other books

[Other Books] Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War // Rick Claypool

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As usual, this is just raw guesswork based on the synopsis and there’s about a seven per cent chance I might be wrong. Read the book itself just to make sure.

Also I’m a bit drained from doing the Vitiators De-con-struc, so I’m gonna try and make this ‘Other Books’ series a bit shorter e.g. last one I did [Green Fuse Burning] was around 4000 words while the first [Figures Crossing The Field Towards The Group] was about 400.

But I always think this way…then I start typing…and ten pages later there are four alternative endings, with the swamp masquerading as a third vicious infinite!

I’m doing it right now.

This intro in and of itself is already over a hundred words and I haven’t really said anything about the book yet.

I’m even thinking of ways to keep the intro going.

A tangent into The Fold//Deleuze maybe, or a call back to-

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SKULL.

SLIME.

TENTACLE.

WITCH.

WAR.

Not sure about the syntagmatic inter-relationship between each of those words, but WAR appears to be the main noun that is being qualified here.

Or is it WITCH WAR?

The SLIME, I suspect, is either coming from or in league with the SKULL, while the TENTACLE must-

TENTACLE WITCH?

The WITCH could have tentacles which would make them a TENTACLED WITCH, which could in turn be shortened to TENTACLE WITCH cos no one notices the ED sound anyway.

So the SKULL SLIME [SLIME coming out from the SKULL, possibly sentient] is up against the TENTACLE WITCH [I’m using singular but I assume there are many of them] and their resentment is drawn out long enough for it to be referred to as a WAR.

Unless all four nouns preceding WAR are individual groups adversarial towards each other?

WITCH vs TENTACLE vs SLIME vs SKULL.

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[Other Books] Green Fuse Burning // Tiffany Morris

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[Disclaimer: as with all the pieces in the Other Books series, this is just a tongue-welded-to-cheek speculation about what might happen in Green Fuse Burning, mostly as a way to promote horror/experimental work. I have not read the book. But I may read it later to see how wrong/prophetic I was]

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This one pulled me in the same way Reanimator did, with luminescent green on its cover.

Plant-related green.

Horror green.

And the promise of more green from the title.

Actually:

‘The first edition of Solaris was a green hardback. Many asylum patients had a copy by their beds. Green is the colour of hopelessness.’ – Dysnomia++ [2015]

But also the colour of ecstasy.

To me, at least.

Will Green Fuse Burning deal in this kind of duality?

Here’s the plot summary/synopsis [whichever one is correct]:

‘After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him—about his childhood, their family, and the Mi’kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita’s girlfriend Molly forges an artist’s residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up.

On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin’s history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest’s lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she’s never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp’s decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.’

As with a lot of these Other Book specs, I don’t know the author, have yet to read any of her other work, so a lot of the guesswork I come up with might be way off base.

But might be way on base too.

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[Other Books] Xenoerotics // David Roden

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Not sure how long I should keep adding this disclaimer, but the following is just a tongue-in-cheek speculation as to what Xenoerotics might be about [as a way to make people read the book]. It is not the actual plot.

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Xeno = foreign/alien/other; different in origin

Erotics = not porn

I don’t really know David [the author], but I know of the books he has written for Schism Press [Snuff Memories and this one, Xenoerotics] and that he is a Lecturer in Philosophy [focusing on post-humanism, I think] at the same uni my mum went to, and, apparently, the writer of several Doctor Who novels.

Unless that’s a different David Roden?

[edit: it is]

I don’t think it is as The Nemonite Invasion comes up under his name on google, as well as in the space under this book [Xenoerotics] on the ‘You Might Also Like’ list on amazon. Maybe not the best barometer of relevancy as it also recommends the following novels:

Holo-girl: Evasion [Light Novel] // Iagan Loch

Renegades Volume 1: Rise // Shawn Frost

Nostalgia is Heartless: the Heartless Series Book 2 // Sarah Lahey

My Name Was Susan O’Malley // Michael J. Nercessian

Age of Vice // Deepti Kapoor

Does Holo-girl also deal with the coming-abject? Did Susan O’Malley get meshed with a graviton emitter? Is Age of Vice written from the perspective of a sexed-up ED-109? Is Nostalgia the name of a-

Xenoerotics…

Not sure if this is fiction or a collection of stories exploring a philosophical concept/theory, or a mix of both, but I do know that one of the quotes on the back cover explicitly calls it a collection of stories so maybe I’ll run with that.

What do the other quotes say?

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[Other Books] Star Shapes // Ivy Grimes

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NOTE: as with all the others I’ve done in the Other Books series, I have not read Star Shapes; this is just pure guesswork and a bit of fun that will hopefully persuade you [and myself] to check out her book.

