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[kaemi]

Just in time to have missed the holiday, a few reviews…

Like a Sky Full of Locusts by Ryan Veeder

For all its heavy metal silliness whereby “blasphemous pinnacles scrape against an eternally black and stormy sky” and its nods to weird scifi icons like Harlan Ellison, Like a Sky Full of Locusts is ultimately an even some more drunching of Veederlore, blusters of Balderstonia and mechanical rebakes of the Little Match Girl series overriding any pip of difference that might holler out of “what if Doomguy was a cowboy”.

Which isn’t to say that Veeder’s once-again-with-feeling approach to tropes doesn’t elicit some memorable mashup winks, like this Eastwood squint at the occult: “It was real angular and complicated, in all the wrong ways. I didn’t like the look of it, and I figured it was bad news for the kitchen in particular and Fort Hugh in general.” A japeous grinthrough enthuses the tone consistent enough to secure against any yes-and nausea, from the colonel’s amusing manifesto to gamey damage counters to action hero puns like when you kill a specter and “it gave up the ghost, so to speak.” Leaning into this silliness, Like a Sky Full of Locusts can overload its lightheartedness to deliver a few genuine sufficient-in-themselves jokes, such as “The Army didn’t tell us what to do with it, so we used it for doing whatever the Army didn’t tell us to do.”

This humor helps give purpose to a game which otherwise lacks it. The arcade shooter gameplay stales parodic when it consists merely of >shooting several times, spiced up occasionally with obviously inert drama: “It took one hundred eight damage, which I guess convinced it to take me seriously, because it started galloping across the hall on all fours, aiming to trample me—or else to rip me up like it’d ripped up all those tables. I got out of the way in the nick of time, and the thing stalked back to where it’d been pacing the floor earlier.” And to the extent that descriptiveness could give the affair animatronic themeride thrills, a delightfully Halloween restaging of Old West cardboard cutouts, the game instead lumbers on almost listless: pressing into the chapel, awaiting no doubt some sacrilegious archdemon inverting a rich array of traditions, there’s instead, uh, a giant lobster? You just like shoot a giant lobster. In fact, as often as not the game shrugs away the need to offer you enemies: “A monster like a giant bat was perched on the cannons. No, it wasn’t a bat, exactly. I don’t have the words.” Unfortunate for a text game, alas.

The resulting effect implies perhaps mass production out of a busy workshop, a game that exists to exist just in time for the holiday season. Even the strings of narrative poetry that thread the chief artistic grasps at mood are largely workmanlike. So we’re left voracious for the promise, fulfilled anon no doubt given our indefatigable author, of being “treated to a selection of nightmarish visions deemed too dangerous for public consumption.”

[kaemi]

your life, and nothing else by Lionstooth

They ought to enpipe a dizzyknotted sewerslide system in all apartments so you can slip out into the nothing as no one, which is all you still ask for. Infuriating this indignity lying liminally between your cavernous desolation and the anonymous crowd gauntlet of petty observability haunted by specters you semiknow. Awkwardly yes hahaing through how are yous mumbled for the sake of not having to explain any feeling, even the fact you feel. Creaking open the door late at late at night, having not been outside for long enough the shell has been swallowed, so nakedly desperately not to externalize, endure the humiliation of existing within the same space as those with whom you could never share it, communal redolence of lives merely adjacent: “Tables are scattered around the cavernous, curiously sterile space. / You don’t do much cooking yourself these days, but clearly other residents do. Every day you smell strong coffee, freshly baked bread and cookies, cheap instant noodles, mouthwatering blends of spices, and the eggs someone always feels the need to hard-boil into oblivion.” None of it yours, gray ghostness of an inaccessible present, presences as listlessly implicit in “Posters on the walls” surfacerefusing “the only real source of color in the room.” Drained of the persistence to withered, and of so increasingly embarrassed. Avoided everyone in the delusion you don’t have to appear. “You’re not sure exactly when, but you stopped looking in the mirror after a while. You avoid its gaze again today.” A dwelling, they called it, and you couldn’t help but laugh; on the bus home you cried a bit but in the moment it seemed godshakingly funny. Maybe one day it will be, you mutter to the dark corners. Surrendered the present but not yet a future, freedom of dreams deep into late afternoon: “Gray light hurts thirst for it burn for it / Too much in the posters all worlds at once like mirrors”.

