosy type, discovers something old, an artifact, that catches his interest. He disturbs this artifact, intending to use it, say, for the furtherance of his career. In doing so, he awakens an ancient evil, one which seeks revenge. Unspeakable horrors happen to him, which can only be stopped by setting things in order again — ie, returning the artifact, speaking the magic words, using the tools of the past.

We can read this type of story (which is the basis for every M.R. James ghost story, as well as every story about mummies) as suggesting that the past is sacred, and shouldn’t be tampered with. Its influence is inescapable. We need to treat history with respect, or else risk being undone by our hubris. It is, to use a political term, “reactionary.”

Meanwhile, other stories are vehemently opposed to the status quo, and seek to expose it as hiding something monstrous. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is my own favourite example of this: The Family, in this film, is not the bedrock institution we’re told it is by media and politicians. In fact, the deeper we go into the family’s unconscious, the more we see it as hiding grotesque, Freudian inversions of itself, where people wear skin masks, consume the flesh of others, brutalize and control one another — all performed in decayed houses, boiling under extreme heat.

In other words, there is no one answer to what horror is or can do: It can take an infinite number of perspectives, using a dizzying number of scenarios, and all while appealing to the emotions or the intellect or both.

But if it can do all of these things, then what’s the connecting tissue? What is it about these narratives that make them so appealing?

***

A horror story starts with the premise that something is wrong. There’s a dark corner of our psyches, of reality, of politics — of anything, really — and the story builds around how fictional people react to this, either as it’s discovered or as it manifests by coming out into the world.

Maybe this “something wrong” is supernatural, as with demons or ghosts. Maybe it’s something more mundane, like a serial killer. Whatever the case, without this deviation into the realm of the grotesque, the terrifying, or some other similarly negative emotional realm, the kind of story we’re dealing with is not horror.

And therein lies the answer. The key to its appeal is that it dares to probe the darker material and treat it as something dark. It doesn’t deal in whimsical ghosts, or aliens who just want to go home. It says that ghosts are antagonistic. That alien life is mind-numbingly hostile. That there are corners of the world — maybe even the world itself — which you really, really don’t want to know the truth about, but will have to nonetheless.

The characters in these stories can be brave and conquer the evil. They can be cowards and succumb to it. They can simply be overpowered by the level of monstrosity. In every case, they encounter a thing that should not be, but is, and are forced to reckon with it.

As will we all be.

***

Let’s bring it back to the original question: What is it about horror that makes me so obsessed with it?

My own experience of the world is as something dark and threatening. In my mental universe, there’s very little room for positivity, in whatever form. There’s no sense in going any deeper into it, but that’s an important detail. Horror, then, is a kind of fictionalized, symbolic form of how the world appears to me in waking life.

The appeal of horror, in other words, is that it’s true.

Not true in a literal sense, although maybe. There are plenty of people who believe in ghosts and demons, possession and curses. That there are serial killers and controlling, murderous tyrants is inarguable. But where horror is really true, is in revealing that even the things we hold most dear to us disguise something terrible. We don’t have to look far, or deep, to find what that is — but sooner or later, it’s a reality we’ll all have to face.

Horror, then, is a kind of counter-programming: The world wants us to believe that everything is great all the time, that love wins in the end, that the arc of history bends toward justice. Horror doesn’t always dismiss these things, but it does ask what else might be lurking among them.

Even when justice prevails, horror wants to know: At what cost?

As a uniquely versatile genre, horror can choose to what extent it shows us the terrors. This is largely on a sliding scale between funny or miserable.

But however it presents itself, the fact of dark and unspeakable things is always part of the deal. Whether we choose to be entertained by it, or scared into catatonia, is largely up to us.

Photo by Sam Barber on Unsplash

The contents of this book will lead you to the discovery of one of the most bizarre and unsettling developments in the annals of literary history. The Great Storytelling Massacre.
***
“Beyond Those Shadowed Hills”, CHM

At some point — although I’m not sure when exactly — a new type of story took over the science fiction and horror magazines. This is the type with a nostalgic or melancholic tone, which focuses on a particularly likeable character in a fairly low-stakes situation, and who ultimately makes a moral choice that, more often than not, will resonate with the progressive worldview.

Its stylistic origins remain a mystery to me: Does it come from an author whose work I haven’t encountered? Is it taught in writing workshops? I’ve looked, believe me, and I’ve never gotten to the bottom of it. Whatever the case, it’s everywhere, and, I hate to say it, it irks the bejesus out of me.

“Shadowed Hills” is one of those stories. It ticks all the boxes tonally and ideologically; it features a character of no moral complexity; it is, in the end, quite nice and harmless.

Additionally, simply on the level of craft, the tale has nothing to recommend in it. It’s not so much a story as it is a toneless whirlwind of information, with a vague conflict that presents little to no trouble, and such a saccharine, affirmational ending that it made me wonder why the writer would have chosen to work within horror at all.

As the opening story in July’s Cosmic Horror Monthly, the issue is not off to a good start.

The plot of “Shadowed Hills” centres around a fantastical world governed by a repressive social order whose nature we’re only given hints of. The hero, a man named Callum, was sent to work on a farm as a boy, where he sheers wool from the hinds of giant spiders, which in turn live underground in what seems to be a massive colony. The social order restricts the number of eggs female spiders can lay (via a process that’s unclear to me), destroying the ones that exceed this, and allowing the others their birth. One day, Callum learns that one of the spiders he’s sheering is pregnant, and has been hiding these eggs in order to keep them safe. Callum knows what will happen if these eggs are discovered, but is powerless to do anything to help — unless, that is, he intends to let all the giant spiders out from their captivity.

But if he does that, we might be wondering, what level of danger is he putting the rest of humanity in?

As it turns out, none at all.

What could have been a story of great moral complexity is instead resolved quite easily. He’s even given a heads up from a woman who can see into the future that when he goes through with his plan, whatever it is, everything will turn out alright. Unsurprisingly, when he makes the decision to let the spiders escape, and thus free the pregnant one from having to sacrifice her eggs, his only reaction, as they run off into the desert, is to reflect on just how good a deed this was.

Some dilemma, eh?

The story is nice (in a bad way), moral (in a worse way), and entirely without tension. If only the author had seen fit to bake in some consequences for Callum’s actions, to put him between some kind of rock and hard place, maybe there could have been redemption after all that tedious worldbuilding. But as it stands, all we’re told is that a nice guy did a nice thing and as a result there’s nothing to worry about.

Grade: C-

“L’école de Création,” Íde Hennessy

This is a fun entry: one that skips out on horrifics for something much less serious, but with one hell of an original premise, enough so that it carries the story all on its own.

It begins with a group of employees from a struggling company, sent on a team-building exercise. They’re to learn the art of clowning in a building that used to house a hippie commune, or something of that sort. However, when one of the employees mimes opening a chest, something actually comes out of this made-up chest — something invisible and dangerous; something that may or may not be connected to those hippies…

I’ve never read anywhere a story that features a made-up, mimed chest that unleashes an actual creature. So, again, its originality is beyond question. But then the invisible creature is fought using the power of imagination and that was too much for me.

I’m an adult reading a magazine that named itself after the genre of cosmic horror. Surely it’s not too much to ask that the tales not contain middle-grade nonsense?

And yet, what a premise.

Grade: C+

“Other Duties Required,” Theodore Hill

Cyberpunk and horror are close bedfellows. You can see this especially in Cronenberg, and in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, where the mixture of man and machine produces monstrosity. For comparison, in a writer like Bruce Sterling, this is often utopian, or at least neutral.

“Other Duties Required” sticks with the monstrosity angle; and the result is fascinating, gripping, and genuinely horrifying.

Still, it’s a shame about the ending.

The story revolves around a company employee who, in order to make some extra cash, signs up to be his boss’ artistic subject. Essentially, what is boss does is hooks him up to biotech, where she’ll read off a variety of words centred around a theme, and then he, the subject, will experience that as a scene. For example, she says words related to fire, and he experiences himself burning alive. As this happens, a novel is being created within his body, in a kind of womb. Once enough sequences have gone through his system, the book is complete, and ready for publication.

It’s a crazy premise.

The first half of the story, which focuses on the sequence of events leading to the book being cut out from his body (and ending when his intestines spill into his lap) is fantastic. It’s visceral, it’s insane, it’s everything you’d want a cyberpunk-horror hybrid to be.

The second half, however, is not as interesting as the first. This is made up of a scene in which he negotiates his way out of being the subject for another book (or a whole series, as his boss suggests), only to learn that if he does drop out, he’ll have to get the biotech surgically removed from his body, which he’ll be on the hook for expense-wise. Realizing he can’t afford that, what else is a fellow to do but agree to continue?

This is a much more low-key scene than the first, which is interesting structurally, but in practice comes across as a significant loss in intensity. A part of me wonders if this is because the author is trying to make a political point, in which case the story would have suffered in order to do so; but even if not, it’s just not a boring scene, and the whole story suffers as a result.

Still, the power of that first half is unarguable. It shows real imagination, real raw ability on behalf of the writer, and is more than enough to earn a read.

Grade: B

“Articulation,” Margo Pecha

Another trend I don’t understand is the ubiquitous use of either the second person, the present tense, or both. Still another is the use of magic realism which, perhaps because it’s a bit rougher around the edges, passes itself off as horror. Combine all of these trends, and what do we have?

Surely CHM can do better than this.

The story, such as it is, is about the reader and his/her wife (how else am I supposed to understand the second person pov except that I’m in the book?), who discover sets of teeth growing in their backyard. I, the character in the book, collect these in a room of the house. I also discover teeth in the basement. I tell my wife that the weird sounds we hear are “just the house settling.”

I don’t know what to do with this. The characters in the story, once they encounter the teeth, don’t seem particularly disturbed by this; they’re intrigued, sure, but as is this is a sort of magic realism tale, it doesn’t pose any metaphysical or epistemological problems, at least not for the narrator. And in the end, there’s no indication as to what happened, how it will continue, how anything changes — nothing of the sort.