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This one is quite random – didn’t know the author, didn’t know the publisher – it just popped up somewhere with the word ‘Star’ in it and a space backdrop so…

Is it actually about space?

Looking at the plot synopsis, maybe not:

Kidnapped from downtown Birmingham, Alabama, and taken to the country, our protagonist is pretty irked. Rather than ask for a ransom, her captors make her feed animals and read dusty books.
She is unnerved by the growing realization that something weirder is afoot, and it all ties back to a book of strange constellations known simply as Star Shapes.
People look to the stars to read the future, but sometimes the stars conceal stories from the past.

I’m not from the Deep South, or even American, but I have seen Lemora: A Child’s Supernatural Tale [filmed in California], and that’s what I’m gonna lean on for the following spec. The eerie-dark aesthetic of prohibition era South-Somewhere, the isolation of everything, even interior sets like the bus station, the vampire matriarch who lures young Lila to her lonely vampire town.

And the Star Shapes?

Okay, so it says the kidnappers are uninterested in a ransom, and instead make the MC perform menial tasks and read dusty books…dusty implies they haven’t been read in a while…that or they’re right next to a window with a busy road outside?

I’m guessing an ancient prophecy, possibly related to some esoteric pagan sect that hasn’t been mentioned in a film before.

Or maybe it’s a fictional sect, made up by the author cos everything real has already been mined to exhaustion/extinction/abstraction/death?

Theme?

Predestination? The need to be connected to something larger/out there?

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[Other Books] Troll // Dave Fitzgerald

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NOTE: as with all the others I’ve done in the Other Books series, I have not read Troll; this is just pure guesswork and a bit of fun that will hopefully persuade you [and myself] to check out his book.

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You don’t know much about the author except he writes a lot of thoughtful reviews on indie books and is clearly a troll otherwise how could he write a book called Troll.

Or maybe it’s his alter-ego?

They [Gitlin & Nuechterlein] do say there is something dark and/or pedantic in there that crawls out now and then without you kno-

Apparently, this is all in second person, which is risky as after ten pages or so the narrative can start to sound like an accusation. Or worse, a list of YOU axioms. But the review you just read on Kirkus promised it was written well, so you don’t need to worry about that.

The review also says that it’s about a youngish uni graduate who failed to escape his home town and now he’s both stuck and adrift, reading books he barely understands, wanking over sex clips from Shameless [including the William H Macy ones], dropping weed into bottles of Asahi, wanking over KOREAN MUM BIG TITS FUCKS SON IN KITCHEN WITH DAD SLEEPING NEARBY, smashing the half-drunk bottle, wanking over Solaris wife, Solaris mum, Solaris dad, setting the whole bottle mess on fire, calling his cat a nosy cunt etc.

You think, hmm, you know this guy, this protagonist, and at some point he’s gonna either become a troll online or dress up as a literal one and go full [Klaus] Kinski in the local supermarket. With a firearm, if he’s American, or a samurai sword, if he’s white-other.

Your gut says the first one, online troll, at least for most of the book, perhaps as a way to juxtapose the nasty shit he does in forums with the powerless null-face of his daily routine.

Here’s the blurb on the back:

‘Here you are, shopping for books online because honestly, who has the energy to go out anymore? There are so many people out there, all buying the same Oprah-stickered crap to take to the coffee shop and Instagram next to their PSLs and blueberry muffins with one perfect bite taken out (or pretend to read until their latest Tinder date shows up). It’s insufferable – the performance of it all – and everyone knows small presses are where the real literary vanguard is happening these days anyway. Well, maybe not everyone. But that’s kind of the point of your being here, isn’t it?

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[Other Books] Casket Flare // Logan Berry

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The problem when you haven’t read Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake is how to say anything about Logan Berry’s new hybrid thing, Casket Flare.

But I refuse to see this as a problem.

Cos I’ve read the synopsis and, as I’ve said on the other four of these things that I’ve done, with experimental stuff, you can never be right, you probably won’t even come close, and I’m pretty certain I’ll come even less close than someone who’s read Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake so…

What is the synopsis of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake?

‘Camp Crystal Lake is on fire, and everything’s been exhumed!!! In the burning forest it’s impossible to distinguish between the killers, the campers, and the camp counselors. 

A cursed book wrought from a cursed planet, Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake is a fetish-object emanating oblique fan fictions and haunted eco-poetics. Where hedonistic teens perform hedonistic plays on an outdoor stage, where Sky Ferreira sings of cow disease, where campers make art out of toxic wreckage–the killers lurk! Berry has created a textualized slasher, brought to you in moldy technicolor splendor, that will fuel your nightmares for years to come.’ 

