Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator, by Alexander Zelenyj

 

"There are more men in the world who wreaked senseless havoc than men who preached for peace."

9781913766306

Eibonvale Press, 2024

406 pp

I would have done a happy dance when this new book by Alexander Zelenyj arrived at my door, but there were people here so I just did it inside my head.  I have had the very great fortune to have read several of this author's short story collections, and this  newest one is definitely cause for celebration.   

In Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator, Zelenyj cuts across and through genre in his stories to produce something entirely his own.  There are elements of horror, science fiction and fantasy at work throughout this book, but there are also any number of disorienting moments between these two covers that speak to a more surreal reading experience.  At the heart of these stories, and what gives them a resonating quality, is the keen attention he pays to his characters no matter the situation in which they find themselves, starting from the beginning.   In "Peacekeeper and the War-Mouth" a young boy from a Czech immigrant family is bullied by another boy at his school, and while he doesn't quite have the courage to kick his tormentor "square in the junk," he discovers another way to achieve the satisfaction brought by vengeance. In the next, "The Deathwish of Valerie Vulture," a popular comic-strip character, Valerie Vulture, who has been "everyone's sad little scavenger bird for over a century" comes to life, only to beg the cartoonist who has taken over the strip to finish her off.  She can no longer stand the "sick glee" of the many humans who've watched her suffer over that time, and can't bear being the "measuring stick" for people who have enjoyed her misery.  Unfortunately the cartoonist's boss won't allow that to happen because of the profits Valerie's brought in.  "Silver the Starfallen" in which the main character's deep sense of longing is brought to the fore, is set in the time after the defeat of the Danes by the Saxons.  A group of Northmen have been trying to keep out of the way of their enemy, their number including an "inexplicable" warrior by the name of Silver whose earliest memory is "falling like a star from the sky."  Evidently he is "not of this world," and misses the peace of the time "before man existed."  

Throughout this collection of tales, characters face the weight of the past, their own inner demons, and often crushing alone-ness, their experiences making for a beautifully rich collage of human emotions and especially their vulnerabilities.   This is most true in my favorite story, "Little Boys," which to me is one of the best stories this author has ever written, and I've certainly read enough of them to be able to say that.    On their mission to drop the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, the crew of the Enola Gay start their long flight without a hitch, but some three hours in, the pilot, Lt. Paul Tibbets, discovers a strange black flower stuck to the bulkhead.  No one knows where it came from, but eventually more crop up. However, that's not the strangest thing that happens during this flight,  but about the rest I will absolutely say nothing more.  I read this story twice, put the book down for a bit, and then when I picked it up to start again I read "Little Boys" a third time. The imagery is absolutely stunning, as is the intent in this tale, and the raw emotion just leaps out at the reader.  Oh my god -- someday (and soon!) someone should nominate the author for some kind of award, if for nothing else, this story alone.   Then there's another personal favorite, "Bright Sons of the Morning," that finds a military investigator who is tasked with tracking down an ancient evil in the desert of Iraq.  Mackey finds this mission more personal than most he's carried out over his very long career, beginning with a strange and powerful cult as well as a rogue officer.  I had the sense of Apocalypse Now mixed with sheer evil as I read through this one, most likely the most frightening story in this collection.    The remainder of the stories are also excellent, with not a bad one in the bunch, illuminating the weariness wrought by the fact that, as the titular character in "Silver the Starfallen" notes, there are "more men in the world who wreaked senseless havoc than men who preached for peace,"  a truth that is definitely at home in our present.  

Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator is this author's boldest story collection so far, and although I have truly loved his books that I've read in the past, this book goes well above and beyond those on so many levels.   Most highly, HIGHLY recommended.  

The Universe as Performance Art, by Colby Smith

 

9781913766153

Eibonvale Press, 2024

143 pp

paperback

Crikey! It's been a long while since I've been here but things have been a bit on the chaotic side for a while.  There really just hasn't been much spare time to post my thoughts about what I've been reading, although I will say I have a stack of small-press gems sitting here waiting for my comments. 

 First up is one of  Eibonvale's latest releases,   The Universe As Performance Art  by author Colby Smith, a collection of short stories that above all will jolt its readers out of their complacency while making them do some serious thinking about what they've just encountered.   As described on the back-cover blurb by author Paul Cunningham, this book is "a disquieting, panoramic gallery exhibition obsessed with art's arranged marriage with Nature and the consequences of art itself," but to say that Smith's work is "disquieting" is an enormous understatement.  

