Prisms of the Oneiroi, by Martin Locker

 

9789992033876

Mons Culturae Press, 2023

190 pp

paperback

(read in April) 

Taking its place on my favorite books of 2025 shelf, this collection of stories sits next to Snuggly's The Onyx Book of Occult Fiction, which is where I first read anything by its author, Martin Locker.  His contribution to that most excellent volume is a tale called "The Dreaming Plateau," which is so powerful that it kept me awake just thinking about the ramifications of the ending.  Anyway, in the back of The Onyx Book of Occult Fiction is a list of sources for the included stories, and that's where I discovered that "The Dreaming Plateau" had come from Locker's collection of stories Prisms of the Oneiroi.  I knew immediately that I had to have that book, so an email conversation with the author and a paypal transfer later, it was mine, along with another that I'll save for my upcoming vacation.   

 I'm not sure which of these stories I can label as a favorite since they were all extraordinary as well as reality blurring,  but quite a few of these have stayed with me since reading this book. Very briefly,   "The Dreaming Plateau" opens this collection, featuring an adventurer motivated by profit and glory who heads up a small expedition to Tibet's Plateau of T'Singah.  The titular plateau is a place where "over the ... centuries several visitors had made their way ... yet very few had returned."  Those who had managed to come back had been "pale and quite shaken," and had said nothing.  The same had also happened to a Tartar explorer on a mission from the Czar who had also made his way to that area, and who, in his report of that expedition was "similarly reticent."  The stories that our narrator and his crew had heard from a village elder about their destination were shaken off as "entertaining, antiquated and exotic ... but not anything which a modern enterprising band such as ourselves needed to fear."   Needless to say, he will pay for that arrogance.   This story is a solid preview of the strangeness that follows, beginning with "Corfdrager,"  which centers on Bruegel's drawing "The Beekeepers and the Birdnester" from 1568.  Our narrator, a scholar, feels that "Something was missing" in the many (and very similar) "interpretative observations" of this work, which he feels "failed to dig into the subject with any real depth" or justified why this particular scene was so "gripping, obscure and archaic."  So when an offer arises for a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where the drawing will be featured as a special exhibit, he jumps at the chance. His goal: to write something that would "tear the cobwebs from the dusty words of the art historians sitting overstuffed in studies and galleries across the academic world." Luckily he has family in the area, and thus begins his quest for the "the deeper meaning," not found "among the ivory towers."  This story was pitch  perfect,  one that I likely will not forget any time soon.       I have to say that while reading  "Sea Salt & Asphodel," I had the feeling of having been beamed directly onto the sands of the western Corsican coast and the village of Cargèse, alongside the "bent women" making the sign of the ochju "with two fingers."  Arrigu is a young man who dreams of creating a "perfume that fully left the world behind, which used the reference points of the hills and the sea but reached out into the myths of his ancestors."  One day he follows a crowd of people running toward something happening on the beach, to find a man who had slipped overboard from a boat during a storm and nearly drowned, but luckily survived.  Arrigu asks a single question of this man; the answer steers both reader and Arrigu down an unexpected path.  Another truly great inclusion here is "In Search of the Wild Staircase," offered in epistolary format, following a scholar's travels into  Lichtenstein and the rather unusual discoveries he's made.  Without giving anything at all away, this story is not only genius but also has a shocker of an ending that I never saw coming.   

from the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Throughout this collection of stories, the reader is constantly reminded that certain types of knowledge can exact a steep price, especially that which has been forgotten or, in some cases, forbidden.   This idea floats throughout these stories, reflecting the tension between the fascination for and the hazards of uncovering what has remained hidden, imbuing them with added depths.   

In the Author's Preface section, Locker notes that this collection of stories is his "first formal foray into fiction," after years of focusing on "research-based publications," which is actually difficult to believe since this book is so damn good.   We are very lucky readers here --  he has used "geographical, folkloric and historical details" in these tales that "hold more than a little truth to them,"  making for not only great storytelling, but also for an eerie, intense and intelligent reading experience.  

Not only is this book highly recommended, but it is pretty much essential reading for those who enjoy their fiction on the darker, weirder side where answers aren't handed to you on a plate.   I can't stress enough just how very good it is, except to say that once I was in it, I never wanted it to end.