First off, this clearly has nothing to do with the Friday the 13th series cos it says campers and most of the films don’t bother with them. They much prefer to slaughter the counsellors/locals.

Not sure who Sky Ferreira is.

The killers apparently lurk in a textualized slasher so there should be murdering at some point within the madness.

Can a slasher work if something more intelligent is going on?

Spec: a group of counsellors are both on their way to and already at Camp Crystal Lake. They have dozens of activities planned out – mostly singing and stage plays – and even when some of them start to disappear or turn up in random body parts, they still persist with the show. Behind the façade is a sad desperation to escape, yet something ineffable in the camp itself will not let them leave. Finally, the killer appears and attempts to drown himself in the lake. As he sinks to the bottom, chained to a plastic anchor, the lake bed gives way and he drops into a shack that he has been living in ever since he drowned as a child. Meanwhile, the remaining counsellor glues the microphone to her hand and sings to the corpses of her friends, something about sunny times ahead. She attempts to cry but shrieks hysterically instead. Shifts right to left, left to right, right to left, left to right while doing so. Cut to: a turtle traipsing slowly over an artificial lunar landscape, in monochrome, with another moon hovering in the near distance.

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[Other Books] Aurora // Ryan Madej

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I don’t know much about Ryan’s work, just that he has the Midtown Tetralogy over at Orbis Tertius Press [who I know of cos they rejected Purple Muon Castle a while back, which was obviously a terrible thing for them to do but, really, if I made voodoo dolls of every press that’s rejected my work then all we would have left is Schism and that’s not very fair – actually I think Schism rejected one of my stories once, for their gobbet magazine, so they’d be gone too] and that his surname might be Slovenian.

Or maybe Czech.

If it’s Slovenian, I think it’s pronounced Muh-day. But I’m not a hundred per cent sure on that.

[Just checked and apparently Madej is a Polish surname. Will need the author to confirm this though].

Back to Aurora…

I was attracted to this one after seeing the cover and reading the title. Anything to do with space – outer, inner, hovering enigmatically in the atmosphere, other – I’m interested.

Plot summary?

Can’t find one with the basics, but these are the two blurbs attached to the book on its Lulu page:

“A dream of metamorphosis as ancient as nebulae, viewed through orbital telescopes, that know more about ‘human nature’ than we do.”

Louis Armand Author of ‘The Combinations’ & ‘Entropology’

“Ryan Madej’s perverse novel reads primarily as a love story, alternating between the deviant and the divine, or as close as one can get from the physical realm. A journey through madness from the mundane to the otherworldly.”

Charlene Elsby Author of ‘The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty’ & ‘Violent Faculties’

Neither gives me much to go on so this spec could really go off the rails in terms of who the main characters are and general setting/locations [just like the last three I’ve done tbh].

Though there are some clues in the blurbs:

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[Other Books] Ablation // Danika Stegeman LeMay

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Previously on Danika Stegeman LeMay: The Psycho Holosuite Years:

  • A ‘Midsommar’ piece for film dada with lines like: ‘It’s winter in my heart. Hey baby. How you feeling?’ or ‘Drop the curtains. The day is unspeakable.’
  • Her hybrid novel PILOT deconstructed but not really [the process for the De-con-struc series is still finding its feet i.e. both tone and style seem to be different with each piece].

Now, she’s swooping in with another hybrid-ish book of poems called ABLATION, a word that has been giving me a lot of trouble as, no matter how many times I look it up and stare at the letters, it just won’t stick in my brain. I heard it in ‘Star Trek’ once – ablative shielding on the ship – but I didn’t really know what that meant, only that the Borg couldn’t seem to penetrate it.

For the Chinese translation of the novel title, I went with ‘person who is losing skin.’ But I think ablation might mean limbs, not skin.

Okay, just checked for the seventeenth time and it’s the removal of body tissue.

Does that mean medical removal? Or a natural occurrence?

I’m gonna stick with the translation I’ve already got cos I don’t know what body tissue is in Chinese and skin sounds more poetic e.g. shed skin and there’s new skin underneath.

What’s ABLATION about?

Here’s the synopsis:

‘Ablation is an elegy to Stegeman LeMay’s mom, who died in 2020, and, simultaneously, a love letter to Stegeman LeMay’s young daughter. The book was written in the liminal spaces opened by birth, death, and trauma. It contains poems, hybrid text, images as windows and thread as a form of healing. The book’s materials coalesce and surface, waves washing along the thresholds of control and chaos, form and formlessness. These thresholds become points of divergence, where what’s essential is carried forward, where all else is transformed and unshored.’

