Endless Joke, Infinite Jest, Interminable Gag

Well, this is embarrassing. What on earth happened to all those posts between mid-September and now, you ask? Huh? Oh, that's right, I didn't write them. My excuse? None, really, other than the fact I've been very busy (so, nothing new there) and I went and published another book.

Ah... what's that? Yeah, I said a book. You forgive me? Good. Let's go get muffins. Huh? You hate muffins? Yeah, so do I. Whatevs, we'll improvise.

Back to the book. I was so caught up in the esoteric, arcane world of formatting for epublishing and uploading to scarily-named nuclear meatgrinders that I damn well forgot to mention anything on the blog I set up to showcase such announcements in the first place. Can you spell "imbecile"? Yeah, of course you can, it was a rhetorical question.

A couple of things: the book is called Endless Joke. The more astute of you will notice its visual and titular resemblance to a certain famous tome by David Foster Wallace. And for the less astute, ahem, pay attention to the title of this post. Okay, I'm actually surprised no one has taken me to task on the almost inconceivable hubris it must have taken for me to place my snarky book of essays on a continuum that begins with Shakespeare and includes the complex and challenging Infinite Jest. In my defence, I did it in a spirit of bathos, in an attack of self-deprecation on a par with the scene in Trainspotting where Renton can no longer contain within his carefully constructed walls of denial and insouciance the truth of what it is to be Scottish. So, as everyone in the UK would put it, I'm taking the piss. Out of myself more than anyone, it must be said. Now, don't get me wrong: although I harbour a reluctant appreciation for arrogance, I'm personally not all that predisposed to it. I mean, here's the rub: I'm good but I'm nowhere near that fucking good.

Anyway, it took me four years to read Infinite Jest. Yes, I said "years". Just saying. It's possibly one of the most aptly named books ever written. Not that it isn't brilliant. In some ways, it's too brilliant, leaves everyone in its awkward, golden wake.

Endless Joke, however, is far from endless; in fact, it's quite short. Twenty nine quick chapters dug from the seams of Indies Unlimited and this very blog, a paean to and a diatribe against the current book-industry climate in which random vowels seem to get arbitrarily attached to existing words (when this extends to proper names, do I go with iDavid or eDavid?) and all of us have had to learn not only how to be writers, but how to be publishers, editors, designers, typesetters, formatters, advertisers and publicists. With that in mind, it's a hybrid of writer's manual and (pop) cultural commentary, medium-heavy on the snark but also informative, sweet and gleaming with a lifetime's love of the language.

Okay, I've rambled enough for now. I'll talk some more about it later, maybe. For now, give it a go, see what you think, and please don't hesitate to give me feedback. I love feedback. I crave it. I need it. Like zombies need brains. Like ageing mitochondria need serious protection from marauding free radicals. Huh? Never mind, shut up.

Summer Long

Summer decided that summer had gone on far too long.

The kids were back in school, the university halls packed with the heady pheromones of possibility. Labour Day already a waning memory. Yet someone had forgotten to inform the actual seasons. Achingly blue skies still dominated, the city's abandoned splash parks and outdoor pools turquoise daubs of melancholia beneath the bright gold of an endless late summer.

Unlike the season, however, Summer—for her part—did not intend to overstay her welcome. This had been a summer that only reinforced her belief that such a stark world was not, nor ever had been, designed for one so fragile as she. The name bestowed upon her at birth by a sympathetic nurse now doubled as an ironic millstone around her metaphorical throat. A cosmic joke.

As befits someone abandoned as a newborn in an alleyway somewhere between Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, her story had followed a sadly predictable script. Foster care and group homes. Occasional violations from clammy fingers. Or foreign objects. Alternate schools, petty crime, counseling, addiction, an adolescent eating disorder surprisingly conquered in adulthood, a rare and welcome rainbow in otherwise stormy skies. Summer's twenties were a grey blur between polarities. She was still only twenty-seven, although she felt seventy-two.

Nothing had worked. Friends—all gone, via indifference or betrayal. Boys—pretty much the same script. Losing herself in drugs, booze, loveless sex. Sometimes cleaning up. Transplanting her various addictions onto the narcissistic rows of ellipticals and stationary bicycles, smeared wall-length mirrors as tawdry witnesses. First World problems. Trapping her nonetheless. McJobs, unemployment, McJobs. Leaving any one of these dull shifts, she would walk the evening streets toward her bleak one-bedroom apartment and wonder how many others felt this same emptiness tinged with horror at an approaching future that apparently bore only more heartbreak. How many other heads contained nothing but one vast, endless scream.