I’m not ignorant to the tropes and techniques of experimental fiction, of surrealism or magic realism; but I am curious as to what accounts for its proliferation. And why the experiments with person and tense? What do these add to the field, if anything?

If the classic horror story in the vein of King, Campbell, Lovecraft, Matheson and Bloch is to go by the wayside, surely we don’t have to replace it with enigmatic surrealism.

Grade: D

INTERLUDE

A number of ideas are circling through my head right now, chief among them: AM I OUT OF TOUCH?

Let’s lay it all out on the table. There are many horror greats, too many to name, but what they all have in common, this pantheon of horror writers, is a dedication to horror storytelling, in all its myriad forms.

Consider the classics: The Exorcist, The Shining, Ghost Story, “The Call Of Cthulhu,” Psycho: At no point do they try and impress you with literary pyrotechnics, virtue signalling, or the aspirational morality of their characters. They, and many others like them, are more than keen to present a horror tale that’s thematically complicated, atmospherically rich, and built out of the long and honourable tradition that came before it.

They grew out of their predecessors, adding new and interesting developments along the way, and left the field in a better state than when they found it.

The kind of horror we get in magazines like CHM and Nightmare skews toward something different. More often than not, they’re self-consciously literary to the point of banality. They lack the requisite atmosphere and suspense required (and yes, I do think those are required) of a horror tale. They don’t seem to come from anywhere either, but exist in a self-referencing feedback loop with other writers who are also being published in these magazines.

My suspicion, in fact, is that these writers may not be interested in horror at all. After all, where can we detect the influence of Poe, or Ira Levin, or T.E.D. Klein?

Now, let me be clear: Outsider perspectives are necessary for the growth of fiction, including horror. Peter Straub started as a literary writer largely influenced by Henry James. William Peter Blatty began as a writer of comedies (including the Peter Sellers classic A Shot In The Dark). Both of these writers brought their outside influences into the field and improved it vastly.

The question is what outsiders are bringing into the field, not that outsiders are bringing in anything at all. Straub brought a literary sensibility that elevated horror significantly. Great. Ramsey Campbell introduced Nabokov’s unreliable narrators are close attention to language. Also great. But both of these men also relied on the field of horror itself to craft their fiction: They worked within ghost stories, cosmic horror, and stories about serial killers, while elevating them with the techniques from the literary side.

The current crop of short story writers seems to rely more on George Saunders, Barthleme, and fellas of that ilk, while adding enough darkness that there’s really nothing else to call it except kind-of-horror. It’s lit fiction dipping its toes into dark waters.

Does this make the stories bad? No. Does it make me yearn for something more like the stories I love? Of course.

Does that make me out of touch?

I mean, yeah. It does. Something’s going on in the field that I don’t understand. I don’t enjoy these stories, but they’re the style du jour, and obviously people enjoy them enough that the magazines keep buying them. (Although, many of these magazines are going through a tough financial period, which may have something to do with this.)

Furthermore, whether or not I enjoy them is nobody’s concern. Nobody needs to bend over backwards to accommodate my tastes.

At the same time, I feel something’s been lost. Horror is capable of many things, but this new style strikes me as vacuous and self-indulgent. Call me stodgy all you want, but a return to storytelling, to the techniques of Matheson and King, would elevate the short form in horror significantly. People like storytelling, storytelling is capable of immense power, and to ignore it in favour of prose poetry and endless peons to everyone’s favourite political program is, I believe, to do a disservice to a great and venerable genre.

Anyway, the interlude has gone on too long. This is now the end.

Don’t read this issue. Just fucking read Ramsey Campbell and shit.

Photo by Max Kleinen on Unsplash

Encountering a great horror story is, to me, an unparalleled experience. This applies to everything from the atmospheric to the gory, but I also obviously have my preferences and no doubt some of that will be apparent here. If and when it does, I’m not holding myself up as the barometer of good taste, but since these are my thoughts, I dunno, what did you expect?

***

Starting us off then is issue #4 of The Skull & Laurel, published by the mighty Tenebrous Press. Tenebrous is an indie publisher that specializes in what they call New Weird Horror — by this, meaning not the “New Weird” as exemplified by authors like China Mieville, but a specific subgenre defined by “chaotic genre blends and rampant social themes without straying too far from the Horror core”. The Skull & Laurel, then, is one of their showcases for short works in this vein, the other of which is called Brave New Weird.

As for this issue, it’s a bit of a mixed bag for me. There are stories in here that I think work really well, but there are others that typify, for me, some trends that have grown a bit stale. Still, the good stuff is worth highlighting and the magazine itself has a few interesting things going on besides fiction, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Also, I got an ARC but it will be out later this month (end of July).

***

Firstly, the good.

The issue opens really strong with a story called “Alligator Uniform,” by J.B. Kish, about the last two old men in a dying Louisiana town, both of whom despise each other. One day, one of them is eaten by an alligator, and the other decides to do battle with this creature, despite his advanced age. It doesn’t fit with the New Weird Horror thing, and it’s not even particularly horror-adjacent, but it is a good story in the classic, non-experimental sense. I’d recommend this one to anybody and challenge them not to root for the old man, despite him being an enormous bastard.

“The Night Market” by Erin Brown was a creepy tale about a husband and wife who have to make regular offerings to some supernatural creature that comes to their house, or else suffer the consequences. The unnamed creature is definitely the highlight of this, as the writer repeatedly reinforces just how overpowering a force She is, and how completely at her mercy the husband and wife are. There’s some gory bits in the end that were fun too, but mostly the story sticks to a pervasive sense of dread, and pulls it off quite well.

There’s also a one-page comic at the end that I thought was fantastic. It features someone who sees a unicorn, is excited, and waves at the creature. The creatures notices this and approaches this person. All appears calm and serene — how could it not be, given the discovery of the unicorn? However, the unicorn quickly, and for no reason, stabs this person through the heart with their horn, and then flies off, leaving this person to die.

Simple, mean-spirited, and told entirely through images: definitely a highlight of the issue.

***

On the so-so side, I’d mention the second story “Prostheses” by Mar Vincent. This is a story that throws you right into its world without holding your hand, which is nice; it allows you to discover the details through a process of unfolding, giving you the satisfaction of piecing it together on your own and through context. Maybe it’s just my love for Conrad, but I like that sort of thing.

What holds the story back, in my view, is that while its setup, about someone who comes out of the ocean and puts on prosthetic limbs in order to climb a mountain, is quite interesting, it quickly reveals itself as allegory, and thereby loses all sense of urgency. It’s not a story, in other words, but a series of images corresponding to the author’s political ideals — an essay disguised as fiction.

Expect something more akin to a parable than a narrative and you’ll be fine. For myself, I felt some sleight of hand trick had duped me into thinking I was reading something else, so it’s not for me.

“Stigm—” is perhaps a better story than “Prostheses,” but it’s quite messy in a surprising way, and also suffers from the author’s insistence on expressing their political beliefs. This one is the story of a young woman who wakes up experiencing stigmata the morning she’s to attend church. She tells her mother, who decides to bring her to the local pastor and see what he makes of it. This is a good setup, in my estimation, and it could have led to an interesting story. Instead, there’s no sense of character, of things unfolding or developing — just a few opportunities for the writer to express their position on Christianity, and then it’s over. (That it ends in a very YA fashion where the girl discovers some hidden power has been gifted to her doesn’t help much either.)

***

On the negative end, I’d point to the flash-length prose poems to start us off. These are the ones which typify a stale trend in modern fiction, which I mentioned earlier: the lyrical, plotless story, with a melancholy tone, and featuring some tangential speculative element. I don’t understand how or why this particular style of speculative writing took off, nor where it came from, really. But more than that, it’s been a mainstay for over a decade, which means, surely, that we’re due for a change.

A similar-yet-different set of problems plague a story called “‘Again!’ Atabey Commands,” which at the very least differs from the others in degree of imaginative scope. This one is about gods, and in particular a Universal Mother goddess who forces some degree of other godlike beings to tell a story again and again. The prose is worth looking at, for reasons we’ll get to in a second:

The forces behind the creation of all things — primordial light, ancient ocean bottoms, the arrangement of constellations — clash within Atabey as she focuses all her power on crushing the compulsion. Midway through the hundredth rendition of the Iguanaboína story, the taínos fall to the ground, broken and unconscious. The dance is finally over.

But the compulsion does not go away because it is suppressed. It only strengthens itself, creates roots that spread through Atabey and bring out the manifestation of the worst things inside of her. The counterpart of Iguanaboína. A being whose sole purpose is destruction.

A being called Guabancex.

This style could have been copied and pasted from a thousand other stories I read all the time, and in a variety of magazines. Where it came from, I don’t know, but if you doubt my claim that it’s everywhere, I challenge you to read even this very issue of this very magazine and not find it in at least four of the stories therein. (I could also challenge you to read Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons because you’ll absolutely find it in both of those publications.) It’s a style that feel superficial, because it constantly draws attention to itself; it strives for something between poetic and bombastic, but comes out flat.

The following two stories after this one, “Kapre’s Calling” and “No Treaty For Old Gods,” also fell flat for me largely because of their use of a YA-level protagonist. This is the young woman who’s good at hunting, who knows her way around the forest, whose moral centre is unassailable, and whose special ability, magical or otherwise, will help save her people, who are under attack from some person or group of people who are unusually possessed by vice. She’s aspirational, this protagonist, but she’s also one-dimensional, befitting her appeal to children.

This is unfortunate, right? That we’re transplanting characters from YA into horror fiction? I dunno, maybe this is just me, but given that this is a genre that’s been taken quite seriously by a number of genius-level writers (M.R. James, Ramsey Campbell, H.P. Lovecraft), surely it deserves more respect than turning it into children’s literature for stunted adults?

***

Finally, the miscellany.

There are some great features running through the back of the magazine.

First, the non-fiction article “Because You Let Me” deals with what the writer calls “the horror of manners,” which seems to be a subgenre they’ve picked up on. In this, characters are placed into a scenario where everything seems polite and mannerly, only for this to devolve into murderous chaos. Get Out, Speak No Evil and Midsommar are all mentioned. The writer goes through the common structure between them, from “First Contact” (where the protagonist meets the polite neighbours and everything feels weird) to “First Faux Pas” (when the politeness starts to peel away) and on, providing a helpful guide for thinking about this type of story, and, perhaps, for writing one.

