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OMG!! Scary!: Review de-con-struc of Skylark Motel Logan Berry’s Casket Flare (Inside the Castle, 2023)

In fluid red ink inside my copy of Logan Berry’s Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake (11:11 Press, 2021) he’s written as part of the inscription “Are we serving the same master?” 

“Construction requires destruction.”

“Any act of creation is simultaneously an act of annihilation, relentless.”

Yes, Lo. It appears we are.

“RUN!!!! DO NOT STAY HERE!!”

–FRONT MATTER–

The first thing I see is Corrao. Get out of here with yr uncanny immaculate crooked elongated lettering comforting the reptilian quadrant of my cerebellum, ghostbrightened in goldenrod echo (yellow has a hue angle of 60 degrees, a saturation of 100% and a lightness of 50%). Get out of here with yr digital cloudtopographyultrasoundimage. Get out of here with yr faintoverlaytextspiritmirrors. Get out of here with yr “The text is typeset in Ac437 IBM Model3x Alt1, a recreation of the IBM PS/2’s 16-bit typeface from 1987, with brief appearances by Walter Tiemann’s Orpheus Pro from the 1920s.” Get thee to a font foundry. 

If you let him, if you make an offering of ample materials, Mike Corrao will fully imagine your visions into something fuckable and killable. Something alive. Lo understands and respects this better than most, and the projects they work on together are/were/will be fractal, labyrinthine terrordream masterpieces. 

–END FRONT MATTER–

Lo, I’m on the first page. I admire the repeated dreams, the sleepmask, the ways you make burgeoning plantlife a murder shroud, neon agents, anti-erasure. You capture how structure chokes on itself. 

Lo, are you casting a time chasm? In revisiting the Skylark Motel, in exposing its bones, are you resurrecting it? What’s sewn in? Is it hungry?

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