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Title: Batesian Prey Of The American Southwest

Author: Sasha Hawkins

Premise: A fictional actress falls [poetically/abstractly] into and beyond the 1964 psychological thriller, ‘Marnie’, as well as a few other filmic references that I had to either look up or stay blank on. Not to mention the Bible.

Publisher: Schism Press

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I am neither Batesian nor Prey nor the American Southwest and therefore not the target reader for this text, but I’ll give it a shot anyway [cos it’s a fellow Schism author, the book is relatively short and I’m intrigued by the ‘Marnie’ reference].

Actually, there are no target readers for experimental work.

That would be insane.

Who else can understand this level of abstruseness outside of the author herself? Themselves?

Okay, I’ve checked an interview online and it’s she/her.

And this is her baby.

All I can do as a reader is embarrassing guesswork.

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That interview [with The Operating System] is a good grounding piece. Don’t think it was given specifically for this work, but an earlier version of one particular section of it. Still, it seems to locate the text in the world of ‘Marnie’ and Hitchcock and difficult nostalgia. Difficult in the sense that Sean Connery was a misogynist who once said in an interview that he sometimes had to slap a woman to shut her up.

Hitchcock?

He was more of a psycho-sexual puppet-master, hence his role as film director, and his choice of scripts where a production line of Hollywood blondes [some, like Hedren, tied to personal contracts with the director himself] get battered and bruised by Hitchcock analogues. Did he see himself as Norman Bates? A flock of no future, no hope birds? Sean Connery?

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If you’re a man, there’s one thing you have to keep in mind when reading this. You can be an object to others. A terrifying object. A pitiful object. A sexy/sexless object. Don’t take it personally. But it’s true.

There is sexual violence in the very image of you, let alone the prospect.

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