I’ll be honest, I was a bit wary about writing something about this as it’s clearly quite personal for Danika and my style can sometimes be a bit abrasive [ablative?].

Not intentionally, it just ends up like that somehow.

But then, there are some questions in the liminal space between my brain and all the miscellaneous stuff, mostly around methodology and subject-matter permission, so I’m just gonna plough ahead and ask them [to myself] and then probably do a spec too.

Or I’ll do the spec first.

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[Other Books] So Beautiful And Elastic // Gary J. Shipley

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No plot summary that I can find for this one, so I’ll have to base the following conjecture on the other author blurbs and what’s available for preview.

First off, this one from Claire Donato:

“Gary J. Shipley’s So Beautiful and Elastic entwines elegant prose, blistering suspense, and art criticism, all shot through with a dark secret. Exploring creators as diverse as René Magritte, Clarice Lispector, David Lynch, Dennis Cooper, Bruno Dumont, and Gary Indiana, Shipley claims his spot as a singular disciple of this genealogy of experimental art. Ann’s voice will stay with you long after you exit her mind’s haunted house—you won’t even realize its cursed magic until it has already swallowed you whole.”

Suspense implies a plot of some kind, art criticism suggests art professors or bohemia.

The cover shows panels of surrealist paintings by Rene Magritte. Nine panels in total if you include the title and author text, which I do.

According to the blurb above, the narrator is Ann, who possesses a mind like a haunted house that may or may not have an interest in swallowing me whole.

Spec: this is a period piece set around the 1920’s. Ann is both in the centre and on the fringes of all surrealist groups, each materialist/non-materialist offshoot. Maybe even the Italian/Russian futurists too. At certain points, she will smoke with Breton and Bataille and kind of nod at the floor as they start to argue about how far something like Nadja could take the next revolution if they could just get it into Bukharin’s hands. Later, she will leave and walk around the city, probably Marseille, and become lost in her own thoughts which, ironically, are pure psychic automatism. The suspense? I guess someone’s getting murdered, maybe at the end of the first third of the narrative. Is Ann the culprit? Yes. She is the narrator and she will let us know [cos her mind is a haunted house with cursed magic].

I’ll admit, I’m not super confident about the above spec, Shipley doesn’t usually do this kind of plot, but you never know…

Why Magritte?

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[Other Books] Figures Crossing The Field Towards The Group // Rebecca Gransden

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At the risk of becoming rebeccagransden.com, here’s the new novella from the writer who brought you The American Scream in the Film Dada series and various other novels/novellas, including one called Sea Of Glass that I did a De-con-struc on recently.

Here’s the blurb:

A pilgrimage. An England in Delirium.

That’s it.

Conjecture: A Field In England springs to mind cos both have field in the title. And a type of vagueness.

An England not the?

Suggests an alternate state of reality, where that England runs a little differently from our England. Perhaps the fields have replaced the cities. Figures could be vigilantes at odds with the group. Does the group have control? Maybe they do and that’s why they’re on the other side of the field. If the field is the only location in the story. Is it even a story?

Also popping up in my head, folk horror e.g. The Blood On Satan’s Claw, Wicker Man, Midsommar etc. If the field is a literal, physical location in the text then it could go down that path. And it’s not impossible to write something set in one field. A lot might happen there. Either surreal violence or a kind of mad inertia or something else or a mix of all three. With field in the title, I’m hoping for ley lines at some point, some occultism. Perhaps a not shit version of The Happening? But then, with the figures and the group…there has to be a sociological element.

Based on my experience with Sea of Glass, I’m gonna say that the field is the key to this, not the figures or the group. The question is: will it be sentient, and does it want anything?

Plot spec: A lone figure starts the story, wandering into a field, searching for a group that they’ve heard can help them in some way. Inside the field, they meet other figures, maybe two or three [not too many cos then dialogue scenes become awkward/difficult]. Soon enough, strange things begin happening in the field. The group is not where it said it would be. One figure bonds with the field on a psychic level and attempts to woo the others to its side. Slowly, they acquiesce, except one who must be sacrificed. Finally, they abandon their search for the group and make a perimeter around the field, fortifying it with sharpened tree branches. When done, they erect a sign that says, ‘welcome to those who are figures, please explain yourself.’

That’s my guess, which I’m about 17% confident in.

Or maybe the field is a total misdirect?

It’s only 88 pages so whatever happens, it’ll be relatively swift. And probably discomforting too [in a penetrating, lasting way].

You can buy it here