Because that yearning still is youthfully convinced of a tomorrow, we brave the humiliations, engage with those nearest, enterprising the infinite distance between. Neighbors, not names, we beseech urgently to breakthrough to something, someone. Mostly they talk at you, usually at the vagueness of you, courier of their whims for some other satiation. Persisting you sweatingly manifesting the miracle: “It’s been a while since you’ve seen him so peaceful. No tear stains on his cheeks, no sign of a haunting in his eyes. You pull up a chair and watch the movie with him, share a couple of drinks. His laughter, when it comes, is surprising yet inevitable, a hot spring bubbling up from unseen depths. / When you get up to leave, his smiling face is as open as a child’s. “It’s been really nice meeting you. We should do this again.” / Of course, you think but don’t say, returning to the hall.” But tomorrow is not the next day but another day. Subjected to cycles stronger than your will to break them, encounters calcify, intimations never make their intimacy. Worlds presented at you as screens: “You know the notebook he’s talking about. He’s shown you before. He never seems to pay attention to the dates in the upper right-hand corners of the pages. / You can’t help him here. You leave him to his thoughts.” Every new domain opened to you is hollow because you are, that’s who you are. You wouldn’t be at home in fulfilment. The liminal is within you. “You know now that all worlds still open to you are here inside these walls … You could give yourself what you’re pretty sure you deserve, but you’d never stop resenting every grateful smile or beautiful strain of music that would still reach you, reminding you of what you could have allowed yourself.”

Suitable to the foggy lugubriations, sentences cataract: “The tile mosaic on the floor makes your head spin. The pattern is phosphenic, obscene.” Filmic, the mosaic of fragments forms superloaded representations that shadowlengthen the progressions to montage: “Sulfur and sex and azalea and antiseptic”, each quality suggestive of depths the direction doesn’t chase. A fragile illusion, though, not only because sometimes the superfluity tinks hollow, as in vague gestures to candles scented of “musk and ozone and something you can’t place”, but also because whenever the ambiguity persists past its aloofness, the allusion extrudes its unplace, as in this slight unsettlement that sloughs its sensuous uncertainty with a logical doorslam:“A pleasant breeze stirs the room and makes a bouquet on the table tremble. The window is closed. Maybe there’s a fan somewhere you don’t see.” Maybe, yes, but one doesn’t need fiction for their explicable shivers.

Reliance on fleetness to prevent the facades from graying out to the empty spaces implied serves the story its well enough, but it does make the nightmare shift somewhat unearned. “eyeseyeseyeseyes” it shrieks, and I’m like, sure. There are teases of a deeper tension which allure: “You fall on your knees, a supplicant, before the dispenser. Mouth open, tongue lolling, you paw at the lever. / How many times have you chosen to unknow like this, to turn away before facing the full truth? How many times have you seen it in its enormity?” But eager to know more, we must inquire it of the link to the credits. Vastness, its capacity to erase, offwhites the blankness bared.

[kaemi]

Dark and Deep by Amanda Walker

Bearing a child. Love, they say, begets it, besets you. Life, they insist, begins with you; over a grave you cannot not wonder they’re wrong: “I wasn’t healed from bearing her before we buried her. That was when the seed of true sin, the one that haunts me, was planted. My hatred of my husband watered that seed. I couldn’t forgive him.” Fell pregnant, they nod, fallen for many things, only some of the times pushed; over the precipice they ask you, again through the grimace, to fall in love: “I stand and run and run, the hatred in my heart and the seed in my belly growing even now until he catches me, holds me down, carries me back, and I lie alone grieving my baby in the earth, and for the one growing in me now, growing in poisoned earth.” Emptiness in each fulfilment they bury you in, in the hollows you ask the mores, is this it, am I all they say? “Long you stand looking down this road as far as you can to where it bends into the undergrowth. You sigh-- what can you find at the end of it but your own doubt, the cavernous hole where God once lived in you? You find that hole at the end of every road now, and it’s deeper every time.”