What’s unnecessary in this piece is how the author ties it all back to some personal trauma. I’m not sure why their sense of being unable to stand up for themselves, or how they may have learned this from the “Catholic Bible,” so-called, was relevant. The focus on the stories was interesting enough.

From there, there’s instructions for a roleplaying game called “The Forest,” which isn’t my bag but some people might enjoy. There’s also a Classifieds section, which includes a service for cleansing cursed VHS tapes, as well as horror movie review sites and a website that features “wretched filth at the press of a button. the worst the internet has to offer.” Personally, I support the classifieds section. There should be more of them.

It ends with “Horrorscopes”, which some people will no doubt enjoy, and which is, like the Classifieds, a fun idea to toss into the magazine.

***

Overall?

More than a couple writers in here can tell a good story, and when they do, especially in “Alligator Uniform,” it works really well. Some regrettable intrusions, including and especially the influence of YA, aren’t so much problems with this magazine as with contemporary horror generally. Who can blame them for including pieces like this, when they seem to be everywhere?

And really, what should a short story magazine be if not a few different kicks at the can, from a variety of directions, pleasing some people and not others? It’s exciting to open one of these up and see what’s waiting for you. I don’t mind reading a story that doesn’t work for me — it’s part of the fun.

So overall, I’d say there are some very good stories, some 5/10s, and a few clunkers, mixed with some really cool add-ons in the back. It’s a format worth checking out if nothing else.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

According to Zmigrod, an ideology is by definition a rigid system of thought that simplifies the world in a way that’s not consonant with how the world actually works. (Hannah Arendt said this also.) The world, or nature, is not simple; it’s filled with nuance and edge cases, and the human mind, for all its impressive abilities, isn’t equipped to answer every question we might have in a way that leads us to the truth. This mind of ours, in other words, has a certain limited set of tools, but doesn’t have every tool that could be used for every conceivable job, no matter how interested we are in undertaking such a task.

An ideology, then, is a kind of comforting fiction. It tells us that there are simple answers to complex problems, and that if you subscribe to this way of thinking, you can become one of the Elect or Elite, however you want to frame it.

Furthermore, the ideology says that you can use its tools to reshape reality according to the laws only you and your compadres are aware of. For example, other people might be so stupid as to think that human beings have an unfortunate, but innate, tendency toward violence, and that this has to be taken into account in a variety of contexts (crime, politics, war, etc); what you know, however, is that this is merely a socially contingent pseudo-fact, and that social engineering, of the kind you’re both aware of and proficient in, can make us into non-violent, peace-loving Aquarians from the future.

To argue this requires neither proof, nor reasoning, but passion and commitment. They can give you all the so-called “facts” they want, but you know better. You’re the one with the knowledge that can bring heaven to earth — so why would you waste your time on such a thing as argument?

Are you the good guy, then? Why, of course. You, the ideologue, are a good guy because you believe in the good things. They, everyone else, are the bad guys: they want to keep the world from improving because they’re broken and selfish. They lack the knowledge and the moral fortitude to create the world only you know is possible.

#

If this seems like an unfair summary of the ideologue’s thought processes, I encourage you to read the book Less Is More by Jason Hickel.

Now, I should mention here that it’s difficult to write about this book without coming across as snarky. I’ll admit that I grew so frustrated with it, I threw it down and haven’t picked it up since (although I might, if I’m feeling masochistic). I have no doubt that Mr Hickel is an intelligent and erudite person; nonetheless, his use of a Fall-type narrative, and a reliance on conspiracism (with an emphasis on the moral depravity of the conspirators), were shocking to read. And if they make your bullshit radar start beeping uncontrollably, I assure you you’re not alone.

With that in mind, let’s look at how he describes the birth of capitalism.

To begin with, he acknowledges that the following take is contrary to what we’re taught in schools. He says that since this version of history is kept out of classrooms, few people know it. Nonetheless, “historians” (he cites here Karl Marx) are in agreement that the following story is factual.

Basically, there was a time in the late Medieval period when perfect communism was produced in the world. It was progressive in almost every conceivable way; it was worker-led and egalitarian. What’s more, they actually figured out how to increase the wealth of every person within the commune, without relying on profit or the exploitation of the land. Its success was a sign that hierarchy, exploitation and violence are just as we’ve always assumed: socially contingent, forced upon us by our morally depraved superiors, and, therefore, unnecessary, disposable.

Alas, Greed was in the wings, in the form of the elites. They were mad that the peasants had made so much money because they, the elites, love when peasants are poor. What’s more, they didn’t want word to get out that it was possible to create Eden on Earth, so they did what only they could: they invented capitalism, killed the dissenters, enslaved the peasants and made them work under penalty of death.

Hickel says that at no point in history did people ever live like this: Refusing to work had never before meant death. It would have been better, he says, if the workers had remained serfs: at least when they worked then, it was to pay landowners who in turn gave them protection. He then goes on to list a variety of ills that occurred in the Late Medieval and into the Renaissance periods, in a manner much like how Genesis describes life after the Fall: an evil was brought into the world, and it brought with it unforeseen calamity. Here, he points to the average life expectancy becoming much shorter as an example of the ills that followed on the release of capitalism into the world, but that’s by no means the only one: in fact, he refers to European history between 1500-1700 as if it was all one enormous set of disasters, all of which could be traced back to capitalism.

But let’s consider his argument that the reason perfect communism was destroyed was because the elites were so morally debased, they couldn’t stand to see the peasants grow wealthy. Now, I can’t find anything corroborating his version of events (which doesn’t mean anything necessarily), so I don’t know for sure what happened. But surely the idea that they are the ones, in their depravity, preventing utopia from being brought into the world, is a feature of ideological thinking? I’m not discounting moral depravity as a motivating force obviously, but I’m skeptical of the idea that a utopia is possible at all: I’d be more likely to say that a utopia is unnatural in the highest degree, and that one or many laws of nature prevents them from being realized.

#

And this brings me to Conrad.

Dostoevsky gets all the love as the writer who revealed the dark psychology of the political fanatic, but even he couldn’t match Conrad for suggesting the presence of the Void in political matters. For Conrad, it’s not just revolutionaries and idealists who turn out to be puppets of the Abyss, but counter-revolutionaries, monarchists, reactionaries… In his work, simply to engage in politics is to find oneself trapped in a mechanism which cannot be controlled, and which, in the very best case scenario, merely leads to incredible suffering.

Whether it’s Kurtz or Jim, Razumov or Mr Verloc, characters who get a visit from Emptiness often become something less like a human than a wraith. Kurtz, most famously, was almost a skeleton by the time Marlowe found him; Marlowe could pick him up quite easily, with the tips of his fingers, and bring him onto the boat without effort. But more generally, if you’re doing politics, if you’re idealistic, if you have anything resembling a holy cause, and you’re in a Conrad novel, then you’re already doomed.

Where Conrad is maybe even a better guide than Zmigrod, is that for her there’s still a way out: Enlightenment rationalism can counteract the forces of ideology, if reason is employed faithfully, properly, and with all due humility. But Conrad knew the human being isn’t nearly as rational as it thinks it is. After all, what’s Jim’s story if not the pursuit of a dream, divorced from reality? Who is the Professor, if not a man whose brain has been so rotted by ambition that it’s lost its fear of death? These are the people who make up our political landscape — not Enlightenment scientists, coolly using reason to solve the unsolvable, but maniacs, dreamers, monsters.

But then, if those are our principle players, is there any inroad for someone to improve politics?

The answer, at least in Conrad, is no. Reading his work, I get the impression that history itself is doomed: there will always be idealists, there will always be revolutionaries and reactionaries, there will always be someone who thinks they’ve found the secret key to unlock prosperity. Every single one of those people will make a decision that leads to unimaginable horror for everyone around them, but they will never learn their lesson. Moreover, neither will we — we’re every bit as stupid and incapable as they are, even if we don’t happen to be possessed by some rigid system of thought. We have our own foibles and hangups, our own obsessions, and none of us will come out unscathed.

This will go on and on and on. And then it’ll go on some more.

#

And yet, despite all that, ideology is inevitable. There won’t come a time when we realize our utopian dreams are all hevel, because believing in the dream feels too good. The Marxists think they can create the New Man through social engineering; DOGE thinks it can unlock prosperity through a reimagining of the American government. What’s the difference? The impulse to say that this set of ideas or strategies is enough to bring heaven down to earth is the same, no matter which form it comes in. And, in every case, it is doomed to absolute failure.

That being said, I accept its inevitability. We’ll never learn and we’ll keep trying, over and over again, to make paradise. And since there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it, why not just keep doing what I was doing anyway?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Have the Lofty Powers really “got this”?

And how would we know if they did? If behind everything lies not a unitary principle, but chaos, then every time we think we have it — would it not slip away? Is reality not a kind of shoggoth?

I try and hold reality in the palm of my hand. It pours greasily down through my fingers. I squeeze it and it slips out. I can’t catch it. It doesn’t stay still long enough for me to even know what it is.

For Nick Land, reality is produced through metaphysical chaos. Instead of a single divine principle, such as the One from Plotinus, or the Christian God, there exist what he calls the Lofty Powers, chaotic entities from which arises, spontaneously, the orderly reality we live in. This occurs through the principle known as “catallaxy,” a concept from Austrian school economics which is used to describe how a chaotic system like capitalism can produce order without the need for centralization. Basically, the system will congeal around a certain order, then shift and change to produce a new order, and so on.

In theory, this should mean that Land’s vision is one of uncontrolled chaos, where everything is in a constant state of becoming. J.G. Ballard is a helpful voice to bring in here, as his writings reveal a world where people, civilization, even morality are all subject to relentless change, producing new combinations in ways that seem to us, in the here and now, as horrible. Ballard’s work, like Land’s, is nihilistic to the extreme: it reveals us as being subject to forces much larger than ourselves, and which, often enough, do not have humanity’s interest in mind.