I am so late in posting about this book which I should have done last month (had it not been for a two-week vacation and then a week of sleep recovery)  that I'm only going to offer three examples of stories that made a deep impact on my already-buzzing psyche.   "The Game Show Expats" did my head in and wins my personal award for most disturbing.    This story consists of three different scenarios focused on people who've won each a trip to the Florida Keys as a prize in a game show that "combined both the novelty-game and trivia formats."  The first two are out there, but it's the third one that made me do a very loud "WTF,"  but then again, I live in this state and honestly, nothing here fazes  me any more.   If you're talking about the question of what different people find to be important in life, this story answers it in suprising ways.   "All about yourself" indeed.    I can't speak highly enough about "Somnii Draconis," which begins as a young man is walking along the beach and runs into an older guy with a dowsing rod. Turns out the dowser is looking for "the sex of stones." Obviously, the younger man says, "there are no organs at all in rocks," but the old man definitely knows what he's talking about -- as the younger will soon discover.    As this part of story is unfolding, another thread running through this tale links current "black-market hype" (which I won't explain here)   to the  "classical Chinese medicinal canon," beginning with the "dragon bones"  (龍骨), fossils discovered by farmers as they plowed their fields, which then went to priests who ground and used them for their "supposed healing properties" against "metaphysical ailments."  While there is more than a bit of humor in this one,  the younger man's  unspoken"counterargument" toward the conclusion of this story deserves our full attention.    In a completely different vein is "Amaterasu Overthrown," which is without doubt brilliant, transplanting the Japanese myth about the sun goddess deep into the future and most fully into the realm of science fiction.   On the space station Takamagahara the light suddenly dies, "sucked away" by the goddess Amaterasu who has fled the station for a black hole after a prank "gone too far"  by her brother. The result is devastating for life forms on the station; thus a price must be paid.   Worth more than an honorable mention are "Aphorisms in Concrete," "The Bombed Zoo,"  and in a much quieter mode, "Fluora," all of which point to Smith as a serious talent. 

The majority of these stories center on art, integrating physical, mental and spiritual selves,  science and the natural world as well as other areas of existence, all written in  bold, vital language.  Connected to that are the consequences of the choices that are made by the people who inhabit these tales, which are also explored here.   What really struck me though in most cases was the intensity of emotion that seeps out via the author's characters, even in those stories I didn't particularly care for, which in actuality weren't all that many.  I will say that if you depend on trigger warnings, well, this probably isn't the book for you.  

 In the blurb on the back of the book, Cunningham also says that this book is "an indispensable contribution to the Neo-Decadent international art movement canon," and  I have to admit that my familiarity with the movement is pretty much nil (although after reading this one my curiosity is getting the better of me).  I found this article from Document (2023) which helped a bit,  and a brief explanation by Fergus Nm in The Aither as part of a review of Neo-Decadence Evangelion (Zagava, 2023; ed. Justin Isis) where he describes this group as a "loose confederation of writers, poets, and artists with an axe to grind against the imagination-starved tedium of much of what passes for 'contemporary culture.' "   Amen to that -- and here's to continuing to shake up the system.  There's more than enough to keep any reader of darker fiction on their toes here, and my many and hugely grateful thanks (along with an apology for taking forever)  to the very good people at Eibonvale for my copy.  I may not know the movement itself very well, but The Universe as Performance Art blew me right out of my comfort zone and made me want to read more from Mr. Colby Smith in the future.  And that's what matters. 

Dabbling With Diabelli, by D.F. Lewis

9781908125880
Eibonvale, 2020
277 pp

hardcover

"...human histories and emotions could never be encompassed by one person. You needed different viewpoints ... to obtain as true a picture as possible." 



On page 225 I found the perfect words to describe the content of this book, as these thirty stories take both characters and reader into

"... an alternate world beyond fiction itself into a realm that was even realler than reality..."

with the power to leave the reader shaken, unsettled, thrown off kilter and majorly disturbed. That was my experience anyway -- more than once I found myself having to put this book down before starting it again as I stopped to think about what I'd just read and then to regroup.  Here the space between writer and the reader tends to shrink or fold in on itself, making for a jolting reading experience.  That is a positive thing, as it is becoming ever more rare readingwise in my case these days, and it is what I look for in a well-written collection of weird stories, which Dabbling With Diabelli most certainly is.


Because there are thirty of them, and because of the involvement on the part of the reader, I won't be going through any of these stories in detail, but I will say that throughout this collection, what starts out as ordinary quickly moves into what I can only describe as fringe territory as the weirdness slowly moves in.   A visit to a fair or to a museum, for example,  are normal activities for most people, as is a trip to the seaside or a boat trip down a river,  but it soon becomes apparent that the author has other things in mind.  Unexpected shifting points of view startle and jar any hint of reader complacency.    Dreamers dream other people's dreams.  Time moves in and out of sync in many cases or has no meaning in others.  Unexpected others pop up.  Stories shift gears out of nowhere.  Benign objects become symbols with particular meaning to the observer.   The characters meander through "mental spaces" as they look back, reflect, reminisce, engage in their respective nostalgias,  dream or write of their lives.

