It’s a good book. There’s a weight to it that sits heavy and savory, like the first book you ever read.

Colin Winnette must’ve lived an entire life before deciding to write this book. It comes from the future. It spans across eras in a very direct and new way that uses plain and accessible language that still carries poetic cadence.

        “I don’t know. No. Not a lot. I like science,” she said. “I like         math and religion and that kind of thing too…”

        “Could you say why you like those things?”

        “Because they tell us why things happen… and why people         do the things they do.”

(People wonder if I serve only the purpose of flattering writers and building up excitement of small press books. The thing is I stay away from ones that don’t hit the notes I need to hear. The ones that hit those notes, even for a little bit, I write about, and I’m thankful to all these books even if, in the end, I only gave them a couple TOEs. But seriously, writing isn’t like painting, writing isn’t about a single stroke, writing is strange hieroglyphs on a shiny blank page, floating, queued, immovable, indistinguishable, and there it is, forever, so explicit yet so hidden. Of course I write highly about the books I read and love, even if only for small stretches, I write highly about these books because I’m thankful for them. Theirs is a difficult task: to say something that spans across eras.)

Mutable Sound out of Chicago made this book. Thank you, Mutable Sound. Having seen both sides of the equation, I feel it’s the right thing to do: give my gratitude to the press that put this book into my hands. Books want to be read, that’s what matters most. Get me read, says the book. The book says, “Get me read!” And this message is embedded within the words inside the book, like a mouth with tape over it. Mutable Sound heard this book’s muted cry.

        In their office, Marcus tied a new fly and spoke a length of         dialogue quietly to himself as he did so. He’d set out to         write a story about that summer. He started with an idea of         how it would go, then he let the happenings of each day         dictate the movement of the narrative. But now came the         question of how to end it. He wanted the ending to be true.         Or, he wanted to use an ending that could be true.”

Marcus, the pinnacle of the REVELATION trinities, tries to write a book one summer, and the book he writes is not REVELATION. REVELATION is a saga within a lifetime. It’s not meta fiction. It’s a third-person narrative that has no reflexivity. There’s youth; there’s bachelorhood; there’s the divorced father; there’s fruitless reunion; there’s hospitals; there’s grandfather, father, son; there’s flirting with death; there’s death and the piping horns of the apocalypse. REVELATION is the first book you’ve ever read, it’s a slightly more loquacious Shel Silverstein.

        “This place is no place for kids. It’s stuffed to the brim with         all kinds of the dead and dying. It gives the wrong idea         about life, its different stages. It’s easy to confuse any two.         But this,” Grand George pressed the tip of his fork into the         table cloth, “and what he’s going through aren’t the same         thing. Not really. You could write them on the same piece of         paper and draw a line connecting them, sure. But what’s         that line represent? Time?” He brought his fork up, held it         to his eye a moment then brought it back down to the         macaroni scoop. “There’s a lot more than time between us,
        is all.”

When you grow, the longer you grow, the easier it is to see the course of things. Colin Winnette was born in 1984, but he writes like he’s either lived from birth to death once before, or else is only an unaffected observer, born immutable to time. Maybe to really get to the heart of time you need to first become impervious to time, or at least convince yourself so much. In the Blues I think this is called “Meeting at the crossroads.”

* * *

Not much, but it did happen once, I felt a kind of systematic rendering of language: a sink hole’s cause is “a hollow filling up.”

* * *

The book starts with erratic weather that seems like it couldn’t quite happen in our world. It starts with fires that ravage for long spells, hail that breaks windshields, and then come disappearing oceans. It seems like Winnette’s world becomes increasingly estranged, not only less familiar but less plausible, until it is rational to start thinking this isn’t the same place I live in, this is another planet, and/or another time. I’m not sure how he does it, I think the word I want is defamiliarization, and Winnette manages this feat without ever obfuscating the story or sounding academic/esoteric.

