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Had to get my wife to double check the count, but it’s real, 27 de-con-strucs in 2024, 24 of them written by me. That’s 2 per month, and some of them were mega-projects!

Here’s the full list [poorly categorised]:

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Visual/Multimedia – ‘4^th Industrial Revolution Slut’ // Karina Bush, ‘Satanite’ // Snatch Wylden, ‘x ( ) -id </3’ Ami J. Sanghvi, ‘Exit Reality’ // Ryan Raymond Buell.

These were the ones I probably connected to the most, especially Ami’s and Karina’s. Seeing Tony Blair punished in a way he never can be in the real world was just what I needed to get through January last year [and this year too – it’s fully absorbed + categorised in whatever part of the brain deals with lit memory]. Also, these de-con-strucs were probably the best I did all year, provoked by the material I was de-con-struc-ing.

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Movies – ‘I Saw The Tv Glow’ // Jane Schoenbrun + ‘Anti-Clock’ // Jane Arden

One watched on the plane, the other in 15 minute bits, both distinctive enough to get a de-con-struc. The ending of ‘TV Glow’ really sealed things for me, and the entirety of ‘Anti Clock’ was both euphoric and brain-numbing.

I might stop adding comments, there’s no point, I wrote a de-con-struc about it already with everything that crossed my mind included, how could I possibly sum all that up in 1-2 sentences?

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Surreal Poetics – ‘Ablation’ // Danika Stegeman, ‘Ponds’ // Nick Borelli, ‘The 2^nd Dream’ // Madelaine Culver, ‘Low Key’ // Yu Xiang, ‘[Women] in Stem’ // Sara Matson, ‘Hounds of No’ // Lara Glenum, ‘Interrogating the Eye’ // M. Forajter, ‘op.cit./urbes’ // Andrew Cyril MacDonald.

Defo the broadest category, a lot of these were quite different from the others, beautiful + draining + [to be blunt] quite tedious in places. ‘Low Key’ was the most interesting cos it had both English and the original Chinese poem, meaning I could practise my reading skills [which still need a lot of work], and ‘Ablation’ made me think about my mum.

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Guest-written – ‘Watching the Wheels’ // Simon Morris [David Kuhnlein], ‘Kristen Stewart’ [Danika Stegeman], ‘Asylum’ // Nina Shope [A. A. de Levine]

All adapting well to the de-con-struc style, which can be tough [IT’S NOT A REVIEW!]. David went with something a bit more elusive and abstract, whereas Danika and A. A. exposed themselves directly, which is honestly more what I’m looking for…but everyone cultivates their own style.

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Insane – ‘Ω – 1 CHRONOTOPOLOGIC WORKINGS’ // Andrew C. Wenaus + ‘A Raft Manifest’ // Rem + Rom

Both created freshly weird layers in text and a new type of migraine for me trying to read it. I’m not sure which was more impenetrable – should be Andrew’s morse code text as it was beyond semantics, but ‘Raft Manifest’ lures you in with actual words then pulls the spinal cord out by revealing them to be dogberryisms and random Spanish/French/Pigeon and just mutated nonsense that probably isn’t nonsense at all, it just reads that way.

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Transgressive – ‘Vitiators’ // Elytron Frass, ‘You With Your Memory Are Dead’ // Gary J. Shipley, ‘Serious Weakness’ // Porpentine Charity Heartscape, ‘DEAR§’ // Elytron Frass + [x]

These took the most out of me, around 40k words total for the 4 of them. ‘Serious Weakness’ was the most difficult as it wasn’t really experimental, had an actual plot + visible characters, and everything I had problems with may have been rendered irrelevant/wrong later in the story [it’s around 400 pages total, I only read about 150]. I don’t think the de-con-struc style is really suited to these kinds of novels, just to much risk attached of my thoughts being ultimately pointless.

Note: you may notice there are two works by Elytron Frass – I don’t usually do repeats of authors, but Elytron seemed to like the ‘Vitiators’ de-con-struc and asked if I could do one for ‘Dears’ too. It turned out I could, and was glad I did, not just cos the text itself was singular and mega-baroque, but cos Elytron is one of the few people I’ve encountered online who seem completely genuine and also respectful/grateful of someone reading and then writing for 20-30 hours about their work.

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Old Stuff – ‘Virgin of the 7 Daggers’ // Vernon Lee, ‘The Kharms Case’ // Dubravka Ugrešić, ‘Sarcophagus’ // Tanith Lee, ‘Cronopios & Famas’ // Julio Cortazar.

All of these authors are dead, sadly, but their art lives on alongside my intellectually scraggy notes + amateurish collage.

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I’m gonna slow down a bit in 2025, but [to squeeze in a few more tags] I will at some point be doing ‘Sea Witch’, ‘Lord of Astiigos’ by Soren Häxan, ‘Mineral Planet’ // James Pate and maybe ‘Galaxies’ // Barry N. Malzberg too.

If you’ve got any recs for others you’d like to see, let me know [pls don’t say your own book].

Sun Lin Fai Lok for 2025.