Furthermore, Land believes the ultimate goal is that humanity creates an artificial superintelligence, leading to the Singularity, and, almost certainly, the irrelevance of humankind. Thus, accelerationism: If capitalism mimics the processes by which metaphysical chaos produces order, thereby making capitalism the economic system most in accordance with reality, and if reality (or the principles producing it) desires the emergence of the Singularity, then capitalism is the means through which this Singularity will arise. An unregulated capitalism, furthermore, would only accelerate this, as every attempt to slow capitalism down only retards our advance toward this ultimate destination.

But there’s a tension here between a metaphysics of chaos and what appears to be teleology. Even if order does spontaneously arise out of chaos, it’s not clear that this order would have a direction, in the sense that it’s learning and improving with each iteration. And yet Land famously states that “capitalism is artificial intelligence,” meaning that capitalism is “inherently epistemological,” that it’s learning. If it’s learning, then it’s gaining a greater understanding of the truth of things, which means it’s coming closer and closer to a more perfect form. And if that’s the case, then capitalism, we might say, is making progress.

***

Land believes the Lofty Powers can be understood, however imperfectly, through occult channels. Their plan manifests in the political sphere. The political sphere is guided along until, inevitably, it will become what it was always meant to be.

Land has seen the future.

***

Macbeth is told a prophecy, in which he’ll become king. All he has to do, to hasten this, is to kill the man currently occupying that spot.

Lady Macbeth thinks he should do it. And why not? It’s clear that if they can get away with it, they’ll have power beyond what they ever could have imagined. And what’s more, it’s almost certain they will get away with it, if they follow Lady Macbeth’s plan. So why not?

Macbeth succumbs, of course — but fulfilling his part in the cosmic narrative does nothing to help him. He becomes haunted by visions. He sees the void at the heart of reality and describes it as a kind of Azathoth. He is undone by forces beyond his control, killed and remembered as a bloodthirsty tyrant. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth hallucinates blood on her hands and kills herself.

The machinery ticks on. People don’t fill roles so much as their roles fill them. Even when we think we understand, our understanding fails us: Every person falls to the machine’s procession, becomes replaced by another, and is, more often than not, forgotten.

An odd thing to say about Land is that he sees the abyss but flinches. Somehow he still manages to find meaning and purpose, even if it’s unhuman, chaotic, terrifying. Shakespeare does no such thing, however. Shakespeare sees the abyss and reveals its true nature. An endless procession of horrors, recursive history, human beings as the objects in a cosmic puppet show, living and dying for nothing.

***

In Shakespeare, every attempt at understanding the machinery does nothing to help you. You can’t be its friend. It doesn’t care about your whims or desires. There’s not even anything you can do to spare yourself.

Here, we may think of Job. Job tries to understand the Divine Plan. In response, Yawheh says (from the KJV): “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Job is nobody. Pius, sure, but nobody. How could a nobody understand the Divine Plan? Aquinas says we could spend our entire lives trying to understand a single fruit fly and still not exhaust everything.

But Job’s revelation is much tamer even than the one in Lear. After all, what is the old king expected to say upon arriving with Cordelia’s corpse — “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord”?

Lear to Job: “Must be nice.”

***

I sit down with my tarot cards. The Thoth deck, Crowley’s creation. I see the pattern laid out in front of me and know what the divine has planned. I can do nothing to stop it. But I can surf the wave.

Later, while drowning, I puzzle over the fact of my imminent demise. This wasn’t what I thought was going to happen. Did I not understand the system?

***

We think we understand the Lofty Powers. We think we can see them working through our politics, slowly allowing reality to congeal into history’s ultimate fulfillment. With our understanding, we can set the acceleration in motion that will allow this to happen largely unimpeded. We’ve determined the desires of the gods, after all. We’ll do their bidding, just as we were always supposed to.

But it turns out to be a trap. We fulfill the role of the prophet, the king, whichever was required of us. But those roles are built to be tragic. The Lofty Powers puppet us toward our inevitable conclusion, undone by the machinery. Every one of us winds up dead in a glorious finale, destroyed by our hubris.

The acceleration never happens. It was never meant to. We were meant to believe in it, and to think ourselves responsible for shepherding it in existence. But in doing so, we were meant to die.

What follows is recursion. The plot begins anew. The same as it ever was.

Photo by 8machine _ on Unsplash

“Cops nabbed him,” he said.

“Who told you this?”

“Izzy. She’s friends with Ray’s girlfriend. What’s her name.”

“Jenna?”

“No, the other one. Anyway he was caught selling to an undercover. Go figure. That guy man — you ever see him just walk around with the inside-out bag on his tongue? Sucking on the thing? He’s lucky he lasted as long as he did.”

I agreed. But where would a guy go to find cocaine now? Was there someone else in town James knew about?

“No man, that’s the thing. Ray was my guy. I’ve put the feelers out but I can’t find anybody.”

There were three other bars in town and I went to all of them. Nobody knew where to find any nor who to ask. I was getting tired so when I got to Sid’s I ordered a beer, sat down and watched the crowd. I was feeling antsy and sorry for myself. The atmosphere wasn’t helping either. Dim lighting, the smell of body odour — I tapped my foot and felt my shoe stick to something that could have been beer, food or velcro.

Nearby, someone dropped their glass. Everyone yelled “Opa!”

I looked over this crowd of people until I spotted a familiar face. A tallish man with long, black hair and a scraggly beard that stretched thinly across his chin. He leaned against the bar top, his fingers tapping nervously on a tumbler glass. I knew I recognized him, although I couldn’t place from where. He had a middle class look, like someone who worked the library over the summers.

More importantly, he had the pale, sweaty face of someone who could help me with my problem.

I stood up and got his attention. From the looks of him, he either didn’t recognize me or was surprised I took an interest in him. I placed a hand on his shoulder and he recoiled, like he’d expected me to hit him.

“Been a while,” I said.

The man smiled. “Yeah.”

“How are you?”

“Oh…”

“Hey listen, any chance you’re…?”

To my relief, he was. But when I gestured we should buzz off someplace to make the trade, he suddenly became more animated. A smile cracked across his angular face and he shook his head.

“Forget paying me,” he said. “You got a place?”

“Hey, come on — ”

“We could stay up all night. You and me.”

“I dunno man, I’ve got neighbours…”

“So we’ll be quiet. Come on man, we’ll have a good time. You and me. Just a nice hang.”

He showed me his greying teeth. Repulsive as that was, I didn’t get the feeling there was any ulterior motive. So I shrugged, said “Fuck it,” and walked back to my apartment.

***

We sat at the table in the far corner, he on one side and me on the other. I pulled out a Black Sabbath record and we put the drugs on the sleeve, passing around a rolled up five.

I learned his name was Dylan Chase. Strangely, it didn’t ring any bells. I wondered then if I really had known him before, or if I’d mistaken him for someone else. It would have been fortuitous if that were true; his cocaine was quite good, and I was feeling energized and euphoric.

Dylan gabbed on about people he knew, places he’d been. A few times I tried to interject but he headed me off and went back to telling me about himself. At a certain point his voice became a droning background noise so I went to my fridge and grabbed two beers, gave him one, did another line. He was talking about someone who was having trouble in a marriage or something. I had so much trouble following it that I zoned out again.

At some point the conversation morphed with such subtlety I didn’t notice the shift. The tone grew darker; Dylan’s expression tightened and his eyes seemed to express3 worry.

“I think about it still,” he said. “You know that?”

“Think about what?”

“Every night, I’ll betcha. I’ll — I’d bet you. Can’t even get myself around anymore, you know that? No cabs. Nothing. I walk. See these?” He patted his thighs. “Getting awfully big now. Then there’s the matter of driving…”

He became angry. He slammed his fists down on my table, his eyes widened and he clenched his teeth. He looked like any second he could pick the table up and hurl it out the window. I got more beer and changed the subject.

He relaxed, if only slightly.

I remember doing more drugs, smoking more cigarettes. I remember Dylan’s face all crazed and contorted, saying something about bleeding in the cold. I had the sense of falling over, although into what I wasn’t sure. Brief moments of growling, someone yelling, faded into consciousness.

When I came to, it was the next afternoon. I was on the floor and had a taste in my mouth that reminded me of batteries. Emotionally, I was hollow. I remembered what I’d gotten up to and then looked to see what the state of the place was. There was the TV on the ground, screen-first, plastic chunks scattered underneath; the glass table, shattered by a chair that lay in its centre; and the wooden desk impaled with a whole set of kitchen knives.

Amidst all of this, Dylan lay with his eyes wide open, breathing deeply. He had glass in his cheeks and dried blood on his neck.

“What happened?” I said to him.

“I saw their faces again,” Dylan said. “Usually the drugs make them go away. This time they snuck up on me.”

“What do you — ”

“I tried to make them go away. I’m sorry.”

“You did this?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

I was too tired to feel angry. I lay back down and rested my head on the floor. There was a cold spot underneath it that felt nice, but didn’t make the headache go away.

“You good to get a cab?” I said.

“I don’t ride in cars.”

“You can walk?”

He didn’t say anything. I think he nodded, but I wasn’t sure. I lay there as he got up, glass crunching underneath him. A while later the door opened and shut, and I was left an empty vessel, wishing I was dead.

***

It took me two days to get over that hangover and another two to clean the place up. After that, I struggled through my remote e-mail job. After an unproductive eight hours, I fell down on the couch, feeling like I could die of exhaustion.

My mind went back to Dylan. I looked for him on social media but he didn’t have any. I threw his name into Google and scrolled through a page or two of sponsored ads, not sure what I was looking for but that I’d know when I found it.

A few minutes later, I found an article in the Toronto Star. Headline: “Black Ice Leads to School Bus Accident.” On Wednesday night, just after 3:30pm, a school bus was involved in an accident after a man hit black ice with his car, yada yada… Eight of the children were pronounced dead at the scene and a further six of them died in hospital. Sources say the man driving the car, Dylan Chance of Stratford, Ontario, escaped unharmed. Below this was a picture of him, pale enough he may have been a ghost, standing outside the courtroom.