One winter, you might realize when, you’ll hear the whispers without your name. When in the aloneness the aches overtake, they won’t send the doctor but the priest. The doctor, they explain, is attending a birth, and you’ll nod, a life so overfilled needs no more loss, love regrets it, resets you: “When things die, people or love or hope or hearts, they leave their broken bones in the objects around them. So many ghosts are here, their bones rattling." Rattled out of the decrescendo one last time to answer, to relate, to defer no longer your refusal to either, this at last is power, the refusal to. “That’s when the witch grew in me, started wearing my skin.” After life, beyond the cages clattering with prayer, soul only soul, the answers, this relation skein, to whom could the priest guide? Long since buried in its fulfilment: “The hole of doubt in you feels bigger yet shallower, as if something is there to believe in, but it’s monstrous” and over a grave you cannot not wonder they’re wrong. At peace, they stop trying to rebut you: “Warm winter woolens instead of traditional formal reverend’s clothing. They make you feel like just a man.” The claim to be something more than worldly, of course, you’ve heard it a thousand times, but “No one will miss such a man, who might leave a job at the slightest whim and go singing down the open road, who is always after an open door, an easy way out.” When you take them seriously, the pain and punishment at the moment nigh, stop their raging to debut you, let loose the hellfire: “You fling the door wide, the bones there in front of me. A moment they stand balancing with emotion, and all but lose themselves, nearly tumbling down again. A tongue of fire flashes out and licks along the upper teeth. Smoke rolls inside the sockets of his eyes.” Demons of a desire so coldering it collapses, cellar secrets pretensions that bearing all this life makes more than “Bones. So many of them, where they should be, where they were, where they are not. A life made of bones rattling and seeking, their fingers still clutching at me.”

The harrowing heaves with the repetitions, so the prose complies. Any image rendered redoubles, retriples migrainely: “Scrubby patches of ice-frosted weeds poke through the hard-packed dirt. Small patches of ice, little frozen puddles, gleam here and there where the dirt dimples.” Okay fine, I’ll put on a jacket. The imagery has a power that grips you, and certainly the mood deserves it relentless, simply that sometimes repetition merely repeats. In the best cases, the doubling downhills the momentum to the sudden jerk up, like this sentence tensionreleasing through its final phrase: “Snow falls in downy flakes from the darkening sky, frosting the frozen ground, landing on leaves no step has trodden black.” But any beauty so earned wilts with the once again without passion: “Fat, lazy snowflakes drift from the darkening sky as twilight deepens.” While often the additions don’t add anything other than the originating impulse, the repetition is by its relentlessness redeemed, as sometimes the repetition, like some Stewart Lee routine, breaksthrough to new, some secret centrality you’ve been circling the entire time: “The white web, the white spider, the white moth, all glowing softly in the dim of the barn, here when all these things should be dead or sleeping through the winter cold. They are as out of place as you are, the design of your life having brought you here despite your lack of fitness for the job, for any job, really. It seems in its unnatural presence a design of darkness clothed in white, appalling, inevitable.” Logic of the gravity of the given gives you the drawing perspective. In there, the core compels.

Briskness keeps the impasto from muddying, so perhaps blurry better describes the pained picture redoubling the forest in so many trees through which you terrorglimpse “a white figure flickering in the woods, keeping pace with you”. That this haunting bespeaks a strange hope testifies to the electricity that keeps sparking from the unsaid, a stronger current to wish be carried to the surface the salience of all these shocks.