In sitting down to read Dabbling With Diabelli, be warned:  the reader becomes a "full-blooded stalker" and "real participant" in this "experiment in the human art of fiction, " and  I found that as such, some mental-rebalancing time was necessary after reading a few stories, or in some cases, after only one.    Having said that however,  my humble reader's gut feeling is that we're meant to be, as the author says in one of these tales,

"cohering the disparate widepread elements into a composite whole; gaining an organic gestalt of plot from the broadcast kaleidoscope of printed appearances,"

 with an eye to examining our own often illogical, absurd and fully human selves and the world in which we live  through this collection of "human histories and emotions."

The stories in this book highlight the author's offbeat (verging on the avant-garde), often-hallucinatory prose style, which invites you in and then often  leaves you scrambling for sanity.  That is not something I say idly -- it's days later and I'm still caught up in the mental wake left behind after reading.   It is a book not to be missed by readers of the weird -- this is my first experience with D.F. Lewis, but I can easily see that the author is a genuine master of this territory.

Close encounters indeed.

***

My many thanks once again to Alice and to David Rix at Eibonvale for my copy.  I loved every second of it. 

The Architect, by Brendan Connell

9781908125095
Eibonvale, 2020
151 pp

paperback

"And so it is that the more desperate men become, the more wild are their dreams. Shunning the world around them, ignoring the blue skies and singing streams, they look for beauty in some great beyond, their diseased minds crippled by stupidity, their senses perverted by occult mechanisms."


When asked by Jeff VanderMeer in in a May 2011 interview what the term "weird" meant to him, author Brendan Connell replied that

" 'the weird' means something different. Not necessarily some creature dug up in the back yard with sunflower seeds for teeth, but rather a perception that is different from normal.  It is like seeing the world reflected on the back of a spoon or hearing a conversation through a thick wall."

The last sentence there pretty much sums up my feelings about  weird fiction.  I know I'm going to be delving into someone's vision of a distorted or dislocated segment of reality, and I look forward to it.   The catch is that it takes a really good writer to  pull it off in a truly satisfying way, and there are a handful of contemporary writers I trust to do it right.  Brendan Connell is definitely one of those authors, with a top tier placement in my imaginary hierarchy of writers of the weird and the strange for some time now.   And while in 2012, the year of its original publication, I'd probably never even heard of The Architect, much less Brendan Connell (I'm a late bloomer -- what can I say?)  Eibonvale has now published its own edition of this book, and I just couldn't resist.  The original blurb for this book refers to it as a "Greek tragedy on hallucinogens."  I couldn't wait to read it and discover for myself whether or not that description was accurate, and by golly, it was.  I normally don't believe blurbers, but yes indeedy, whoever cobbled that phrase together was absolutely on the money.

To more fully understand events of this book, we have to go back in time a bit, to a certain Dr. Maxwell Körn (1849-1924), who had during his lifetime, among other things,  received "certain occult initiations pertaining to the Order of the Hermetic Brotherhood,"  "lunched with swamis and drank tea with Taoist sages,"  and had "entered a secret society of adepts where he studied the anatomy of the soul."   But it was on the third of April, 1894 at 6:30 p.m,  an hour after eating a plate of roast beef and while sitting at platform number 3 of the Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin that within twenty minutes he'd become "spontaneously enlightened,"  coming to the understanding  "of the entire workings of the entire universe, from its creation to its future destruction and saw both the purpose of mankind and the purpose of its life, the celestial scheme of things." Two years later he decided to form "a Universal Brotherhood of Mankind". He gave lectures throughout Europe,  astro-traveled to "other planets and planes" where among other accomplishments he "met with other beings, familiars looking for and archangels, the souls of great thinkers."  In short, he was a "visionary, spiritual scientist" honored by the modern-day, Switzerland-based Körn society, whose board members as the story opens, are examining plans submitted by various architects for a Meeting Place.  None of the designs meet their approval -- they want a building that reflects the idea of Körn himself, who said in 1914 that

"great architecture transforms the world of material objects into a direct and immutable projection of the spirit."

Unforunately, the plans they've seen to this point have been on the mundane side, not a place worthy of Körn's followers.  Frustrated after having been looking at these things for months and finding nothing worthwhile, a nephew of one of the board members comes in with a book of drawings by a certain Alexius Nachtman, and shortly thereafter he is invited to submit a proposal to the board.   He offers them not only

"the greatest structure built in the post-Atlantean age... a symbol of the liberated spirit, of mankind's final dominance, not only over nature, but over physicality itself"

 but speedy delivery.  It takes the Society only thirty minutes to give the go-ahead, and they also offer  Nachtman all the money he will need to complete the project. All he must do is to join the Körn Society, the dues deducted from his otherwise generous salary.