This is a grounded book, earthbound, there’s no pretension, no airs to grandeur, no needless experimentation. Having said that, there’s also no feeling of spontaneity. While REVELATION doesn’t feel like a heavily plotted book, it doesn’t have what Marcus’s summer novel has. It’s precise, polished, a model example of husbandry. It’s a matter of taste, but for me this is the one thing I missed when reading REVELATION. It felt a little too mathematical and too modulated, too compressed.

Then REVELATION takes a turn toward the more prosaic. From fire and falling ice and receding seas, Winnette transitions into a story that tells of three generations. There’s that number again: three, triptych, trinity. Even though Marcus is at the head of the trinity, he’s private, and not just in relation to the other characters in the book but also to me, the reader. There isn’t much of an inner dialogue in his case, but somehow, even in his aloofness, I could piece it together. The narrator helped me out at times.

        His mind was swelling, and strong, and diffuse, and the         confusion of his life was dissolving to a kind of crossbred         simplicity.

This is a good book, says the echo, this is the first book you’ve ever read, an elemental book that relaxes your neck and relieves the tension in your traps. REVELATION is the quiet person in the crowded room, slowly drinking and drawing stares and increasing his/her importance.

[This review was originally posted at The Open End.]

MB: Given that Revelation is a novel built on the accumulating calls of the biblical book of revelations, perhaps this is the most obvious place to start: Are you a particularly religious person? What is your religious background?

CW: I’m not a religious person at all, really. Far from it. But I had the unique experience of being a non-religious person growing up in a small town in Northeast Texas. So throughout my life I was steeped in various devoted interpretations of biblical narrative. The closest our family ever came to adopting a religion was when, in an arguably noble attempt to set our family on a, well if not more righteous, certainly more socially accepted path, my older sister (who was very young at the time) insisted our family begin attending church. The idea was that we would then be more like the other families in town, more like her friends’ families, and a little less…our strange selves. My parents were very open-minded and supportive, so we went. I don’t remember which denomination it was, or even what we did there. I only remember dressing up for a few Sundays in a row, then being very happy when we abandoned the project. Christianity, in one form or another, was the dominant religion in our hometown, but I never really got into it and, aside from this little experiment, I was never really asked to. Then, in grade school, I had a good friend who was Muslim, (his was the only Muslim family in our school, I think) and I used to talk to him a lot about his beliefs and his particular religious practices, and the benefits/challenges of these. I distinctly remember him telling me that I had to believe him about something or other because he couldn’t lie as it was against his religion. That struck me then as very convenient; to have a system of beliefs that worked as a set of rules governing your behavior. In my head, he didn’t have to worry about lying because he couldn’t lie. It was against the rules. I was open to, and enthusiastic about, his religious experiences and accounts because he was my friend and they were so unfamiliar to me. The idea of finding something like that for myself became appealing, and I asked my mother to take me to the library so I might read up on various religions and see which one best suited me. Then I too might have a set of rules by which to live. On the one hand, the project was a failure. No single text, or tradition, really fit me that well, but it all seemed really wild and each religion exhibited these great imaginative capabilities. I was learning a lot. At the same time, I was struggling my way through Tolkien, some Shakespeare, Greek mythology, that kind of thing. It’s probably for this reason that I have always viewed religious texts simply as powerful narratives, as literature, rather than existential truths or solid guidebooks for how to live. At best, I guess, they’re examples of how things could be, or might have been. But, again, this was just my experience. Since then I’ve always studied religious texts as/alongside literary texts, particularly the Bible, as it was such a dominant narrative voice in the town/state/country where I grew up. This was one of the initial sparks for this project, engaging a biblical narrative on literary terms, and exposing it to the same manipulations/experimentation one might any other literary tradition.

MB: And as a book that is shaped by the book of revelations, people might expect the usual apocalyptic story that tends toward epic devastation, but instead Revelation is focused very intently on a quiet, transformative upheaval. How did you come to this more subtle / personal approach to apocalypse?

