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Title: Ponds

Author: Nick Borelli

Publisher: Schism Press

Plot: the world ends and other worlds end also. But end is just a transition to a new world, which will become a mutated version of all that came before. Mostly in the form of animal sludge and swamp water.

Subplot: A vampire gets some unexpected down time at the bottom of a pond.

Sub-subplot: Time breaks, patches itself together again, wanders lost through the catacombs, exits to ritualism.

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‘You must imagine what you can’t see. All the mould and muck and blood and puke. It’s everywhere, Mole.’

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About ten pages into Ponds, I got hit by a nostalgia train, the old picture book version of The Wind in the Willows that my sister used to ban me from reading. I remembered the page with Toad dressed up as the washer woman, being chucked off a barge, the bit where he crashes the automobile, the climax with him and the other conservative animals taking back Toad Hall from the working class ferrets, stoats and weasels [who could all be variations of the same animal, I’m not sure], the general reverence for the riverbank and its café culture lifestyle, the weird god head in the forest, the brothel in the wild woods etc.

Then, as a realist counterbalance, my brain leaked in all the rabbit deaths from Watership Down, the bleak misery of slaughter/migration, the arbitrariness of following a seer etc.

And finally circled back to Ponds again.

Each book has its counterpart, as Borges may have said to Bioy Casares one time.

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The last de-con-struc I did [Vitiators] was quite draining, not least cos I forced The Fold into it when I should’ve just left it in the library with Anti-Oedipus and Notes on Benjamin.

[Definitely no philosophy texts this time, no way].

After surviving that chaos, I needed something to help me unwind.

So I read a children’s book in Chinese.

Then watched Cybernator.

Then picked up Ponds [or opened up the pdf file on my phone].

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