Most importantly for this story, the board members also meet his demand for "full undiluted authority concerning both the architectural and engineering aspects of the project. "  Nachtman has been known to be an eccentric, but with "full undiluted authority,"  his true personality is revealed.  He is the ultimate narcissist, the epitome of unchecked ego, a master manipulator, a man driven by his own obsession and lacking a conscience, but he is also the object of what can only be described as a cult of personality, supported by members of a Society which somewhere along the way "seems to have lost its bearings."  I think in this case,  the author takes the idea of the cult of personality that forms around him to its extreme, yet here logical  conclusion with this tale, which is not at all pretty, but one which doesn't seem to bother anyone except a couple of people who see through what's going on.  Connell  once said that "There are enough monsters and demons in the real world without needing to look elsewhere,"  and in this story it's a toss up as to whether it's the titular architect or his most ardent supporters who reflect this idea to its fullest.  There is, of course, much more, but the joy is in the reading so I will say no more about plot.  The irony will not be lost on any reader.

 As dark as it is, there is a streak of black humor that runs through The Architect, making me laugh out loud for more than a beat or two past a split second.  That's not unusual for this author -- some time ago I read and loved his The Translation of Father Torturo and as pitch dark as that one was, god help me, there were times when I absolutely couldn't stop a giggle or two from bubbling out.  At the same time, The Architect left me with a growing sense of uneasiness that I couldn't shake even after it was all over. 

 Connell's books take on a unique logic which appeals and which works, and frankly, I just love how he writes.  He deserves the honor bestowed on him by author Rhys Hughes, who wrote on the back-cover blurb of  Connell's Unpleasant Tales that

"Every generation throws up few genuine Masters of the Weird. There is simply no hyperbole in the statement that Brendan Connell is a member of this elite group right now, perhaps the most accomplished of them all."

I knew this already, but anyone who reads The Architect could not help but to agree.  A fine novel, certainly recommended to readers of the weird, especially those who have not yet had the great fortune to have made the acquaintance of this author's work.  You will become an instant fan.

*****

My many, many thanks to Alice at Eibonvale for offering me a list of books to read out of which with no hesitation I chose this one, and to David Rix, "a writer, artist and reader who loves books" and who also happens to be the guy who runs Eibonvale.  

Animals of the Exodus, by Alexander Zelenyj

9781908125828

Eibonvale Press, 2019

Eibonvale Chapbook Line #12

hardcover

cover art by David Rix 

(read earlier this year)

"When your Earth-mud walls are scaled at last, 

strike out: your home waits in the vault

None of it was your fault

We belong somewhere, too."

The cover blurb of this book describes Animals of the Exodus as "A 70-page festival for the world-broken. Because there are paths..."  a concept that I first came across in Alexander Zelenyj's Songs for the Lost, a most brilliant collection of stories which  I've been recommending to everyone and anyone who will listen.   It was there also that I first encountered the Deathray Bradburys,  "the most infamous cult band in the history of rock and roll" as noted on the back cover of this author's Ballads to the Burning Twins (Eibonvale, 2014).   The quotation above is from one of their songs, "Migration of the Ancient Children" which is found at the end of this book.  The Deathray Bradburys themselves are legendary, when at the end of August, 2000, they 

"along with 225 of their fanatical followers, disappeared from the face of the Earth as part of the fulfillment of a self-prescribed cosmic prophecy."

As explained in Animals of the Exodus, their quest was to

"fulfill a cosmic destiny of finding those who've suffered irreparable trauma, and taking them away from the place of their suffering to a distant Paradise: the binary star, Sirius."

 And indeed, in keeping thematically with past works by Zelenyj,  the world in these 70 or so pages of interlinked stories is indeed one filled with "irreparable trauma," and the paths taken by those who suffer who seek to find, again quoting from Ballads to the Burning Twins, "a place, far beyond all of this despair..."

The book begins with "Taking Karen Away," which unfolds under the "twin stars of Sirius"  with a horrendous act, the reverberations of which will later resurface in another story as one of the two people here will soon find herself hoping to find "a paradise among the stars."  "Celeste Had to Go Away" occurs ten years after the "initial disappearance" of the Deathray Bradburys, with the actual story beginning much earlier during "72 hours like lifetimes endured in Hell."  In "Some Saw the Fire Exodus," a boy watches as his sister and her boyfriend come to the culmination of their own particular path, knowing that one day he'll see her again.  Finally, in what is certainly the best of the four and most exquisitely written, "The Mayflies Want to Fly," a boy and his "goddess" teacher take a roadtrip toward "That bright pair" of stars in the east, "in case they're good places."  My advice: read each story slowly and carefully -- the links will emerge without having to look for them --  and consider the book as a whole even though it is divided into short stories. 

Anyone who has had the pleasure to have read anything by this author will feel the same emotional gutpunch as before; here he offers such an incredible depth of not just feeling but the very real sense of a broken world  in the very short span of less than 70 pages. Some authors take forever to build that sort of reality in their fictional universes; that is not the case here at all.   Also, like most of the best books I read, there is absolutely no denying that Animals of the Exodus is beyond relevant to our own times.   As I've said before, Mr. Zelenyj really gets it; he's such a brilliant writer that I'd read absolutely anything he writes in the future. 