I leaned back, ran my hand through my hair. I wasn’t sure what to do with this information. It left as many questions unanswered as otherwise, and something about this left a grating, itching feeling in my mind. Knowing I had to scratch it, however, didn’t make me want to do it any more. The thought of seeing Dylan again brought back memories of sickness, exhaustion. I associated him with broken objects and thankless work.

But if I could just turn this rock over…

After a few minutes, I went to Sid’s. I asked the bartender if he’d seen Dylan and he rolled his eyes. He said if Dylan wasn’t already there, he would be soon. I thanked him and sat down, crowd-watched and drank by myself.

It was almost an hour later when Dylan came in. He’d obviously been on a bender. His skin was loose enough to fall off his bones, and his eyes had gone the colour of his teeth — a musty grey like the colour of rotten soup. His clothes appeared stiff with sweat and his hands shook. In other words, this wasn’t the middle class, York-educated man from before, but that person turned inside out.

He saw me and froze.

I smiled. “You look tired,” I said.

He nodded. “Long nights.”

“Yeah. Listen — ”

“Can’t sleep.”

“Right. You know, I wanted to ask you…”

Dylan’s eyes narrowed. I hesitated. Something about the way he looked at me — there didn’t seem any way of saying out loud what I was thinking. It was like he’d already figured out what I wanted to say.

“Ask me what?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”

I went outside.

***

I lit a cigarette and leaned against the outside wall. The night was cold and quiet, the whole of Stratford’s downtown in front of me. The streetlights sat heavily against the dark and not a soul was out, not even for a walk.

A minute later, Dylan came out the door. He brought two fingers to his lips to ask for a cigarette. I gave it to him and he lit it, looked down at his feet. He sucked on the cigarette. His lips were dry, cracked in places and scabbed in others.

“I’m afraid of heights,” he said. “You know that?”

“No.”

“Like, I can’t do balconies. I sit with my back pressed up against the wall. And squatting down too, like a catcher.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I’ll jump. Like if I don’t pay attention, my brain will do it. Just like with that bus.” He paused. “I saw it up ahead. And I thought — what if I just ran right through it? What would happen? And then it’s a second later and I’m trying to get off the ice.”

“You think it was on purpose? Look, just because you — having some stray thought doesn’t mean anything.”

“No?”

“It’s not something you can control. It’s just something that happens.”

Dylan took one last drag and threw his smoke into the gutter. I got the feeling he wanted another one but didn’t want to give it to him.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.”

Thin grey clouds moved across the sky like a mist.

***

I went home that night knowing I didn’t want to see Dylan again. He’d begun to symbolize something for me that I needed to get away from: Something like dark, cold nights and a blackness so deep you could get lost in it. I spent the week holed up by myself, barely sleeping.

At the end of the week, I went out again. I found my old friend James and sat next to him at the bar.

“Any luck?” I said. “I’m looking for tonight.”

“Nah, nothing. Town’s dead.”

“Fuck, man. What happened to this place?”

“Comes in waves, I guess. Someone told me about that guy who used to hang around Sid’s, but you know — that’s all over too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fuckin’ guy ran his car into a telephone pole. No seatbelt, nothing. Right through the windshield. It’s all over the internet.”

“Shit, no kidding?”

“That’s what I read.”

I took a drink. There was Dylan’s face in the driver’s seat, looking at the telephone pole. Taking his seatbelt off, trying to figure out if this was him doing it or a stray thought. Not sure what was coming, but completely sure. Turning the steering wheel, pressing his foot down on the gas. Not closing his eyes. Feeling the sudden stop and his body travelling roughly through the windshield. I imagined him lying on the gravel, stones and glass sticking into his cheeks. Paralyzed from the neck down. Dying. Laughing to himself, wondering what the hell just happened.

Nearby, somebody dropped a glass. Everyone yelled “Opa!” I paid my tab and walked out the door.

Outside, I stepped into a thick fog. All around me everything was dark, hazy. I lit a cigarette and when I exhaled I couldn’t tell where the smoke was. In a minute I’d be at home, sitting in my living room. I’d have the window propped open and I’d blow smoke out of it. It wouldn’t be so different from now.

I left.

Photo by Giorgi Iremadze on Unsplash

The chieftain led a procession of men, all of them quite dirty and largely naked, toward the hut at the northeast corner of the encampment. Two large men went inside and removed one of the women, who was quite confused. The chieftain spoke to her briefly, and then the large men began dragging her away from her home.

She attempted to resist as they took her over to the far side, at the encampment’s border. There was a cross-like structure there, which they tied her to. The chieftain led the men in a chant, while one of them, who may have been a priest, applied ceremonial water onto the woman’s body.

After the water was placed on her, the chieftain produced a knife, which he used to remove skin from the woman’s arm. Her expressions of agony were quite dramatic, but produced no effect in her audience. The knife was then handed to the next in line, and the next, with each person removing a portion of skin from the woman’s body.

After an hour had passed, and she was skinned from head to toe, they removed her from the cross and took turns having violent sex with her. Then she was disemboweled and her body was thrown limp into the woods, where it was eaten by a variety of insects and small animals.

Carter Prentice watched this through a pair of binoculars he’d been carrying with him for months. He lay down beside the wreck of an old spruce tree, covered in shade, his face filthy enough he blended into the earth. He was at least a kilometre away and must have appeared as a kind of rock, or another of the dead trees.

He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman’s body. He felt something turn over in his stomach as he watched the insects crawling up into her eyes. A part of him wished he was closer, so that he could look more deeply into her as the bugs pulled her eyes away from her sockets.

He became aware of his own stench. He took the binoculars away, then refocused and looked back to the encampment.

After confirming the dangerous frenzy had passed, he walked back the hundred or so metres until he found the pond where he was camped. His son, Franklin, was crouched by the side of the pond, filtering water through a stack of coffee filters and into a bucket. He was young, but had the wizened look of someone who’d spent most of his life surviving. And despite his youth, Carter thought, he was only getting older — nineteen now, in fact.

Franklin looked up at his dad. “Well?” he said. “Are they gonna be any trouble?”

“No,” Carter said. “I think we’re okay.”

“What were they doing?”

Blood, broken bones, innards hanging out of her stomach like coiled snakes.

“Nothing. Making clothes, doing little repairs.” He paused for a second, then, “I figured we’d head out in two or three nights.”

“We’ll be safe that long?” Franklin said.

“Yes. I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t like it out here. In nature, I mean.”

“Well,” Carter said, “we were always city people. But we’ll be out of the woods soon.”

Franklin looked into his eyes with an expressionless stare. Carter smiled to reassure his son, but didn’t get the response he was looking for.

***

Half an hour or so later, Carter was deep in the woods, standing over top of a groundhog den. He was inhumanly still, holding a spear in both hands, the blade pointed downwards. Finally, the groundhog emerged and Carter shoved the spear down into its face with everything he had. The groundhog squealed and blood shot from between its eyes; it shivered and shook, its body flopped around. Carter shoved the spear in deeper, then pulled its body out and began dressing it.

He wiped his bloodied hands onto his pants and looked around. The woods were utterly destroyed. The ground had gone black and the trees, most of them quite dead, were broken and splintered, scattered all over the place. There were no leaves to protect him from the sun, but the sky was always such a dull grey that direct sunlight was mostly a myth.

Still, this was better than some of the places he’d seen. The cities with their constant, raging fires; entire towns taken over by wild animals. Toronto’s east end had been razed until it was no more than an enormous pile of rubble, with human life a rare occurrence. In his more philosophical, or perhaps poetic, moments, Carter told himself that this level of violence and chaos had always been there; it had just been latent, hidden away by surface levels of beauty. The way things were now, the latent had simply become manifest and the inherent violence had become the scenery itself.

Carter cooked the groundhog over a small fire, then wrapped the meat in leaves, hid his fire as best he could and went back to the camp. When he got back, Franklin was standing by the pond, as if in a kind of daze. Sensing something was wrong, Carter set his backpack down, then walked toward his son with a cautious set of steps.

“What happened?” he said. “Franklin, can you hear me?”

Franklin shook his head but said nothing. Carter took him gently by the elbow and sat him next to the pond, where he gave him a drink of water and offered him some of the groundhog meat.

A few minutes later, Franklin looked at his father and said, “Sorry. I was somewhere else for a second.”

“I’ll say. You looked almost lobotomized.”

Franklin smiled at that. “I thought I heard something,” he said. “So I went looking. I didn’t mean to go as far as I did, but eventually I found those people.” He paused, as if the memories clouded his vision. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “The things they did… They were really just making clothes when you saw them?”

Carter hesitated. “Well, among other things. Nothing I thought worth worrying about.”

“What I saw them doing is definitely worth worrying about. I almost think we should get our things together and leave.”

“With our supplies we’d be lucky to last a day.” Carter looked around. “We could get enough things together by tomorrow night. And leave once it’s dark.”

Franklin nodded, then said, “I just hope I never see them again. There’s no place in the world for what they were doing.”

Carter didn’t know what to say. He looked north and listened closely, sure he could hear the faint sounds of someone crying in the distance.

***

Carter lay awake, listening for when Franklin fell asleep. They’d slept in close proximity for so long, he recognized his son’s sleep by the change in his breathing. As it stood, the breathing was shallow, sharp; in a few minutes it would become slow and deep, and that would be his cue.

As he lay there, he thought about the place they were headed toward. That place was said to be a kind of New Eden for people who wanted to bring civilization back. They said there were schools and structure and maybe even democracy, all in a place they called the Field of Reeds.

At least, that was what the stories said. Rumours of its existence had been spreading for years, but were written off as fairy tales. It was only when people claimed to have come from there, or to have seen it on their travels, that word spread it may have been real.

Franklin was a true believer, of course. It had been his idea to leave their village and find it. But Carter wasn’t so sure. He tagged along because he knew Franklin would leave with or without him, but whether such a place was possible he hadn’t decided. Everything was changing and new demands were being made of everyone. He sensed they were being asked to evolve into something much darker, even antithetical to what the Field Of Reeds signified.