CW: That’s a good question. I wrote a lot on this topic in a piece I did for Necessary Fiction, along with AD Jameson, Jen Gann, Patty Cottrell, Jesse Ball, Gabe Boyer, Zach Vandezande, and Thania Rios, which can be read here. In that piece I talk a lot about how this book is, on the one hand, an attempt to exorcise the dominant narratives I’ve been exposed to in my writing life. This includes biblical narratives, but also heavy-weight literary figures like Raymond Carver and Anton Chekhov, really a whole tradition of psychological realism with which I was hit over the head as a young writer as an example of the finest writing one might aspire to. And while I admire these writers, it all began to feel very limited and frustrating. So I looked for a way out. I discovered authors like Ben Marcus and David Ohle, or even Robert Coover, and more recently Amelia Gray, whose work is wonderfully unfamiliar and strange, and yet still feels incredibly intimate and humane. Part of this has to do with their various techniques for making the familiar unfamiliar, rather than abandoning it all together in pursuit of something altogether foreign. I got a charge out of that, I suppose. A big part of it is a certain sense of freedom and play I get from the authors I now admire most.

However, a more direct answer to your question would be to say this book is a collision of narrative modes, on a very basic level a formal experiment. And yet I’m still concerned with telling a good story, at least in this particular book. I think fantasies of the apocalypse will always have the capacity to move us because they have to address some of our, or at least my, primary occupations: the suspicion/concern that the world is beyond our control, and is quite possibly all going to shit, and the knowledge of our inevitable death. Many end-of-the-world narratives, particularly that of the book of revelation, are concerned with salvation: what it means and how it might be achieved. In Revelation I wasn’t interested in salvation. I was interested in what it means to live on in its absence. In the absence of a larger salvation narrative, it seemed only natural to focus intensely on the character’s everyday interactions and exchanges. How these characters lived from moment to moment, related to one another, and how quickly and easily that could change became very important to me. A friend of mine, the writer Zachary Coleman, told me “Revelation…like life and the lives found in the book, compiles a series of moments and events that make up a whole, which in turn bursts, fades, and disappears, leaving the beauty of those moments, and nothing.” I thought that was a really nice summary.

MB: Also, where many novels focus only on a pivotal moment in a character’s existence, Revelation takes the reader through the entire life of a character – from birth to death – can you talk to us a little about bringing a character through a fully evolved lifetime in the span of a mid-size novel?

CW: I wanted to link the experience of reading a book to that of a life lived. So the space between each chapter represents a considerable chunk of a life we’re speeding through page by page. The moments we’re given by the story are almost entirely in the aftermath of some major emotional/psychological/biological shift. So every time we’re reintroduced to the characters, they’ve changed. Sometimes a day has passed between pages, sometimes years. Change becomes the focus, and the way of knowing more about the characters and understanding their story, noticing what’s changed about them and what’s the same. So the idea would be that you’re constantly re-calibrating your sense/expectations of each character, while simultaneously feeling like you’re getting to know them better. The other side of this is that they are more rapidly approaching death than your average protagonist. For every installment these characters are thrust forward, more and more persistently toward the end. But to be approaching death in this apocalyptic world is the result of survival.

MB: Switching gears a bit, you’ve garnered praise from Ben Marcus and Adam Levin – as such, how much pressure is on Revelation as a debut novel, or on you as a debut novelist?

CW: I don’t feel any particular pressure on the book, as a debut novel. If anything, Ben and Adam’s support really boosted my confidence in the project. I’ve been a huge admirer of Ben Marcus’s work for a long time, and it was sort of a dream come true to suddenly be in contact with him, and then to have him read the book and say nice things about it, it was all pretty unreal, actually. As I started to say earlier, Ben Marcus’s work reinvigorated my enthusiasm for prose, and he led me to discover a wealth of authors working in a variety of exciting ways. While this book is not really like Marcus’s work, I probably never would have written it if it hadn’t been for him. My early writing had very different concerns. Ben’s work gave me permission to explore a little, and to have some fun. And there’s a remarkable sincerity at the heart of Ben’s work that has always really appealed to me. Having his support in the end was more than enough to leave me satisfied.

