protean depravity

C'est le moment où un homme sain d'esprit qui cause avec un fou ne s'est pas encore aperçu que c'est un fou. The above quote by Marcel Proust from À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs , the second installment of his In Search of Lost Time series, describes a moment you haven't yet realized that the person you are chatting with is, in fact, insane. It is this quote, oddly enough, that has always sprang to my mind, the feeling that surfaces from within me, when I listen to the American folk rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. It is the core of what this music's surface of pleasantness and harmony, conveyed by melodious, honeyed, smooth tunes, hiding outbursts of intense emotion and distorted, disrupted by glimpses of insanity, by cacophony, awakens in me. And it intrigues me, it haunts me, I can listen to them and be inspired to a different feeling every single time, but that basis of oddity, of weirdness remains.

There’s much to appreciate about an author who can, in a short story collection, juggle with a limited and recurring set of ideas without coming off as monotonous and repetitive. Collections are considered accomplished to the degree that they are varied and reflect a mixed assortment of literary devices; differing points of view, thematic and stylistic variation, anything to keep tedium away. It takes a master hand like Evenson to go against that convention and to write a collection of stories thematically focused and subtly interconnected, extremely well curated and arranged, unparalleled in minimalistic writing and laconic dialogues, examining themes like environmental collapse, paranoia, AI, or cruel family ties through heady, composed, original horror.

From aquatic to cosmic horror to zombie apocalypse to science fictional catastrophes, to top tier weird – Tom Over's writing definitely has a wide range and it's outright scary how effortless and at home he can write in each one of those directions.

A place changes you – a city, a neighborhood, a hotel. A story. You arrived to each with your own fear, your own hunger, and you found yourself taking on the cast and the appetite of where you were. You couldn’t help it. About one third into Extended Stay I was confused and not sure what Martinez was trying to do here. The half-hypnotic, half-psychedelic narration. The dream-like atmosphere. Confusion. A main character as detached from his reality as he was from his readers. Helpless, directionless, sometimes mean, sometimes aggressive, sometimes opportunistic, sometimes indifferent. An environment teeming with, literally leaking hostility. It really felt like reading a dream, or rather a nightmare-diary. And I didn't like how it affected me, it didn't feel like a kind of fiction I enjoy reading.

A couple of years ago my way to work passed through the so-called "Pissallee" behind the Berlin train station Zoologischer Garten - a terrible, derogatory name for a street in Charlottenburg inhabited by homeless people, the walkway usually packed with tents, makeshift beds, blankets, shopping carts and bags full of stuff to live on scattered all around, so much so that sometimes you didn't really have space to walk. One evening on my way to the train station I saw from the corner of my eye a sleeping bag - nothing unusual in this street - which looked empty to me the way it was thinly spread across the floor. Just as I was passing, it started moving and wriggling around like an earth worm, giving me for a split second the impression the empty sleeping bag is doing this eerie squirmy dance. In that split second I felt such a dread in me, felt my stomach drop and my spine chill with such a force that it threw me off for a moment and I felt the need to first collect mysel...

Thinking about where to start with Black City Skyline and Darker Horizons , my thoughts keep on going in circles which always end in the same one word: Providence. "I can't tell you what's going on in this city, Detective. Maybe it's a combination of gentrification, global warming, and crime, with a hefty dose of lockdown anxiety. Maybe it's something else." Courting ground to Edgar Allan Poe as well as home to H.P. Lovecraft, Cormac Mc Carthy and yes, Barry Lee Dejasu, Providence has a substantial claim to fame when it comes to North American literature. In the tradition of other evil small towns like King's Salem, Levin's Stepford, or the more recent examples of Baxter's Gulpepper, Jones' Proofrock, Junji Ito's Kurouzu-cho, Dejasu's Providence too plays a crucial, almost characterlike part in his debut short story collection. So much so that this horrible place, of which characters often complain but never do or even can leave, is th...

Every now and then there comes a book that I read digitally and feel so strongly about that I'll want to own a physical copy. I recently found that book in a wonderful, allegorical novella about identity, aggression, estrangement, inner conflicts, desires, solitude and maybe even a little about hope and despair: One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve. I just loved it.