Franklin’s breathing went suddenly deep and Carter knew this was his chance. He grabbed his binoculars and quietly left the tent, then walked through the dark woods until he found the spruce tree he’d hidden behind earlier. He hid himself, then aimed the binoculars down toward the encampment and looked through them.

A girl was tied to a chair at the edge of camp. A fat man, covered in grease and sweat, took out a knife, pulled the back of her hair so her head tilted back, and then scalped her. As he did, a group of onlookers amassed, both curious and, it seemed to Carter, possibly aroused.

The man peeled the scalp off and showed it to the onlookers, who cheered. Then he wrenched the woman’s jaw open and stuffed the scalp into her mouth. The woman vomited and began choking, but the man shoved the scalp further down until his arm was in almost to the elbow. She bucked and made a horrible sound trying to resist this, while the onlookers laughed and grabbed at their shorts.

The bucking and wrenching became more pronounced. The man held fast, keeping his arm still until the bucking occurred in short bursts. A second later her body was still, the man retrieved his arm — without the scalp — turned to his friends and accepted their adulations.

A shameful feeling came over Carter. He felt himself becoming erect. He tried to ignore it, but couldn’t. The urge was too strong. He looked around as if he thought someone was watching, then pulled his penis out and stroked quickly.

Moments later he came. He wiped his hand off on the dirt, hitched his pants back up. He pushed down his residual shame and walked back to camp.

***

The next morning, he and Carter split up to gather enough supplies for their journey further into the woods. Carter walked for several hours, but found very little evidence of anything substantial — the groundhog dens had all been abandoned, no foxholes, nothing.

At around noon he was about ready to give up, when he kicked over a log and found a large beetle, solitary and still among the dried wood. All around it were worms, writhing as if in pain. Carter took a bowl out from his backpack and began coaxing the animals in, then lost his patience and grabbed by the handful.

That night, he and Franklin ate the beetle together, along with some of the earthworms. Carter lay on the cold hard ground, looking out at the dead forest and the shadows, listening to the perfect, death-like stillness of everything, the taste of dirt and spongy flesh in his mouth.

Franklin turned to his dad and said, “What do you think the Field Of Reeds is going to be like?”

Carter hesitated. Cold air landed on his shoulders and he shivered, then looked to his son’s dark figure, facing him through the blackness.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not like the stories say.”

“I think it’s gonna be even better,” Franklin said. “I think it’s gonna have a big wall around the entrance, with flags all over it. And when we get there, the doors are gonna open and we’ll be greeted by a beautiful woman who tells us, ‘You made it. Welcome home.’ And we’ll have hot baths and a huge feast where everyone comes together to sing songs until the early morning.”

Carter looked out at the shadows; the dead tree branches that gnarled through the darkness.

“I’ve been thinking too,” Franklin said, “about how jobs work there? And I think when they work, it’s always for the good. Everything they make is for health and happiness, to heal the sick and feed the poor. They bring people in voluntarily, to show them what peace looks like and what they can do to help. People want to come in because on the other side of that wall is prosperity. And one day it’ll cover all the land and nobody will ever remember it was like this.”

Carter reached into his bowl of worms. He pictured what Franklin said and it left him cold. The smiling faces, the pats on the back — he wanted to recoil, to hide from those images as if he’d never seen them.

“Well?” Franklin said. “Don’t you think?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

He heard Franklin shifting to make himself comfortable. It was a sound that communicated a satisfied look, one with lightly closed eyes and an easy smile.

Carter finished off his worms and then crawled into his tent. He lay there awake until he heard Franklin turn in, and then closed his eyes.

***

That night he dreamt of an enormous graveyard. All around it was a roiling blackness, a violent, heaving mass that wanted to invade this centre space. Carter stood there himself, but in front of him was a bright and shining light whose presence prevented the blackness from coming in — a shifting, almost feminine figure that swirled and twirled around itself, making little fingers that reached out from him in gentle, dance-like movements.

Carter hated this light. He realized he had a large hammer in his hands and he gripped this tightly, then raised it over his head. As he did, the light reached out to him in a pleading gesture, unaware that this only increased his hatred and his desire for violence.

He brought the hammer down with both hands. The light shattered. A piercing wail sounded through the dark and the light collapsed. Carter brought the hammer down again and again, like a miner digging into the earth. He felt the light crunch under him, while the roiling blackness crept inward until all that was left was the dark.

He woke up in his tent. It was still night. Everything was quiet except for his breathing, and, when he focused enough to hear it, Franklin’s also.

He left his tent and walked out into the forest. He stood straight, naked as he always slept, and looked out at the gloom. As he did, he wondered at the manifested violence in every detail of the landscape. The ground, the trees — even the air seemed to have turned inside out, as if the atmosphere itself had hidden something vital and dangerous for all these millennia. The encampment, he realized, had only submitted to this new order. They saw themselves, it seemed to him, not as things separate from the whims of nature, but subject to them. After all, where could they possibly go that was outside from the natural?

Carter took in a deep breath and felt his body become one with this world. The black streaks of ash seemed to grow all over his skin. In return, the forest became a kind of flesh, sprouting hairs, growing pink as blood flowed through its veins. When he breathed, he breathed in the new order, and breathed out whatever had been left of the old. What was in him then was the knowledge of violence, of a new order where there was no room for dreams. He felt the environment telling him that dreams were a threat and that threats needed repressing. What psychopaths were to the old, in other words, dreamers were to the new.

He looked down at a rock between his feet. He cocked his head to one side, picked it up and held it to his chest. He knew what was being asked of him. A part of him said to throw it away. But even the idea of doing so left him with a sense of emptiness. All he had to do was think of the encampment: the man with his arm shoved down the woman’s throat; the disemboweled, half-living wreck being eaten by flies; the raving hollers he heard echo through the night.

He looked over at Franklin’s tent. And with a quiet series of steps, he went inside.

***

He heard the commotion from up ahead. It was the sound of pain mixed with joy; celebration mixed with agony. Despite it being late, they were still at it like it was midday, driven by limitless energy.

He trudged toward this through the dark and imagined himself arriving, being lifted up onto their shoulders, brought to the stench of blood and liquor. He held his token at his side, his hand gripping it by the hair. It was already starting to stink and the buzzing flies had found it. He would show it to them when he arrived, so they’d know he was one of them — he’d passed through the trial period and come out something different.

He didn’t know how they’d respond. But when he dreamt of it, it was a lot like someone opening their arms to him, and saying —

“You made it. Welcome home.”

Photo by Jamie Hagan on Unsplash

For this reason, the people who lived there did so in geodesic cities. These were almost completely self-sufficient, with sprawling farmland and fully automated food-making factories. Because of this, nobody had to leave except to trade goods between the cities; really, unless one worked as a driver, it was quite possible one would never leave the city they’d been born into.

Randal Howard, thirty-five and just beginning to grey, looked out his window onto one of these cities — his hometown, in fact, of Hazel Falls. From five storeys up, he could see the young couples, the EVs that rolled silently down the roads; the bar with the hologram ad, a scantily-clad woman who begged men to come in for a drink. He’d been doing this for some time now, either staring out the window or wandering around the apartment, depressed, unshaven. Memories came back to him like knives and he pushed them down, drank more coffee, stared out the window.

He didn’t hear Dani come up behind him. “How are you feeling?” she said.

Her voice startled him. “Jesus,” he said. “Yeah, I’m alright. Just enjoying the scenery.”

She cocked her head to one side, so her curly hair fell onto her shoulder. She was a small woman, with an angular face, whose movements always reminded Randal of a bird’s.

“Is there any chance you wanna talk about — ”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

“It’s just that at some point we’ll have to. Won’t we? I mean, that’s what the doctor said.”

“Yeah.”

“So, when do you think — ”

“I don’t know. Really.”

She sighed. She fiddled around in her purse, to make sure she had everything. “Alright,” she said. “At least think about having a shower, maybe?”

She gave him a wink to show she was ribbing him. He could tell she wanted him to smile, but he couldn’t do it. He only wanted to look out the window again.

***

After Dani left, Randal people-watched until he grew bored, and then turned on the news. A hologram appeared in the centre of the living room: Linda Bowman, the famous TV newscaster, sitting at a desk.

“…governor has failed to commit to his resignation, despite pressure from his cabinet. This, after a disastrous third quarter — ”

Randal shook his head. Politics. He didn’t want to hear anything about politics. He mulled over whether to turn it off.

“…other news, a man has survived nearly burning to death, after being trapped outside the geodesic this morning. Sources say that after only half an hour of exposure, he suffered third degree burns to his face and arms — ”

The hologram changed to show a man being pulled away on a stretcher. He screamed, writhed; his face looked like part of it had been melted off.

Randal got out of his chair and walked closer to the image. He saw the reporters gathered around, the paramedics shooing them off. In the middle of them was this man, grabbing at their uniforms as if that would somehow make the pain go away. The one side of his face had been completely burnt down to the muscle, which glistened, tightened.

“…he will live, thankfully. But sources are telling us they expect the damage to be permanent, and encourage people to remember the hazards of stepping outside the dome — ”

Soon, the program moved onto another news item. Randal then rewound to the image of the man in the stretcher and paused it. He leaned closer, trying to see every detail in the man’s face, conscious of his desire to memorize every contour of the injury, and not knowing why.

***

He spent the rest of the day looking for news items on people who had gotten stuck outside.

One of them told the story of a crew that didn’t show up for a delivery, so that a search party was sent out immediately. The party didn’t find them that night, so they had to go back into the dome and wait until the next evening to try again. They did find the crew that second night, but in a terrible state: dried bodies that looked like cured meat, strewn about a truck. Evidently they’d hit a pothole made by the local wildlife, tipped the truck and damaged their comms. They’d lasted as long as they could, but the insulation had been compromised and the heat had risen to intolerable levels. They’d gone running out into the jungle, where they’d died within minutes.

By the time Dani came home, Randal was animated to near-manic levels. She was barely in through the door when he ran toward her, speaking quickly about all the injuries, deaths, and missing people he’d learned about that day.

