Rebecca Gransden

[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

[De-Con-Struc] Sea Of Glass // Rebecca Gransden

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Title: Sea Of Glass

Author: Rebecca Gransden

Premise: an indentured-cypher called Kattar re-enters a building that may in fact be a lux reconfiguration of [Capitalist?] Hell and is slowly overwhelmed by it.

Subplot: A beleaguered Chairman tries to keep shit together before ripping it apart again.

Publisher: Cardboard Wall Empire

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“I won’t die,” she said, manic, “I’ve been here for days.”

Conjecture:

Writing can detail but not convey the abject, only visual images can.

There is no visceral sense of disgust in a written description of someone’s guts leaking out [no warmth in them being put back in either].

Unless the book/text itself comes to life, reduces the distance?

Or feels like it does.

I don’t know if anyone ever claimed the above, it may just be me. And it’s based solely on the fact that I usually skim or skip the hugely descriptive parts in novels, which is where the abject usually lies. Where I suppose it lies. Abject in terms of “filth,” not the thing that lurks behind it.

Do I read intensely enough? With enough discipline?

Probably not.

But still…

Description = something already sketched in my mind after the first base signifier. E.g. The castle sat on top of the hill. Castle, to me, would be something from a Corman-Poe film. A matte painting from the Masque of The Red Death or The Pit And The Pendulum. Any further detail about the castle will be fighting against this fixed image. The more specific or elaborate it is, the harder that fight will be for the writer.

Exception 1: Ray Chandler, especially his descriptions of people.

Exception 2: Sea of Glass.

Continue reading →

The American Scream // Rebecca Gransden

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The American Scream dream-light plays and flickers over abandoned space, where long walkways fade. Looped screenings overlap, projected onto the crumbling interior walls of the last dead mall standing in the States, a construction scheduled for demolition on a prophesied future date. Kids of skateboarders sit with their backs propped up against certain inner walls, their mouths slacked open, as the overlayed and out of sync projections run. There is no obvious source of origin for the film, no projector—only projectees, imbibing the images as a sunken parade. Circumfused score and dialogue clang into an atonal echo, while badly overdubbed undercarriages numb into a collective hymn to discordance.

In a pan-textually nonexistent booth between planes, a pity party projectionist sells his soul to a screen demon and fuses with the machine, his life force propelling the unit’s motion in a perpetual spasm of winding muscle.

Silent Disco Reverse Screaming Sucks

The kids grope for an unearned nostalgia analgesic, tanked as blank receptacles, their souls clawing out amygdala residuum. Gormless rhesus shrieks break out and fuse with the film noise, dimmed consciousness behind vocalisations in syncopated cutthroat singing. A stridulant chorus of reconstituted transhumanist dogma reabsorbs its own unspooling spiel, in an hellacious upwelling of klazomania.

David Lynch’s Family Evacuation