Now, she sat on a bench on the waterfront, overlooking the deep blue inlet and the north shore mountains. Sapphire and teal, azure and jade. This wasn't her turf, never would be; this was a pretty land of wealth and poise, of audacious cocktails on sunset balconies, of condos, candelabras and Cadillacs. Wheeling overhead, a gull laughed harshly, as if in agreement. There were days when she didn't see the beauty. Couldn't, even. Or saw it, yet didn't absorb it. She tried now. The dog walkers, the cyclists, the tourists, the floatplanes gunning their takeoff roars, the cruise ships and barges slicing the sparkling waters, the container ships massive and rusted silent in the deeper waters, watching. The slick, wet terrier heads of harbour seals, bobbing like buoys. Surface-skimming cormorants. An SUV behind her, blasting hip-hop beats, or dubstep. Nothing. She felt nothing. Except a trickle of sweat down her side, an ineffable sadness like a lodestone in her heart.

"So unhappy." A voice, approaching her. She started. And saw a man, a plain man with rodent-brown hair, possibly in his mid-30s. Uninvited, he sat beside her.

"I'm fine." She shifted away from him.

"If you are fine, then I too am fine, sister."

To which there was no sensible reply, so she sat Centurion-straight and stared out at the waters, counted sailboat masts in an effort to slow the odd sense of panic fluttering in her chest.

At length, he spoke again, his voice marble cool.

"A beautiful day. This city..." A sigh and a shake of his head, sensed more than seen. She kept her eyes on the inlet. "Later today, I'm going to jump from the bridge to my death."

Automatically, her gaze shifted beyond the dark conifers and gathered bulk of the park to the evergreen suspension bridge that connected the latter's steaming mass to the north shore. She felt her heart draw itself tighter. Then she looked back at him. His pale face was that of a mime, no sign of mischief, mockery, or pain.

"I don't know why you'd say such a thing, but I'm in no mood to hear it. You want me to feel sorry for you, is that it?"

"Not at all. I want you to mark my passing. See me go over the edge. Not in the literal sense, necessarily. But there is no one else, and you look like someone who knows."

"Knows?"

"This feeling. It's both numb and heavy, freezes the love right out of you while weighing your insides down. You know what brings us here. Like lemmings."

"There is no us." Her own face a mask. To hide the jackhammer of her heartbeat. Summer could feel more sweat trickle down her sides, wondered if it showed on the forget-me-not blue of her dress. For a second, she cared about that, didn't want to be seen so pitiably human. Her resolve made of her frame a mannequin; no stranger would rob her of that adopted insouciance, however forced its genesis.

"I disagree."

"Look. I don't know you. I don't care if you agree or disagree. I was sitting here alone and I'd appreciate it if you would leave me that way. We all have our crosses to bear. Mine's heavy enough, I can't carry yours as well…" She bit her tongue. Already she had said more than she'd meant to.

"Ah. I knew it. As I said: so unhappy. Misery has an instinct for its wounded kinfolk."

Instead of eliciting a screaming, as she'd intended to do, something in his words touched her. A certain dark poetry. She felt her obduracy dissolve.

"Why are you jumping?" she asked, quietly.

"I can't answer that, but probably similar reasons to why you also intend to bow out, wouldn't you agree?"

"I don't know." Her head dropped. She felt the acid heat of uncried tears. Heard the distant howling of eternity, as it prepared to rush toward them, heard the world creak on some cosmic fulcrum. Sensed that if she gave in to the deep sob, a vast, trapped bubble yearning for the ocean's surface, she might avoid some fate she'd hitherto seen as fixed, unavoidable. She let them come, the tears, the hiccuping sobs, the deep-sea bubble, a ravaged young woman in a powder blue dress jackknifed by grief on a public bench beside a quiet stranger. She let them pass through her; the images, the sounds, the smells, of betrayal and cruelty. A face misshapen by rage. Calling her a cunt, a thundercunt. Inserting something into her. Hurting. Hot breath stinking of onion, sour mustard and oatmeal stout. Another face, mismatched eyes, laughing cruelly. Indignities. Mockery. More names: savage, bitter, merciless words... Might as well have been aborted, sucked out of her whore mother dripping pink-red ropy gouts in that same rain-drenched alley. Oh, there's more, always more. In a way, she had been aborted. First the rending pain, then the dull, hollow loneliness of it all.

He sat and waited. For the summer squall to abate. Which it did, and almost always does: tempest to gale to breeze to stillness.

"So, how were you going to do it? Fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the water? The Virginia Woolf method?"

"I have no idea who Virginia Woolf is. And no."