I loved this book; it will not be for everyone but it cannot fail to touch more sensitive souls like myself. 

*****

My very special thanks once again to the most excellent people at Eibonvale.  It was such a great, smile-producing surprise to have discovered it a few months back in my mail.  And please,  more of the Deathray Bradburys!! 

Resonance and Revolt, by Roseanne Rabinowitz. I love this book. I seriously love it.

9781908125514
Eibonvale, 2018
374 pp


"I will always raise my  voice and write things down so people will know about them. I will never be like a bell without a tongue."



There is just something about this collection of stories that makes me want to buy a gazillion copies of it, then hand it out to people and tell them "you really need to read this."

 The tales offered in this book by Rosanne Rabinowitz, as noted by Lynda Rucker in her introduction,

"weave a cyclical sense of the ebb and flow of power and tyranny and resistance ..."

which you might expect from a book with this title, but that is really just the beginning.  At some point as you're reading, it dawns on you that while you've started out in some recognizable reality, suddenly  you find yourself "between the boundaries of the known places"  and have arrived at "other places, special ones," as her stories make a nearly-imperceptible shift into the periphery of the strange. What makes this collection of stories so unique and so different is that they work sublimely across time and space, past, present, and future, ultimately revealing that  "time and history exists in layers all around us" and that we are  "living with echoes of and surrounded by the past." 

Here's part of the actual blurb:

"A secret sect of medieval heretics stumbles upon the secrets of quantum entanglement, a centuries-old wanderer thrives on rebellion as well as blood in the ruins of post WWI-Munich. Anti-austerity demonstrations lead to haunting connections with past and parallel events, while quantum computing meets 'welfare reform' in our near-future.  Meanwhile, persecuted Jews in early 20th century Russia must decide whether extraterrestrials are allies or the schnorrers out of space."

When I read that little bit o' the blurb before I'd even started reading Resonance and Revolt, I knew then that this book and I were going to be soulmates. I'd also read something (and I can't remember where, sorry), that showed the author describing this book as a "melancholic merging of social realism and the strange," and that is an absolutely spot-on description. 

As just two examples of what you'll find here (although you really have to experience this book firsthand to really appreciate it), the first story "In the Pines,"  is  a sort of triptych of tales that occur in different points in time, where the centerpiece is a particular song that puts the main characters "in synch with signals and waves elsewhere," and reveals a concept that the author calls "dissonant symmetry." It begins with a woman in the past who's lost someone, and as she's trying to deal with her loneliness, the future offers its own echoes to her. Things move forward in time, carrying with them not only that song but adding to it a  deep resonance of loneliness.    In another story, "Return of the Pikart Posse," a young woman with her job on the line and a not-so-satisfying relationship travels to the Czech Republic to learn more about her subject of  her Ph.D. research.   Evelyn  is focused on a particular member of the fifteenth-century "heretic"  Pikart/Adamites, a group who broke away from the Hussite orthodoxy and thus became a target for violent repression. She takes as a sort of mantra a line from the book Lipstick Traces that "Unfulfilled desires transmit themselves across the years in unfathomable ways," and has "set out to decipher all those unfilled desires as they hurtled across the centuries."  She gets her wish, in more ways than she thought possible, as she "entwines" with the past.  This will not be the last story which works on these opening ideas, as they continue to  float throughout this entire collection.   And really, part of the genius of this book is that  the final story, "The Turning Track" (written with Mat Joiner and one I've read before in the excellent Rustblind and Silver Bright ed. David Rix) brings us back 'round to the first in a most brilliant and beautiful way.

Lynda E. Rucker sums up my feelings about this book in the first line of her introduction:

"There's something very special about finding a writer whose work speaks to you in a particular way."  

Author Roseanne Rabinowitz definitely speaks to me --  I've always believed that "history exists in layers all around us," and not solely in terms of events.  The book is a beautiful blending of the historical, the mystical, the surreal, and the strange, but even more than that, it is a book that is absolutely relevant to right now in her rendering of  many recognizable contemporary issues.    The stories do not easily yield answers, but the more you read the more in tune you become, as her writing not only crawls under your skin, but deep into your pores, your veins and your entire being.  And do not miss the excellent and most insightful introduction, but leave it until last.

I'm so incredibly impressed with the people who write for Eibonvale --  as far as I'm concerned, the authors I've read have all made it to the very peak of  my imaginary tier of writers of the strange.

I also have to once again thank the lovely Alice for sending me my copy of Resonance and Revolt. She made me a very happy person for introducing me to the work of  Roseanne Rabinowitz.  I love her work.

this man well and truly gets it: Blacker Against the Deep Dark, by Alexander Zelenyj

9781908125767
Eibonvale Press, 2019
375 pp

hardcover

"It was the world that got inside me. I want to be cured of the world."   