And while this may be silly of me, I haven’t given much thought to the potential pressures of this being a “debut” novel or on me as a “debut novelist”. I mean, I want people to read the book and for it to affect them, and I of course feel pressured to make the work as solid as it can be, but I’ve since moved onto other projects, and I’m more concerned with those now, I guess, than worrying about how this book is received or how that might effect people’s feelings about the new work. I do view each book as pretty singular, though they come from the same network of ideas and instincts. While the books may illuminate aspects of one another in some uncalculated way, I think the order in which they’re written or published is in many ways irrelevant.

MB: Can you recommend some other recently released first novels, other writers that are just now hitting the indie scene that we should be reading, or that you are?

CW: Yes! Well, this name is circling pretty widely, so I’m sure I’m not telling anyone something they don’t already know, but Amelia Gray’s novel THREATS (which I believe came out yesterday?) is really a fantastic read. It’s thoroughly engaging and strange and surprising. There aren’t a lot of novels like it. Also, I’ve been reading manuscript after manuscript by an author named Jen Gann. None of the books are published yet, but I’m really looking forward to the day she releases one of these to the public. She’s a really great writer. Right now she has a chapbook out with Magic Helicopter Press, called Backtuck. And you can read an excerpt from one of her novels in American Short Fiction. It’s called “Miniature Buffalos”. I don’t have a strong sense of how long he’s been around, but I only recently discovered Norman Lock, and he’s such a fantastic writer. His book Grim Tales is really incredible. There’s also a book by the poet Zachary Schomburg, called Viking, forthcoming on McSweeney’s new poetry imprint, that I had the honor/pleasure of serializing in Dear Navigator, the online journal for which I acted as associate editor. You can start reading it here, if you like. Unlike his other books, Viking pretty much follows a singular narrative, or the same basic set of characters (though the edges of what I mean when I say “narrative” or “characters” are pretty blurry), so in some ways it’s more like a novel. Steven Moore would probably argue for it as such. But it’s an amazing piece of writing. Just terrifying and thrilling and very moving. No one writes like him. There is a lot happening right now in the indie-lit scene, a lot to be excited about. I haven’t listed anywhere near everything, but these are places to start. These are the authors I’m thinking about daily.

MB: What is next for you, what is in the works? And will your next book be released from Mutable Sound or a similar indie label, or will you be seeking a university or mid- / large-sized publishing house instead? I’m always curious where authors see themselves going after the success of a first novel.

CW: Right now I’m finishing up a book of poems, that was originally titled Denton, TX. The book recently took on a collaborative element, though, and I’ll be finishing up the project with the poet Ben Clark. We’re now calling the book Kate Jury Denton Texas. That book’s in the works, not quite finished, but an excerpt will be published in the April issue of Mud Luscious Quarterly. I’m not sure what will happen to it after it’s finished, but we’re really excited about it. For right now, I have a collection of prose forthcoming on Spork Press, which will be out in August of 2012. I’m really excited about this collection, and for the opportunity to work with Drew Burk and the good folks at Spork. They make beautiful handmade books down in their lab in Tucson, and they represent some of my very favorite contemporary authors (Schomburg being one). Excerpts from this collection have been published in a few places, but two new excerpts will be out later this year in Hobart 14. And then I have two novellas coming out with Atticus Books, a mid-sized publishing house based in Maryland. They’re publishing the two books Gainesville and In One Story, The Two Sisters as a novella tandem, under the title A Long Line of Diggers. That book will be out in the winter of 2013. I love Mutable Sound, though, and I’m currently talking with them about coming on as an editor at the press, so that we might continue to work together. As for whether or not I’m seeking a university or mid-/large-sized publishing house, it all depends on the book, I think. I’m happy to find people who are enthusiastic about the work, and who put their whole selves into the publishing process, in the same way that I put my whole self into the writing of the books. I’ve worked with three very different presses on several very different books, but they’ve all brought a lot of energy to the project, and seemed genuinely excited about the work and what they might be able to accomplish by representing it. That’s really what I’m most interested in. I’m just looking to find people who like the work and are exciting to work with. I’m not sure where I see myself going exactly. My policy so far has been to make the books, put them out there, and then go wherever the energy is. And that’s worked out so far.