He stood, suddenly. As if he were a lockpicker and pins and tumblers had shifted and clicked into place. A look of stubborn surprise spread across his face, and he blinked.

"You know, now feels like a good time. Though I got a bit of a walk ahead of me. Will you walk with me, even for part of it?"

She looked at him. At his eyes. They were eroded to blanks by whatever unasked-for pain had been his burden. But she was no lemming. The camaraderie of annihilation was not for her. She would ache for this nameless man when she heard the news reports of a jumper on the bridge, but she would not throw in her lot with him, hitch her fate to his.

And he saw it. For a second, she saw the blankness in his eyes melted to pure pain, the realisation of his utter aloneness descending once more, as it no doubt had done when he'd made this call in the still, small hours, or whenever that awful moment had arrived in which his tenuous ties with life had finally come undone. He winced, paled further.

And she stepped forward and hugged him. It was all she could do. Held him as he sagged against her. Her route through the tangled undergrowth was not to be his. No two of us are alike, it seems.

When they parted, set out in opposite directions, one toward loud car stereos, dog shit, bar fights, perimenopause, film, sinks full of dishes, sleepless nights, music, abandon, spiritual inquiry, aching tender love, g-spot orgasms and sporadic health concerns—life, in other words—the other toward quiet, irreversible oblivion, something made Summer stop and turn and say:

"Oh, right. Yeah. I was gonna grab a 40-pounder of vodka, go home to a drawerful of Xanax, make a low-class cocktail of sorts and watch the sunset. Worked for Whitney, apparently. Although she was high class, I guess, but still..."

And with that and the most rueful of smiles, she turned and walked away.

Summer had lasted too long. But it was a false thing, really; however cunningly it faked it, there was no hiding the steady, earlier encroachment of darkness each and every day, a slow imperative. Either way, she would set out now into its still-warm, sticky glare and wait to see if fall, in its acceptance of that darkness, would yet prove a more bearable season.

*     *     *     *     *

Ed Lorn has written an excellent response to this piece on his blog, Ruminating On. Anyone wanna tackle winter? ;)

Update, 18 September, 2012: JD Mader stepped up to the plate for the winter segment and the ball is still somewhere in the stratosphere collecting ice. This has turned into a fantastic exercise, a new Four Seasons for the 21st Century. Who needs Vivaldi? Okay, that was stupid. But this is very cool.

Final update: Jo-Anne Teal rounded this whole thing off beautifully. Thanks, all, what a fantastic exercise.

Theo

There have been far too many endings lately.

That trail up by the dams—a steep, winding kilometre uphill to the rocky vantage point overlooking Hayward Lake and all the way south beyond the wide Fraser River into rural America. That trail was one he particularly loved. Not for the views, since dog eyes are not made for grand vistas, but for the climb, the steady pace through the silent forest, over wet mulch and slick roots, beside fallen logs, waxy green salal, fragile trillium, ears and muzzle alert for black bear or cougar. How many times did we walk that route together? All those times.

Rain, sleet, heat, those dull-echo grey days of no weather, of no weather at all. The turned ankle times. The pissing on everything that smells of other dog times. The stone in the shoe times. The wariness of fresh, steaming bear scat times. The bug-cloud sweat-feast times. The hot, dusty berry times. The bright, shining times.

But that one time. That one time I thought I'd lost him. Turned out it wouldn't be the last, for this infuriating Houdini of dogs. And now… well, I have lost him in the end, after all. As we always do. But that one day… Here I must admit to a wilderness faux pas, a backcountry indiscretion: I would let him slip his leash. I know, I know. Admonish me, all you Sierra Club acolytes. Scold me for my sinful self-centredness. I offer nothing by way of excuse. Except that his uninhibited joy was infectious, rendered me irresponsible.

We began on the easy, flat stretch between the parking lot and the true trailhead, parallel to the road. Reaching that trailhead, beginning to climb, lost in thought, it took me a little too long to realize he was gone. I called his name. Quietly at first. Theo. A good name. A god name. The silence of the forest was an implacable judge of my negligence. I called him again. He wasn't there, I knew it. Alarmed now, I left the trail, bushwhacked for a while, but I knew he was not in this part of the woods, could sense his unpresence. I couldn't continue to climb, there was almost no chance he was ahead of me. Or, wait? Had I missed him as he passed me? Stealth was not foreign to this dog. It was possible. Indecision; we welcome it, sometimes, when we wish to abdicate. And there comes a time when we all wish to abdicate. Eventually, I called it—go back, he's behind you—so I retraced my steps; perhaps, limping behind me on the trail, he was hurt. I made it to the road, searched anxiously for blood or fur on this grey tarmac curve of a route that saw more than its share of gravel trucks and logging trucks. Nothing. I crossed and reentered the forest, heading back toward the place where I'd left the car, in a patch of sunlight, in a silent parking lot. Starting to rehearse what I was going to tell my young child about how I'd lost our dog in the woods, my shamed heart dull as a cracked bell in my numb chest, the stirrings of grief chasing mere worry away.