Reading the work of Alexander Zelenyj is not only a personal pleasure, but it is an experience never to be forgotten.  While immersed in this author's newest book, Blacker Against the Deep Dark, as was the case with his previous collections, Experiments at 3 Billion A.M.  and Songs for the Lost,  time collapsed and the outer world just melted away.   Like the "indelible mark upon the future" left by "the horrors of the past" in the title story of this collection (as noted by Trevor Denyer in the introduction to this book),  Blacker Against the Deep Dark leaves an "indelible mark" on the souls of its readers, one that never goes away long after the last page is turned and the book goes back on its shelf.  This man well and truly gets it.  

The blurb offers the barest of clues as to what will be found here,

"From a man having a conversation with the shadow of a human being blasted into a wall by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, to a pastor giving shelter to the most bizarre individual to ever walk the Earth; from a secret group at war with the physical manifestations of disease that have run rampant for ages, to a pair of detectives trying to solve the mystery of a deadly otherworldly drug that legend says holds the power to open the gates to Paradise. These, and other dark and weird tales..." 

 but at the same time, it doesn't tell you that once you start reading you are undeniably in the hands of a master of his craft. These stories are dark indeed, weird yes, but at the same they are  beautiful, raw, and overwhelmingly powerful; they also hit the deepest (and sometimes bottomless) depths of unsettling, as they should.   There's a method to this author's madness here, as the stories reflect a particular theme that continues throughout the course of this book which I'll leave for others to discover, just briefly hinting at it in the quotation from one of the ultimate best stories in this book, "Journey to the End of a Burning Girl," with which I opened this post.

from the cover

Speaking of the stories in this book, I won't go into any of them, but they all take place in worlds not unlike our own, in which people live with loneliness and isolation, pain, depravity, gut-punching cruelty that takes many of them to the outer boundaries of extreme, some looking for cures and others looking for their own means of escape. It is a book that drives you into the darkest zones of humanity, but at the same time, the author recognizes that there is good in people, leaving just the tiniest opening of hope that all may not be lost.

Another highly, highly, highly recommended book that should be on the shelves of anyone who reads modern dark fiction/weird/strange tales; it's also a lesson for aspiring writers as to how it should be done.  I seriously don't know what can possibly top this book over the next eleven months.
Anyone who has read Mr. Zelenyj's previous books will find much that is familiar here, but in Blacker Against the Deep Dark, he takes contemporary concerns, anxieties and worldly ills to their absolute edge, and then goes even further.  I'm not a reviewer by any stretch, so in real-world reader speak, I'll end here by saying that  it's a thought-provoking, tough book to read on an emotional level at times (and I admit that the tears flowed more than once), but Jesus H., it's damn good.

 Then again, I knew it would be. 

My many, many thanks to Alice at Eibonvale, for reasons only she knows. 

same-old, same-old readers need not apply: Experiments at 3 Billion A.M., by Alexander Zelenyj

978095526848

Eibonvale, 2015 (2nd ed.) 

545 pp

paperback, my copy from the publisher

(thank you!)

I think there has to come a time in most people's reading lives when same-old, same-old just doesn't cut it any more. I'm there right now -- actually, truth be told, I think I've been there a while and just haven't really paid attention to the signs of frustration until just recently. In the reading arena of zombie apocalypses, torturefests, cannibalism (and let's not forget the book where HP Lovecraft, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs take on Cthulhu and Shoggoths - major groan ), where is the originality these days?  Why are people happy to rehash the same old sh*t time and time again?  And why aren't readers complaining? 

Thankfully, there are many small presses out there whose founders are more literary minded and who see beyond the need for publishing the SOS --  and Eibonvale is one of these.  I first made my acquaintance with these visionary publishers with their Rustblind and Silverbright (ed. David Rix),  then came Songs for the Lost, and now there's Experiments at 3 Billion A.M., both written by the extremely-talented Alexander Zelenyj. I don't know the man, have never corresponded with him, but I can tell by his writing that he's very much on the cutting edge of the literary side of dark fiction.  He outdarks dark in some of the tales in this book, which I see as a great mix of the strange, designed  for people who want to push their reading boundaries in a most literary and intelligent way.  At the same time, as far out as they may seem, these are very human stories that manage a great deal of depth, often in the space of only one and a half pages. It takes an imaginative, deep and clever person to make this happen, and it's just one reason why I loved this book and why Zelenyj needs more readers. 

I'm not going to go into each story since even listing the table of contents would take more time than I have right now, but there are many incredible tales in here -- I loved "Blue Love Maria," for example, which has all of the underpinnings of those old, darker urban legends -- the sort that "twists and changes over time, it is the nature of its life." This is one of the shorter, more powerful stories in this collection, but there are longer ones that offer the same sort of gut punch  -- the historically-based  "The Prison Hulk," for example, had me immersed until the last word; the dawning self-awareness of isolation in  "The Stealing Sky" didn't let up, and the growing horror of the city found in "I Humbly Accept This War Stick" are just a few examples of why I loved this anthology of stories.  And then there are "The Laboratory Letters," and "Another Light Called I-47,"  just blew-my-socks-off amazing.  