The year is 1903 and the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies is closed for the summer session, the windows empty, gargoyles and latin script cut into the arched doorways, the buildings now abandoned but for a few who have no other home, a handful of teachers, administrators, and orphans.

Here amidst the rippling green of cyprus and fir upon a tenuous breeze, the ground covered in litter from the trees above, a tragicomedy is underfoot in which our key players, Archibald the Professor of Arcane Knowledge, Headmistress Ursula, Jack the Handyman, Boo Boo, Simone, Gundrun the Grammar Instructor, and a wealth of demons and demigods are pitted one against the other to see which one will last through the night. The story unfolds over the course of 52 three to five minute installments released over the course of the previous year. It involves bushes that release psychedelic fumes, secret passageways, an embarrassing account of adolescent cannibalism, the hordes of hell streaming out a hole in the fabric of space, an unhealthy relationship with a monkey, young scholars battling creatures from the deep on a barren rock, and a narrator currently being eaten alive by grinning faeries. There are those who claim that it is one of those dastardly timelines leaves a person quivering in their seat, and struggling to keep up, while perspiration collects upon the upper lip.

Recorded entirely at Shady Pines in Eugene, OR and written by Gabriel Boyer, this radioplay was inspired by HP Lovecraft and Seinfeld. It is a show in which nothing happens, yet that nothing is such an ominous nothing, such a bone-chilling nothing, that you will shiver while you twitter, and gag on your own giggles.

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies stars
(in order of appearance)

Gabriel Boyer Narrator

Sybila Lisdert Headmistress Ursula

Sarah Puttonen Simone

Ruby Kalamas Boo Boo

Paula Rupert Imaginary Bears

Nick Soracco Handyman Jack

Clair Migdal Grammar Instructor Gundrun

Shane Howard Archibald, the Professor of Arcane Knowledge

Jon Bakker Nathaniel

A. Julian Boyer William O’Reilly

David and Stephanie Abbott Man and Woman

Ila Kreigh Fairy Princess

Helen Kalamas and Charles Watkins Assorted characters

Malcolm Felder Demons

Jules & Sybila. Click image to view more photos.

Mr. Geebee on the dawn of Mutable

It was ten years ago this month that we here at Mutable put out our first product, a green vinyl record called, “A Journey to Happiness Island”. It was just a little joke of an album we wrote and recorded over the course of a weekend with a roomful of friends in a loft in Greenpoint, New York. We had no idea we would still be putting out records and books ten years later.

Mutable began in a diner in Brooklyn Heights over a conversation between myself and Zach Katz. It began in a projectionist’s booth when a local filmmaker gave us the name. It began when we put out a run of books called Seven Short Plays for the Bedroom using Kinko’s and our own efforts at binding. It began when we put out our first album in conjunction with Mr. Records and began when we put out our first professionally bound book, Manifesto I, a collection of manifestoes. It began when I spent a summer performing plays in bedrooms across America and placing Mutable products in bookstores and record shops.

Mutable Sound, which was Mutable Press, and will always be Mutable. Which has become as much a part of me as I am. Which has been a source of uncertainty and rage and adoration and affection, which has brought people together and given me hope when I was otherwise hopeless, through which I have come to know so many wonderful and interesting writers and musicians, has now come to define an entire decade of my life. And so I must commemorate this moment, even if I’m alone in doing it.

