NOVELTY and Other Stories. Caleb Caudell. Bonfire Books, 2023. 159 pages.
Sixteen clear, solid short stories make up Novelty: some are whimsical, most are moving. One outstanding feature of a good percentage of the stories is the downbeat ending that is often given to you as the reader. Sly O Henry endings with an ironic twist that drives home some rueful point are, in Caleb Caudellās world, artificial somehow. Many of the stories, like the quietly devastating āThe Man Who Couldnāt Watch Television,ā resemble Tolstoyās āDeath of Ivan Ilichā in that they describe a lifeās inexorable progress and quiddity and the reader must understand it whole. A fertile fictional territory is the source of the middles of stories, and that is where the action is. The premises of the stories are at times, outlandish and fun Plinko boards that Caudell releases a disc into and the reader watches the descent take its caromed pathway down. But all the ending slots where the discs come to rest are painted in slightly differing shades of the same color. There is emotion at the end, and there is poignance. But there is not an excessively crafty cheating of the reader by handing him a nifty narrative contraption. No matter. It was the kinetic routes they took along the way which we watched with amusement. The climax and the fascination happens en route.
In āThe Eternal Return,ā a man who canāt keep away from hookers gives in for one last go but is faced with a puzzling and frightening encounter. An arrogant superstar executive chef in āFatter,ā who commands a phalanx of restaurant workers, experiences a karmic whiplash he is not equipped for. I canāt give away the mechanism of āAntechinusā with its fiendishly hilarious concept giving way to an impression of harrowing sadness and isolation.
The mood is often grim, which is okay in this form. Much care is given to inscribing the characters in Caudellās collection with the lineaments of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and it lingers with the reader for long after they have put the book down at the end. I felt satisfied by the book after I read it even though I know it was populated with bitter, heavy conundrums that have largely trapped the majority of the characters. You might try to revisit them and release them with commiseration, but like with dying figures in tragic scenes of action movies, youāre told to āgo on and save yourselves!ā
Caudell has written a novel called The Neighbor and now that I have read his short stories, I wonder what a bigger canvas and a bigger structure would do to the formulation. Novelty and Other Stories was a very satisfying and enlightening exercise in oddness, in inventiveness, in pacing (all the stories move along ā remember the Plinko disc that never gets stuck amongst the pins but is pulled down always by the law of gravity that applies equally to every object on earth).
THE GLASS ABATTOIR. Matthew Kinlin. DFL Lit. 2023. 79 pages.
Vibes heavy, gauzy, filmic, hypnotic, spidery, fantastic (in the sense that it draws from fantasies so maybe fantastique?) ā The Glass Abbatoir is a short novella that leans into the dreamlike, the perhaps insubstantial at times.
Reputed to be inspired by Ingmar Bergmanās Cries and Whispers, the question arises: does one need to be fluent in this cinema to get the book? I donāt know. I enjoyed the bookās gothic atmosphere, the four-part structure ā one for each member of a quartet (three sisters and a servant) ā as they were victimized by something elemental in the text itself, seemingly. The graphic qualities of the book included reproductions of paintings and drawings, disorienting dislocations of the text and most interestingly, a curious tendency for repetition: passages would be printed normally then reproduced a second time with lengthy strikethroughs suggesting what? something repressed, redacted by psychological ghosts? an editor controlling and mediating the already elliptical narrative? Unsure. But it was conspicuous and intentional.
I have never read House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski but there was an aspect of the bookās design that seemed to suggest a haunted domicile similarly. Angela Carter was perhaps lurking on the premises as the warped storybook qualities of the narrative disturbed the reader: throw a dart at any page of the book and the projectileās steel point will puncture some line of drowsy surreal storybook horror inflicted on the women.
Drawbacks are: uncertainty as to the solidity of the plot; dependence on having seen the source material in Bergmanās film; unrelenting portentousness even as epistolary diversions are produced out of Kinlinās magician compartments in the form of diary entries and letters. Maybe it needs to be reread to be enjoyed fully. Still, it was fun to hold the candelabra in front of oneās readerly footsteps and sink into the gothic murk.
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Good news: I got a small cartoon/illustration accepted by the publication Exacting Clam which is a print publication run by Sagging Meniscus. It should be out in December. That just happened. Iām working on an interview with Anna Krivolapova for Bruiser where we talk about her new collection Incurable Graphomania out from Apocalypse Confidential in mid-September. The interview is really good, I think. And I have a piece of fiction planned for October in Expat Press that is major, to me at least. And I have a feeling thereās lots of excitement coming in the scene in general that I will look forward to commenting on. I have way too many books to read and potentially review but I want to share those with you also, soon.
Would you like to see your work in the pages of Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin? Do you have a book review, essay, fiction, or something else that youād like to share with my subscribers? Itās not a full fledged lit publication but it is web publishing in a limited primitive form. I have over 100 subscribers (approximately half routinely open the newsletter emails which I understand is about average and being generous ā itās a lively bunch from what I can tell). Or would you like to collaborate with me on creating something to be shown here? I want to branch out into doing some interviews and that kind of thing. Think of it like the zines of old. I would be really interested in something to do with literary culture, some new treasure youāve dug up that few people know about. If you have an idea maybe the best thing to do would be to contact me via DM on twitter/x @platelet60 or the same address on Instagram where you can follow me. I canāt promise I will be into every single idea Iām presented with but I will be willing to look at them.
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