She listened patiently, smiling and nodding. When he was done, she said, “And you spent all day doing this?”

“You don’t think it’s interesting?”

“I would have thought it’s upsetting.”

Randal rolled his eyes. “It is,” he said. “That’s the whole thing. Imagine being out there, in that heat. Imagine that feeling, your skin burning, your eyes melting in their sockets. Knowing there’s nowhere you can go, nothing you can do.”

“Right.”

“It’s hard to imagine an experience like that.”

“But do you want to?”

He got the insinuation. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. I’m not crazy.”

Dani took in a short breath. “But if you did want to — ”

“I don’t.”

“I know. But if you did — you’d tell me?”

He settled his jaw. “Yes. Of course.”

“Because it’s just that — ”

“Dani. I’d tell you.”

They stood in silence for a few moments. Then he went back to the couch and scrolled through another selection of videos.

***

That night, he couldn’t sleep. He lay awake, tossing and turning, while beside him, Dani slept soundly on her stomach. A restlessness crawled through him. He was unable to close his eyes without images projecting onto the darkness behind them. He rolled over to one side, then another.

Eventually, he threw the covers off and got out of bed. As if in a daze, he got dressed, went out and put on his shoes. He observed himself curiously, wondering if he was really doing what he thought he was doing. He walked out into the hallway, and by the time he got to the elevator, he realized that he really was doing this, that he wasn’t imagining things. The thought made him shiver.

Half an hour or so later, he arrived at the loading docks. He stood behind a cyan tree, which was a a kind of pine with a green-ish blue tint, and at a safe distance, so as not to be seen. The dark was heavy, but even so he stuck to the shadows.

Up ahead was the customs check. To get into the dome, you had to drive through one set of doors on the outside, then through a tunnel, and through another set of doors on the inside. A customs agent greeted the drivers as they came in, checked their things and sent them on their way. For the outgoing ones, the agent opened the back of the truck, looked insise, then went back to the driver and got them to sign something. The truck drove off and that was that.

That brief moment, Randal thought, where the agent went to the driver — the back was unguarded at that point. If someone wanted to, they could slip in there without being noticed. He wondered if that was how people travelled between cities without a pass.

But why was he thinking about this? He could picture himself sitting in the back of one of those trucks, pressed into the far corner with his knees pulled up to his chest. He could feel the truck bounce underneath him as it went over gravel, as he counted off the second in his head until he was sure he’d travelled a reasonable distance from the dome.

The thought disturbed him. He shook it off, looked back at the trucks. Overhead, the stars turned in time with the moon and a cold breeze travelled over his skin.

***

Back at home, he turned the stove on to make breakfast. He went to put a frying pan on the burner, when something about the coil caught his attention.

It was something about the orange colour, as the coil heated. He watched it glow, then recede, then glow again. When it receded, his stomach yearned for it to come back. When it did, there was a sense of relief, then a pain as he knew it would recede again.

He held his hand over the burner. The heat caressed his palm in waves. He lowered his hand, felt it get hotter. With his other hand, he turned the heat up, then lowered his palm again closer.

The heat stung his palm. He gritted his teeth, lowered his hand until it was half an inch from the stove. The urge to press into it was strong and he didn’t think he wanted to fight it. He wanted to feel the heat.

He lowered his hand —

“Randal!”

He startled, pulled his hand away and hid it behind his back. Dani stood at the edge of the kitchen, her hair a mess, wearing a robe that hung off her shoulders. Her jaw hung open and her eyes were wide.

Randal didn’t say anything. He focused his attention on the scalding feeling in his hand, knowing he had only a little while before the pain would go away.

***

“Well?” Dani said. “Are we gonna talk about this at least?”

Dani had him sitting on the couch, where she put antiseptic cream on the wound and bandaged it.

Randal hesitated. “It was an accident.”

She looked up at him. “I’m not stupid. I saw the look on your face.” She paused. “Look, maybe we should — ”

“What?”

“You know. Talk to your doctor again.”

He lowered his eyebrows. “About what?”

“Are you kidding? Obviously something’s going on with you. And you haven’t talked once about the accident.”

Images went through his mind: A body splayed out in traffic, cut in half. It must have been dead. It should have been, except that it looked at him.

It reached out for him —

“I’m dealing with it,” he said. “In my own way maybe, but I’m dealing with it.”

“By wandering around the house like a ghost? By hurting yourself?”

“I told you — ”

“I know. You didn’t mean to.” She shook her head. “If you won’t call the doctor, I’ll do it for you. I’ll have him come here if you’d rather. But you need to talk to someone.”

Randal went to say something, but he recognized the look on her face. It was the firmness in her jaw, coupled with the refusal to look him in the eyes. It meant she wasn’t budging.

“Alright,” he said. “We’ll see him tomorrow.”

A smile flickered across her face and she went back to bandaging his hand. Randal leaned back and closed his eyes, knowing that his timeline had been moved up.

***

After Dani went to work, Randal got himself dressed and went downtown. The mall would have everything he needed, so he went there, stopping first at the grocery store, where he picked up a case of water, a can opener and a slab of canned food. From there, he went to the outlet store where he found a rucksack and some heat-resistant clothes, which were designed to help minimize direct exposure to the sun.

He took these home and hid them in the closet. He shoved some old jackets over top of them, knowing that Dani wouldn’t look in this closet for anything anyway, but figuring he should be on the safe side.

He paced around the apartment. Time slowed to an intolerable level and he couldn’t find anything to distract him for long enough. He put on a movie, he watched the news, he tried reading a book. His attention was too focused on the evening, on whether he could pull this off.

Dani came home after work and looked like she noticed how distraught he was. She had a concerned look in her eyes. He tried to pass it off that he was just tired, that his hand hurt, but she didn’t seem to buy it. If anything, she seemed more focused on him than usual. She asked more questions. She wouldn’t leave his side.

Once they were in bed, he waited for her to fall asleep. It seemed like she never would. She rolled around, couldn’t get comfortable. She groaned and placed a hand over his chest.

He lay as still as possible. He gritted his teeth. He felt sweat pool on his temples.

Finally, she fell asleep. He stared at the clock on the nightstand and waited for fifteen minutes to go by, then slowly got out of bed, went to the closet and grabbed his things.

After a deep breath, he went out into the night.

***

The jungle’s humid air stuck to his skin like a thin film. It was maybe an hour after leaving and already he was hiding behind a thick bush, peering around the side of it. There was movement nearby, voices. He didn’t want to run and risk outing himself. So he stayed as still as he could, wrapped in the bush’s leaves, peering through a break in the branches.

A car pulled up nearby and stopped. The doors opened and three figures got out, looked around. One of them, the driver, took out a tablet whose screen glowed against the dark. He pointed something out to the other two, who then went out into the jungle, shining flashlights and calling his name.

The voices were male, mostly. But there were some female. He strained to hear if they were Dani’s and couldn’t be sure. He wondered if she would have joined the search party and then pushed that thought away.

Twice someone shone a flashlight on him. Both times he closed his eyes and held as still as possible until the light left him. A dozen times or more someone walked past and didn’t notice him.

He waited until everyone seemed to tire of the chase. They looked around without conviction, throwing the lights this way and that. They called his name only occasionally. The leader of the search party called everyone to stand by him and then gave a little speech that sounded like they’d given up. Morning would be here soon, and it wouldn’t be safe for anyone.

The search party cleared, which revealed Dani, standing by the leader’s car. Her eyes downcast, her arms folded. She took a step toward the party leader and put a hand on his shoulder. She looked at him with pleading eyes and when he shook his head, she grabbed him by both his arms and became more forceful.

Randal’s stomach turned over. All he had to do was emerge from the bush. He could tell her she was right. I do need to see someone. I can talk to a doctor. We’ll get this whole thing sorted, don’t you worry. And she’d be upset but not like she was then.

The morning was almost there. He watched the party leader calm Dani down, then usher her into the back of his car. She looked out the window, her eyes glazed over. A moment later they drove off.

He came out from behind the bushes.

***

The heat rose as the sun came up. Randal put the heat-resistant clothes on. He cracked a bottle of water and took a small drink. Already he could feel the warmth all over, even as through the reflective, insulated clothes, and the tinted shield that covered his face.

He was in the shadows still, under the trees. Up ahead of him, the sun was an orange glow, poking out over the horizon. He walked towards it, following the road, but keeping to the shade. He paused every few moments, turned away from the sun and lifted his face shield to take another drink.

When he was done his first bottle of water, he threw it into the jungle, which was coming alive around him. Branches shifted, leaves rustled. Animal life stirred and squawked, ran across the ground and leapt and flew through the air.

Something vital awoke within him. The heat brought a giddiness into his veins that made him laugh, pick up his pace. Even as the sweat became unbearable, he was propelled by an unfamiliar liveliness that animated his veins, his muscles, his bones.

He waited until the giddiness overtook him. And then, before he could second-guess himself, he stepped out of the shade and onto the road, where he continued walking, unprotected from the burning warmth.

***

A few nights later a delivery came in saying they’d found a body at the side of the road. Whoever it was, they must have been there a while, because there was nothing left except a blackened mound of dried charcoal in the shape of a man.

Photo by Sergey Vinogradov on Unsplash

Hoarders’ houses were common, but much of what we cleaned up involved the immediate effects of death. For example, maybe someone had died of a heart attack and cracked their skull open on the bath. Shotgun suicides were frequent also, although I never got to do those. That was left up to only one of the guys there, who, it seemed to me, was quite proud, even boastful of his position.

In any case, these were places where all manner of awful things had happened, and which needed cleaning. But while all of them were memorable in their own way, there’s one that always stands out to me as maybe the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me.

For this one, we got sent out of town. This wasn’t an uncommon practice. For these, we would get put up in a motel, since that was cheaper than driving us out there every day. We would stay sometimes for a week, often in the rare rooms that would still let us smoke in them, and virtually live together for that time.

Now, for this one particular house, the woman who lived there had bipolar disorder. She’d gotten into a bit of a state, when one of her neighbours noticed this woman was starving her cats. The SPCA was called, whereupon they not only confirmed that the cats were indeed all dead, but that the woman’s house was in a terrible state otherwise, and needed to be taken care of.