And then I heard it. A keening that sounded like the earth's last coyote, an abandoned, wild sound. A banshee wail. Lost. But ahead of me. I walked faster, breaking into a partial jog, hiking boots a carthorse hindrance, my backpack bobbing ungainly in my wake like an outgrowth of guilt. And I burst from the forest into the parking lot and he was there, was always there, of course he was there, you don't lose dogs in the forest, sitting beside my car and howling like a tiny rusted wolf, first seeing me and hesitantly approaching, head cocked, then ecstatically greeting my equally euphoric hands as I petted him all over his writhing body, a dance of unbridled love, two pack members reunited.

There were other moments. Always, we remember the extremes. The losing fight with a raccoon, halfway up the fence. An outraged shriek and eight stitches. Successfully seeing off a black bear, its dark hindquarters scrambling for purchase on a swaying fence. More magical escapes from the yard. A night in jail. Almost hidden, a tawny back forging trenches in one December's abundance of snow. Another losing argument with a bad tempered dog. A scar on his scalp. Walks, always walks. "Wow, he looks just like a fox!" Steadfast companion of an only child. Beloved, sweet, self-contained. Cool, in fact. Not a canine word, perhaps, but apt here.

Listen: they come into your world trusting you, curled small enough for a palm, dark almond eyes blameless and mostly devoid of all that makes being human so utterly painful, and then they leave your world with that same heartbreaking trust in those same eyes, now bedimmed yet still encompassing you. In his case, held fast on a sterile table, a hypodermic pushed into a vein in his right foreleg, an overdose of anesthetic, his bereft, inconsolable pack close by, holding him, offering their warmth and their smell, those quiet, tolerant eyes watching, watching, three or four almost-panic-breaths, two, three, four, five, then stillness forever, that once-proud and silly head brought low, now cannonball-weighty on muscles slackened to damp string by life's hasty retreat. And his small body, somehow smaller now than it ever was in life, cooling so fast it makes my own breath catch and hitch, not knowing whether to exhale or inhale, caught on the cusp of all grieving breaths ever taken in this world, ever to be taken.

He's on that trail now, somewhere in my memory or in the impossible world, my little golden friend, and he's trying to get back to that ticking car on that quiet patch of black asphalt. Maybe an owl swoops over him, or he hears the harsh cries of ravens far above in the tops of cedars, or a snake glides by in the green untidy detritus of the rainforest beside the trail and he thinks briefly of investigating. But his ears twitch and he is avid with the rawness of it all, is smelling the youth and the age of the world at once, absorbing the joyous tragedy of everything that ever mattered, as he runs, knowing he will soon see me come striding down that leafy, rocky path, my face a picture of consternation, and he will cock his head then bound like a small deer and finally stop his infernal howling when he knows for sure that love's come back, however briefly, to visit awhile once more.

Heads Up for the Slaughterhouse

So, I've mentioned it in passing, but I might as well make it a more *formal* announcement. For anyone (and I can't for the life of me think why they would) who wants to know what type of pale, awful critters make those scuttling noises down in the dim cellar of my subconscious, Richard Godwin will be interviewing me tomorrow (Saturday, September 8, 2012). Except "interview" is a wholly inadequate word for this monstrosity. Conducted on and off between March and July of this year, and running over 7,000 words, this thing felt more like an interrogation from someone who was trying to torment me by forcing me to think beyond my comfort zone than any other interview ever. Oddly enough, I don't mean that negatively. The strange mix of relentlessness and openendedness seemed to combine almost alchemically in order to extract a series of interesting (comic, bewildered, bitter, awestruck, sad, pissy, loving) responses that might well occasion some anxious concern over my mental health from some quarters, but I feel better for having stayed on this particular bucking bronco, so yeah. Okay, I'll say it: some of this felt damn near cathartic, and although my reticent side remains a little uncomfortable with its candid nature, I still think it's the best insight out there into why I write and why I write what I write and why I write about the things I write about. Uh. Anyway, look for it tomorrow.

Incidentally, his interview series with crime/horror writers he terms Chin Wag at the Slaughterhouse is well worth checking out in its entirety, with everyone from Jack Ketchum to R.J. Ellory, as well as my good friend Dan Mader, all given the "sharp, bright light in the eyes in the stark, dim room" treatment.