Of course I’m not alone. There’s Zach my co-founder and Malcolm Felder my current partner. There are also all the people who have been involved in Mutable projects over the years, or had their projects released through Mutable and by so doing have become members of the Mutable family, artists from across the seas, and writers with a distinctive vision. We continue to experiment with sound and narrative, and continue to entertain ourselves first, and everyone else second.

Follow the link below to listen or download some free music, a mix of some of our favorite Mutable moments from the past ten years.

-GBoyer

Listen to A Mutable Decade

It’s disorienting, at first, that the novel insistently focuses on these men growing older, having children, entering and leaving marriages, and so on, rather than offering specifics about why the world is on fire or what will will be done about all these plagues. It goes so fiercely against expectation, reversing the genre of apocalypse tales; think 2012, in which hollow stock characters are put in the story only to lead the viewer from one special effect to the next. In Revelation, by contrast, the explosions are there to lead us through the years of these characters’ lives, and for the most part the catastrophes of the story — both apocalyptic and domestic — happen “off stage.” That stylistic choice of huge spans of time passing in between pages is disorienting, too, reducing the chronological context of how these boys became the men they are to ambiguous events of religious conversion, time spent in jail, multiple wives we don’t meet, and so on. We drop on these characters once in a while, at moments that aren’t their most dramatic but are more like the aftermath of drama, and all along the apocalypse goes on in the background as ambiguously explained as their lives.

For these boys-then-men, the end of the world has gone on like this for years, one plague at a time their whole lives. Time passes, other things dominate your attention, and minding the apocalypse is as easily forgotten as remembering, for example, to visit an aging father more often than it actually happens. That may be the biggest revelation in all of this: how easily time slips away, subsumed by smaller demands, even in the face of global destruction; no need to overload the implications, in our age of climate change and extinction.

There’s a metaphor in all this, that the world is always ending and always has been and will be for each generation of men (because Revelation is very much a story about men and men’s lives, with markedly few women crossing the novel’s pages) as they’re born and they age and they endure the same frustrations and failures as past and future sons. It’s the end of the world but that’s no reason to give up on it, as a father who spends his free time on astronomy reminds his son:

“The stars don’t stop moving.” Marcus’s father was at the telescope. He sat back in his chair and looked at his son. “There is always something else to see.”

Later, that son, Marcus, pays to take a hot air balloon ride, and the balloon’s pilot asks,

“What makes you want to do a crazy thing like ride in a hot air balloon, anyway?”

The other man could only laugh.

Why pay for a view above a scorched, oceanless, nearly-dead landscape unless that’s the only world you’re used to and individual heartache pains you more than that global loss? Why, unless the end of the world is the ordinary cost of being alive?

Later, when he’s older, Marcus wades through a parking lot flooded with biting locusts to carry his own son to safety, a much greater concern than asking why the world has been plagued. And Marcus’ own father, the astronomer looking for answers, says of the insects:

“Funny thing is,” his father began, “as long as they stay outside, they’re not really a problem. In fact, they can be comforting at night. Their little bodies tapping against the windows and the walls of the building, every night sounds like a soft summer rain.”

Characters endure and even ignore the apocalypse one way or another, the way we endure anything — broken bones, broken hearts, lost jobs and lost oceans — and ultimately there’s a fatalistic optimism in that: this is the world we live in, whether it’s on fire or not, and this is the world in which we’ll grow old, so you might as well get used to it. The way you might get used to a sky when familiar stars are fading away:

Marcus was no good at rowing. They turned three half circles in either direction once the boat was out of the mud and fully afloat. She took a turn with the oars and managed to get them 20 feet or so from the shore. It was a clear night. Things were still. Little wind. The water gathered itself around the body of the boat.

“It’s much duller than it was at the beginning,” she said..

[Originally published on the personal blog of Steve Himmer, editor-in-chief of Necessary Fiction. It can be found here.]