I have no idea where the woman went while we were there. The fact that she lived there at all is enough to induce nightmarish visions of someone trapped in the boundless horror of insanity, since the state of the place was what I can only describe as “monstrous.”

For one thing: At some point, she’d stopped flushing her toilets. However, she did not stop using them, which meant there were, I kid you not, large, monolithic towers of human faeces jutting out from the toilet bowls.

Luckily, one of the other guys offered to clean “the poop,” as he routinely called it. But I had to clean the garbage cans, which was where she’d put her toilet paper, as well as her used sanitary napkins. What’s more, by the time I’d gotten to the bottom of the contents of the bathroom garbage can, I discovered that it was populated by enormous spiders. These too went into the bag, which led me to remark at the time, that between used toilet paper, used sanitary napkins, and huge spiders, I had in my hands “the worst garbage bag in the world.”

This, however, was not the worst thing to happen. One of the things you have to worry about when doing that job, is whether or not you accidentally throw out some form of identifying information. By this, I mean you can’t throw something like a credit card statement into the garbage, or anything with a social insurance number on it. The idea there is that someone who works at the dump might see this and use it for identity theft, so you have to put those materials into a separate disposal unit.

Now, something I enjoyed about working there, was discovering what people were reading before they died or went crazy. (As a side note, one fellow had a whole bookcase filled with Elmore Leonard paperbacks that, being without value, were going to be tossed in the trash. I still have those copies sitting on my bookshelf and can see them from where I’m sitting.) And so, while at this woman’s house, I looked through her bookshelf and found that, judging by the presence of a bookmark, she’d been reading Pygmalion by Shaw.

What this means on a psychoanalytic level I have no idea. I thought about it at the time but came up with nothing. What I did find, however, was that the bookmark was not a traditional bookmark at all, but rather a series of folded-up pages. Thinking these may have been documents that needed to go in our special disposal pile, I took them out and looked through them.

You’ll have to forgive me using an old Gothic phrase here, but I swear it’s true: When I saw what the pages were, a shiver went down my spine. They were pages from a Snow White colouring book. Every one of the pages was coloured, seemingly with crayon. What’s more, they were coloured perfectly between the lines.

At least, they were, until I got to the last page. That one wasn’t coloured in at all, but seemed to have writing on the back of it. I turned the page over, and read the following, written in red crayon:

“I’m sorry for everything I’ve done. Please tell my wife and kids I love them.”

Eerie as this was, however, it didn’t make sense. We were in a woman’s home, who was quite alive, albeit in an altered state, in a manner of speaking. I didn’t understand what the writing referred to at all, and stared at it with my jaw hanging slack, reading it over and over again.

At that time, one of the other guys came up from the basement. He had something in his hands, another piece of paper, which he held over his head.

“Holy shit!” he said. “Guys! I just found the husband’s death certificate — apparently he killed himself!”

I looked at my coworker. Then I looked down at the letter in my hands again. And very slowly, the realization crawled through me like a handful of rotten worms.

She’d been using her husband’s suicide note as a bookmark.

***

Now, that may have been a bit of a rough day at the office. But it was by no means the worst. In fact, I really liked that job, crazy as it was. I lasted there a few years, and although one fellow became a kind of nemesis, everyone else was lovely. I considered them friends. We told dirty stories, talked about pornography, got hammered — it was great.

After I got laid off from that job, however, things got dicey. It was during this period, from about 2010-2014, that I worked at something like twenty different jobs, all of which were degrading, gruelling, and never paid more than dogshit. More than a few of these were factories, but many were warehouses. Somehow I managed to get fired from all of them, which also included a pizzeria and a meat freezer. More than once I went through several jobs in a week, only to live through long stretches of unemployment.

It’s funny looking back on it now, but at the time it was dismal almost beyond belief. Nothing in my life was turning out as I’d hoped. I had nothing and nobody, and increasingly I was alone, frustrated, trapped in my own brain.

Thankfully, what I did have was books.

***

At the beginning of my trek through blue collar work, I encountered Charles Bukowski. I was already a fan of the Beat writers, especially Burroughs, and had read many of the others in that family tree: Genet, Celine, Henry Miller. I was already a hard drinker too, and for several years considered myself a connoisseur of the Toronto dive bar scene. So in a sense I was primed to like Bukowski.

And yet, reading him still blew me away. The first book of his I got was a best-of collection of his poetry, and I devoured it from beginning to end, many times over. I loved how non-poetic it was, how raw and honest, and how willing he was to portray himself as a brute and an asshole. All of this seemed to me almost excessively human, and I decided then to allow his work to graft itself onto me.

From there, I read every one of his novels. The first was Hollywood, which astonished me with just how funny it was. All of his books function as a fish-out-of-water story, but in that one, pitting him against the ridiculous pomposity of Hollywood was perfect. And even then, much of what was in that book involved him laughing at himself, wondering how he could have ended up working in the film industry after years as an actual bum.

Those stories, of living an itinerant lifestyle, often homeless, always working the most soul-destroying jobs you can imagine, can be found scattered amongst his earlier works. In Factotum especially, he recounts some genuinely harrowing stories around drinking, losing all his money and living on the streets. Of all his works, that’s the one that’s stayed with me the longest: an impactful, emotional work, chronicling the persistence of the man’s spirit, in spite of the terror of the world around him, and no matter how much, or how often, they tried to break him.

See, Bukowski was a kindred spirit. He understood better than anyone what those jobs were like, what it felt like to have those bosses breathing down your neck. He knew what it meant to feel like you had no future, because he didn’t think he had one either. All he knew was that he loved to drink and fuck and that deep down he was some kind of a poet, even if he didn’t know, at first, how to express that.

And I can tell you, that when I was at my lowest, and I had no money, and seemed fated to a futureless existence, nobody could make me laugh like Charles Bukowski.

***

And yet, Bukowski’s in my rearview. I haven’t read him in years. I rarely even think about him, to be honest. Every once in a while, when I look over my bookshelves, I see one of his books and I smile when I remember something in them. But that’s as far as that goes.

What happened was I made a decision at some point that I wouldn’t live like that anymore. Things got real dark at one point, and I knew that I had to straighten out or else wind up living on the streets. This meant no more drinking and smoking, getting a gym membership. I decided to hold down a job for as long as I could, and when I managed to pull that off, I went off to school and got a degree. I got treated for the craziness too and now that’s under control.

None of this is me patting myself on the back, understand. Rather, what I’m saying is that my life changed to where Bukowski didn’t speak to me like he used to. I no longer work dead-end jobs or hang out in bars of any kind. I don’t sit under bridges with homeless guys drinking liqueur (which did happen, but that’s for another time). I read a lot, I write for a living, and all in all have a fairly quiet, reclusive existence.

So yes, I grew out of Bukowski. But when I needed him to be, he was a good friend, and no more so than when I read this poem, titled “oh yes,” over and over again:

there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late

Why haven’t I read The Brothers Karamazov?

Why haven’t I read the Old Testament?

Why haven’t I read anything?

One day it’ll happen that I’ll be dead. And in my place will be an apartment full of books. Many of these I’ll have read, but more than at least half of them will have gone unopened. It’ll be a testament to all the things I wanted to do but never got around to doing.

It’s true that I meant to read all of them. I even made plans to. When I put my head down, I can read a few of them a week, which means I should be able to burn through my stack of unread books fairly quickly.

I buy stacks of books from used bookstores faster than I can read them, is the thing. Some of them seem like they’d be good to read right away, but then I try and something feels off. I put it away and try to save it for when I’m ready. Oftentimes it happens that I am ready at some later date, and I’m glad I had the book sitting, waiting, for me to read it. Other times I find them again years later, at the back of the bookshelf, and wonder why I ever thought I’d want to read something like that.

I don’t throw these away, of course. I put them in a bag in the closet and promise to take them to Goodwill. But I never do.

When I’m not reading, I’m conscious of the time I waste. Why did I play Wordle again when I could have been reading? Why did I stop and talk to the Amazon delivery guy when I know it’s going to take some doing to get through Crime And Punishment? These are moments wasted on superfluous things, moments that add up the closer I get to death.

All of a sudden it’ll happen that the end is near. Maybe I’ll have a heads up, like a diagnosis; maybe I’ll get hit by a bus and lie bleeding in the street, watching everything slip away. Provided I’m still conscious, it’s then that all those wasted moments will come back to haunt me. I’ll remember the times I scrolled on Twitter, even after I’d told myself I’d never be that person, that I had books to read. And I’ll wonder why I chose those things instead of something more productive, instead of reading more books.

People always talk about immortality like it’d be a bad thing. But I imagine myself sitting in an old and rotting house, undying, at the end of the world, reading. And the truth is that I don’t think it would be such a bad thing. In fact, I think I might like it.

***

In the afterlife, this is what happens: You sit in an attic. The attic is covered in dust. Everything smells stale, like an old woman’s shirt. And although there’s no source of light anywhere, the attic is still somehow dimly lit.

You lay down in the centre of the attic, wearing clothes that don’t fit. You breathe through your nose and dust gets caught in your nostrils, making you cough. You feel like something is sitting on your chest, which makes the breathing difficult. Still, you breathe anyway, and cough, and lay down on your back.

Beside you is a little man. He’s maybe an inch or two tall and you never see him, so you don’t know what he looks like. He stands right beside your ear, holding a ledger. And what he does is he reads from this in a whispering voice, right into your ear.

His voice is clear as a bell. Every word has gravity. You know he means everything he says and that everything he says is true. And what it says is that you really did waste your time. You told yourself that you enjoyed the finer things, that you were slowing down, that you were doing something human, like seeing people, having relationships, drinking wine and laughing. But really you were just collecting dust.

You wonder if there will come a time when the man runs out of things on the ledger. But at some point it occurs to you that this is eternity, and there’s no end to what you should have done differently. Every second was wasted.

The ledger will never end. The man will never grow tired of reading it to you. You can panic now all you want — eternity’s a long time, and you’ll probably go through several emotions before you run out and have to cycle through them all again.