Drink for the Thirst to Come

I finished a book last night that I'm going to need to expound upon. A collection of short horror stories by Lawrence Santoro, it's intriguingly and even poetically titled Drink for the Thirst to Come. This is a book that jumped out at me from the endless conveyor belt of social network promotions we are subjected to at every turn, for two reasons: the aforementioned lyrical title, and a cover picture for which "creepy" is an altogether inadequate adjective. There is something about the face on that cover—suggestive of a mutant, broken Christ-figure hounded to the world's last margins—which dredges up long-forgotten nightmares and something closer to existential disquiet and an awful pity than out-and-out horror.

And for the most part, the stories themselves operate in a similar vein.

But let me rewind. For far too long, certainly since reading John Claude Smith's The Dark is Light Enough for Me, I've been looking for a collection that might scratch a certain maddening itch: it would need to be dark, very dark, but written by someone fully in control of their narrative and characters, adept in the language of unease. Outright gore is fine, even familiar tropes of the horror genre, but I want to get below the surface, take a peek at the stuff that fills me with a disturbance that won't dissipate. I suppose I've been foraging for sickening, shuddering nightmares to prove to me I'm not alone in my own. A twisted kindred impulse. So I downloaded Santoro's collection to my Kindle and left it there a while, savouring the anticipation.

Until one day, the urge to open it finally arrived.

And I began to read...

...and was hit with the most profound sense of disappointment. This wasn't the sobbing monstrosity I was expecting. For starters, the font/typeface was beyond ugly, bordering on the unreadable. And I was immediately disoriented by the opening story for which the volume is named. The tone of the narrative was like nothing I've read in a long while. Phrases seemed strange, hyphen-heavy (oh, enough, David!) and awkward: "the green-forever", "just-up corn", "down-rushing mud." Already, from this vantage point, I can see I was reacting to my own shattered expectations and allowing the admittedly awful font to influence my overall response to the words on the page.

Let me just say this: I am more than glad I persevered.

This first story takes an age to get going, coughing and rattling like an ancient jalopy before roaring into unexpected life. Okay, the font doesn't get better, but the sense of reading something truly worthwhile sure does. It is a quest story set in a post-apocalyptic world, but that description is like saying Riddley Walker's about some weird kid in a Kent of the future. And returning to those opening passages now, I see something I completely missed first time around: Santoro's writing style itself is a comet that comes closest to being captured by the orbit of a star named Bradbury than anything I've read in a long, long time. Yeah, go back and read that slightly awkward sentence again. I mean it. And because on this occasion I had been looking for a Barker or possibly even a Ligotti, I almost missed out on the equally dark treats that followed.

I don't want this post to get out of hand, so I'll resist a blow-by-blow account of each individual story. Suffice it to say, there is plenty here to creep you out, all the way down to the follicles, to turn your stomach, to genuinely frighten you enough to want the lights turned back on for real. Even the stock monsters of horrordom appear in altered form, disguised enough to terrify anew via the delayed shock of recognition. The voice is often perfect for each story. Gruff, strange, foreign, familiar. Settings and mood are never repeated one story to the next. New Orleans here. Chicago there. 1940s England elsewhere. The most common theme is one of haunting. Again, not ghosts per se, but something cold and spectral seen through dirty gauze in an infected room. A feeling we ourselves are the ghosts trying and mostly failing to engage with the world within these pages just out of reach. A world we might be better off avoiding, all the same. Speaking of which, I have encountered many an atrocity, both in fiction and in real life, sadly, but there's one story here I would seriously hesitate to recommend to anyone with even the slightest tenderness in his or her heart. I'll merely describe "Little Girl Down the Way" as one of the most harrowing horror stories I never want to read again. It is vile and yet it is brilliant. And I almost hate myself for even admitting that.

Alongside the frankly bizarre font issues throughout, let me issue one more word of warning: these stories, almost without exception, are long. They occasionally ramble and twist, taking tangents that occasionally work and that sometimes don't. But sit with them, stay with them, prop them up when they flag, let them reciprocate, and as Santoro suggests in his foreword, read them aloud. Taste the writhing sounds of life itself trying to make sense of the darkness, defining its own opposition to that negation of all things.

No doubt there's some moral here, something along the lines of the serendipitous defiance of expectations, but, whatever, I'm glad I pushed through and found myself in a very odd and eldritch dimension indeed, perhaps not the one I was expecting, but one that scratched another itch—a crawling, anxiety-ridden itch—I didn't even know I had.