Surreal, dark, on the edge of nightmare -- I can't think of any words to really describe what resides in this book except maybe for this, from "Captain of a Ship of Flowers" :

"And my sleep is deep. And when I awaken I wish only to return to dreams, where I am alive."

Those two sentences sort of sum up how I felt about this book: after turning the final page, it was difficult to get back into reality  -- I just wanted to return to the dreams.

bravo.

about as dark as it gets, folks...Songs for the Lost, by Alexander Zelenyj

9781908125323
Eibonvale Press, 2014
510 pp

paperback

my copy provided by the publisher -- a very huge and very grateful thanks!

Once again Eibonvale has scored really big on the anthology scale, this time with its collection of short stories Songs for the Lost by author Alexander Zelenyj.  There is no way to pigeonhole these tales in terms of genre or style, so the term "dark fiction" or my new favorite phrase "literary darkness" (thank you, RD) will just have to do for the moment. David Rix, "who first launched the good ship Eibonvale,"  notes in the book's introduction no less than twenty genres, which "suggests a diverse range of styles" including "surrrealism", "weird western," "weird war fiction," "children's fiction," "urban fantasy," "weird erotica," "pulp," "noir," and then his final category, "as well as other less defined things." It is certainly one of the most diverse collections I've ever read -- one minute you're reading about the horrors found in the jungles of Vietnam or Laos and the next thing you know you're in the middle of a suicide cult's final moments -- but even with the wide range of styles on offer here, thematically they all tie together perfectly.  Turning once more to the book's introduction, Songs for the Lost deals with "Human pain on a level that is very real," the kind of pain that brings with it a "parallel need for escape, and with it a kind hope."

There are a total of 34 stories and poems in this collection so it is a huge, all but impossible task to talk about each one on an individual basis and to give each the detailed attention and it deserves.  This is a book inhabited by the lonely, the damaged, the lost, the emotionally tortured;  their collective pain an undercurrent that runs through the entire volume,  their collective desires for deliverance made manifest in several different forms.  For example: a soldier whose mind is broken because he carried out orders. A brother and sister standing on a beach waiting for the inevitable. Two adventurers who stumble into an unknown civilization, one of them guided by fame, the other by wonder. A rock group which rises to cult status and fame after they simply vanish  along with hundreds of fans in an "exodus" tied to the twin stars of Sirius.   And many, many more lost souls to be examined.

I have several favorites from this volume -- "The Dying Days of Treasure Spiders Everywhere," about a troubled boy and his grandfather; "Maria, Here Come the Death Angels," which made me want to cry; "Or the Loneliness of Another Million Years," about a man who meets up with a boy who hears about a special door on a toy radio; "On Tour With the Deathray Bradburys;" "Roaring Dream of the Weeping Spider-Men," which emotionally floored me solely because of its subject matter, and then there's "Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations," one of the best stories in this collection, about a man who uses and abuses a young girl he meets who somehow finds it within her to love him even though he admits her body is just a vehicle for him (to what I won't say).  This story alone, probably the best written in the entire book, combines erotica, fantasy, and magical realism to examine a man who is quite frankly dead inside.

 To unashamedly borrow from the book's foreword  written by Brian A. Dixon, once you step into Songs For the Lost  "you will find yourself among lost souls touring abandoned hopes and forbidden dreams at the edge of an impossible paradise."   And it is exactly the author's ability to place the reader at that edge that  is Zelenyj's special gift.   It is a dark place to be sure, and there were times while reading that I wanted out, but I was just not ready to pack up and leave until the last word appeared on the last page.

Songs for the Lost is that perfect, excellent blend of literary and dark that I am always looking for and in my opinion, it is an absolute must-read for anyone who loves dark fiction.  Highly recommended but not just for anyone. Prepare to be gut punched, and do not read this book while you're depressed. Once again, it's a small press that proves that literary and dark can indeed go hand in hand -- cheers.

as close to perfect as an anthology ought to be: Rustblind and Silverbright: A Slipstream Anthology of Railway Stories, ed. David Rix

9781908125262
Eibonvale Press, 2013
365 pp

paperback

"The rhythm of the rails is like a lullaby, comforting as the movement of our mother's bodies while we were still inside the womb. The destination is never quite known. The glimpses we get of backyards and gardens and lanes: voyeuristic, placing no obligation upon us to interact or judge. They seem to embody a hundred thousand alternatives to our own lives, threads not yet grasped, other ways to brighter futures." 

-- Douglas Thompson,  "Sunday Relatives."

"And mind the gap of course."
--Daniella Geary, "Death Trains of Durdensk." 