(Who is Kristina Marie Darling? Whoever she is, her poems have affected us strongly, even as we cough uncertainly in the far east, growing weaker by the day. Three of these aforementioned poems can be found below:)

Noctuary (i)

The brass locket, which contained only an empty frame, was the first in a series of ominous love tokens that appeared beneath her window.

                                                *

When he fastened the clasp on her necklace, every nightingale seemed to sing. Their swollen throats and colorless eyes.

                                                *

He reminded her of Petrarch, driven by the necessity of pursuit. The beloved as interchangeable, a vessel. A bird heaving under the weight of an otherworldly song.

                                                *

The homage felt contrived, mechanical. And still the luminous buttons on her shirt.

                                                *

It was then she wished the pursuit would continue indefinitely.

                                                *

She presented him with a miniature bird, which bore the most unusual inscription. Her wrist still heavy with silver charms and locks of his knotted hair.

                                                *

She remembered his eyes growing dim. Her fingers tracing the brass locket’s empty frame.

A History of Melancholia: Glossary of Terms

beloved. The raison d’être of the melancholic’s affliction. Consider the graceful line of his wool coat, its fabric dark against the towering snowdrifts.

courtship. A set of social conventions that gave rise to their exchanging of love tokens. These antique pendants, which held locks of tangled hair, were inevitably lost in the great avalanche.

locket. An object onto which her memories were inscribed. When she thought of their evening soirées, its clasp seemed smaller, more intricate.

memento. A foreshadowing of their ominous tête-à-tête. The charms she would unpin from her blue silk dress.

mourning. Described as a year of pathological grief, in which her locket gave rise to a luminous and deathly narcissism.

nightingale. A harbinger of both despair and the onslaught of winter. Its bright mornings and colorless evenings.

ocean. Now iced over, this body of water was said to reflect the imperceptible radiance of their courtship. Compare, in its present state, to a discarded necklace, pendant, or charm bracelet.

Footnotes to a History of the Beloved

_____________________________________________

1. Two of the darkest flowers, which were pressed in a book and displayed on a mahogany nightstand.

2. Only then did she describe the recurring dream, in which his luminous cufflinks gave rise to a series of house fires.

3. “I had wanted to preserve the cold white light that shone that evening. But beneath every door, a little wisp of smoke. The hallway smolders and now my armoire burning in a locked room.”

4. Violence.

      1. The use of physical coercion.
      †2. The relative strength or duration of an emotion.
      ‡3. An unpleasant or destructive natural force.

5. The unpublished portion of their correspondence, which documents her pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Jude. Despite numerous appeals to divine providence, the lock of hair never appeared beneath her window.

6. Parure. Translated from the French as ornament or embellishment.

7. She told her sisters he had given her the locket, which was wrapped in green paper and tied with a cluster of blue ribbons.

8. “The necklace was a relic from the shrine of a saint. In every charm, a white veronica and the most intricately engraved psalm.”

9. A little known version of the film, in which the heroine enters a convent. After renouncing all ties with the beloved, she was plagued with visions of fire. Smoke shattering the neat rows of stained glass windows.

10. Her house contained the most elaborate memorial. His cufflinks tarnishing on a white satin pillow.

11. The wilted corsage. Every shrine burned to the ground.

[The above poems are part of a larger project entitled Melancholia (An Essay). Kristina Marie Darling's previous books include Night Songs (Gold Wake Press, 2010), Compendium (Cow Heavy Books, 2011), and The Body is a Little Gilded Cage (Gold Wake Press, 2011). She's been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center.]