Until someone recently recommended it to me, I'd never heard of Rustblind and Silverbright, an anthology of slipstream stories joined together by their focus on trains and the railways.  I have to say, this is not only one of the best anthologies I've read this year, if not the best, but one of the most cohesive from a thematic standpoint.  The editor, David Rix, has done an excellent job here, putting together a number of pieces that frankly, I couldn't tear myself away from without a lot of resentment toward whatever it was that made me put the book down. 

Twenty-four stories make up this collection, each one of them simultaneously strange and fascinating. As the editor notes in his introduction, each of these tales, like railways everywhere, visit

"Worlds that can only be glimpsed from blurred windows or from the far end of the platform. Hidden places. Private places. Places where the ordinary and the secret meet."

These short stories take twists and turns as they branch into places that may seem familiar for a while before branching off again into altogether different territory.  Structured into three "acts," they're occasionally broken up by the editor who inserts little bits of history or other fascinating sidelines along with his thoughts.

The stories in this collection (with those little inserts by the editor denoted by "--") are:

act 1

"Tetsudo Fan", by Andrew Hook

--"Animal Station Masters"

 "On the Level, by Allen Ashley:

"The Wandering Scent," by Aliya Whiteley

--"Die Breitspurbahn"

"To the Anhalt Station," by  John Howard

"Death Trains of Durdensk," by Daniella Geary

"Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle," by Nina Allan

--"UK Ghost Trains"

"The Last Train," by Joel Lane

"Writer's Block," by SJ Fowler

act 2

-- "Northern Line Tube Announcement, by Anon" 

"The Path of Garden Forks," by Rhys Hughes

--"London Underground Mosquito"

"District to Upminster," by Marion Pitman

"Wi-Fi Enabled Bakerloo Sunset," by R.D Hodkinson

--"The DLR Shuffle"

"Stratford International," by David McGroarty

"The Cuts," by Danny Rhodes

"Sleepers," by Christopher Harman

--"The Dumb Network"

"Escape on a Train," by Steve Rasnic Tem

"Choice," by Charles Wilkinson

act 3

"Embankmen," by Gavin Salisbury

"Sunday Relatives," by Douglas Thompson

--"The Necropolis Railway that Was and the Sewage Railway that Wasn't"

"The Engineered Soul," by Jet McDonald

"Didcotts," by John Greenwood

--"The Little Carriage to North Korea"

"The Keeper," by Andrew Coulthard

"Not All Trains Crash," by Steven Pirie

"The Turning Track," by Rosanne Rabinowitz and Matt Joiner

followed by author biographies.  

 Truth be told, I loved most all of these  tales, but I did have a few personal favorites:

 Danny Rhodes' "The Cuts" was a most perfect story.  A briefcase-toting civil servant, an arrogant, pompous "characterless bureaucrat" working for the government, travels by train to Wales in November, 1963.  He is sent there to "show some some willingness to listen" after the protests about  the Beeching railroad cuts outlined earlier that year, but he knows that it's a done deal ("he had the figures in his logbook") and his journey is purely for show.  When he stops at Rhosgoch, he is surprised that he finds no protestors there to greet him -- but what he does find is the stuff of nightmares.  Not only is this story beyond good and highly atmospheric, it has the best and most fitting ending I've come across in a very long time.  

Nina Allan's "Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle" is another favorite in this collection - taking the action from real to model trains.  A woman whose career in model trains stems from childhood is hired by a man named Vivian Guppy to find a particular model  that he'd sold and now wants to buy back. When she finds out why, things start taking some pretty strange turns. This story is written as if the author is telling the story in person rather than on the page, but at the same time, she also pays so much attention to detail that in describing every bit of a model dining car, for example,  you feel like you're actually peeking through the windows into an entirely different world.  Luckily, it's longer than a typical short story, almost novella length, so it's not over too quickly, but left me beyond unsettled. That's a good thing.

" Tetsudo Fan":  one of my gauges for any anthology is the appeal of first story and author Andrew Hook didn't let me down here. I was so taken aback at this tale of two Japanese tetsudō (railway) enthusiasts who come together - one helping the other to take his hobby another step further into an entirely different world -  truly setting the tone for what's to come. After reading this one, I knew this entire book was going to be just up my alley. The story succeeds on so many levels of weirdness, but mostly because it's so grounded in reality.

Rounding out my other favorites are  "Sleepers," by Christopher Harman;  moving on into Kafka territory there's  "Didcotts" by John Greenwood, and finally,  "Not All Trains Crash," by Steven Pirie. 

I also have to say that now when I hear that lonesome whistle blow in the distance, a little chill crawls up my spine.  It's one of those books that once you've turned the last page becomes embedded in your brain and never leaves.

I know that in no sense of the word is this a "literary" review, since I am not particularly talented in that arena,  but they do exist: here's one at The Short Review, and one real-time ongoing one from Dreamcatcher Review of Fiction Books.  My thanks to Seregil of Rhiminee for pointing me in this book's direction. His review can be found here, at Rising Shadow.