Untrustworthy narrators guide us through these first stories, as familiar characters perform un-self-conscious, transition-less mutations: Snuffy, in “Bird Bird and Snuffy,” is a feared, retired barber, frozen in ice, who becomes Scruffy, a cute guy, then Shuffy, a foe of two bear characters (who were previously referred to as brothers), who then becomes Stuffy, who will marry the character who thought Scruffy was a cute guy, and finally he becomes Snuffy again, brought back together with Big Bird, who died twice in a previous paragraph, once from a star crashing down upon him, though he’s now been raised from the grave by a similar experience. On first reading these stories, it’s difficult to refrain from diagramming character relationships, sketching timelines of events, or even writing in the margins: “Isn’t s/he supposed to be legless?” Whether these mutations are a result of Bacteria X (in “Ota Benga Episode Guide: Season 3” this substance transforms a Congolese pygmy into a jungle bear, for instance) or because they mimic the plotlines of the tales and films and television shows we consumed in our youth, doesn’t matter in these stories told through the warped filter of nostalgia.

There’s plenty of stories in the world that wallow in a kind of slick, gilded throwback to childhood pursuits and desires—and they have nothing in common with Amazing Adult Fantasy. Maybe it was Longinus who complained first: “the genius of the present age is wasted by that indifference which with a few exceptions runs through the whole of life.” (On the Sublime) What’s special about Jameson is that he’s incapable of indifference, and the stories in this book feel as if they were so goddamn fun to write: handsome Riker of Star Trek Next Generation, who I’ve always had a tendre for, boasts of the number of tacks he can fit in his mouth; C3PO feels abandoned “like the ghost of a grocer pimp”; in “Oscar the Grouch,” the lovable curmudgeon we only thought we knew steals women’s bikinis and has published a terribly reviewed first chapbook of small nasty words, or was it his critically praised first chapbook small nasty worms?

The second half of the book, “Solar Stories,” includes rewritten, mutated histories, told through the lens of a kind of brooding, questioning adolescence. The characters in these tales attempt to understand themselves as they, for instance, try to destroy NASA. These stories have in them the struggle of those uncertain years, when we begin to realize how much we will be let down by the world, as in “Moon Rock” when the author of the book Journey to the Center of the Moon writes, “Astronauts went to the moon, so what? They came right back again. They didn’t find cures for cancer or eternal youth.” The narrator begins this story, “When I was a child I talked toward the moon because it’s there…I was wasting my time; the moon is dead.”

But like remnants of DNA that can’t be bred away, the whimsy flits back in; after all, it’s Buzz Aldwin, not Buzz Aldrin, who wonders when he lands on the moon, “Why is it not so hot?” because “the Apollo mission was supposed to go to the sun and not the moon”; a Congolese pygmy exhibit emerges in the solar story “Neal Keaton,” harkening back to “Ota Benga” and Jessica Webb, who is the star of a film in the first half’s “7 Movie Reviews,” will become Jessica Webb who becomes Melanie Kingston who becomes Jessica Webb who will pledge her troth to Buzz in the second half’s “Buzz Aldwin.”

Even as all of this is going on, there are bursts of exquisite language and poignant moments: Neal, a young boy in “Neal Keaton,” mails postcards to himself from his dead parents; and in “Korawik Wattanakul” we read:

“Nature is big; it has room for a great many things—absurd things like snot, and sane plants that grow in the dirt, like apples and coffee. It has coins and good places to put them: under hesitant, heavy tongues, or hidden among the bleached bones of a stranded whale. It has failing dunes and waves…”

While it is unsurprising that we find ourselves on the last page watching the narrator transform into what we always knew he would be, an adult who doesn’t believe: “Now, at the end, I couldn’t believe in those things. It’s ridiculous to believe in a Duke of the moon… It’s all rubbish and nonsense and bothersome stuff. It’s a fine load to swallow, fine enough for when I was a child, with childish needs,” we can at least rest a little bit easier because we know Jameson cannot have abandoned these needs completely.

At the end of “Moon Rock,” the narrator chastises himself: “But mostly I stayed up too late, night after night, exhausted by excitement and despair, crying myself to sleep over cheap science fiction.” And we finish the book, thinking Jameson wouldn’t have had it any other way, as if we would have ever wanted him to.

[Originally published in Necessary Fiction.]