Adventures in reading
This weekend saw the launch of The Portal, a new website reviewing sf, fantasy and horror short fiction –both Anglophone and non. Besides its intrinsic interest, the site is relevant to my blog because I’m one of the contributors.
My first review for The Portal is of the September issue of the webzine Ideomancer, covering stories by Catherine Krahe, Lenora Rose, and Sandra Odell. The review is here, and the issue of Ideomancer under discussion is here.
Sean Ferrell, Numb (2010)
Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed (2010)
On the table today, two novels whose protagonists have unusual conditions which put great strain on both their own lives and their loved ones’, and which are used by the novels’ respective authors to explore wider issues.
The titular character of Sean Ferrell’s Numb by is unable to feel pain, or to remember who he was before he stumbled, bleeding, into a circus, of which he soon became the star attraction. We join Numb as he is gearing up for his greatest stunt yet – facing off against a lion. Things don’t work out as they should, though, when the lion collapses at the key moment. As a result, Numb leaves the circus, along with his colleague Mal, and heads to New York, in search of his fortune, his identity, or… well, maybe even he doesn’t really know.
One’s natural expectation with a story like this is that it will focus on uncovering the protagonist’s past, but Ferrell’s novel isn’t like that. The man Numb is now is of greater interest to the tale than the man he used to be; when occasional clues do appear (never adding up to anything like a solution, though), they feel almost like an intrusion – which, in a sense, they are, because Numb’s greatest interest is establishing an identity for himself in the present.
Identity is perhaps the central issue of Numb the novel, as that subject impinges on each of the main characters in some way. Numb himself has to deal with becoming public property to an extent; his feats of endurance make him famous, land him appearances on TV; he becomes the star of innumerable internet videos, about which he learns only by accident, if at all – in short, Numb’s identity multiplies until there are people out there who’ve never met him, who have a more solid conception of who he is than he does himself. Numb’s situation seems to me summed up best by a passage in which he reflects on the experience of staying at length in a hotel (funded by his agent) – surrounded by luxury, everything he could want at hand, but none of it belonging to him.
Mal also has to deal with the effects of Numb’s fame, though in his case the issue is that he has fallen on hard times whilst Numb’s stock has risen; Mal takes desperate measures in an attempt to claw back his sense of self. Elsewhere, we have Emilia, a model with whom Numb embarks on something of a ‘relationship’, and whose identity appears mutable – she gains gratification from Numb’s inability to feel pain in New York, yet, when Numb meets her later in Los Angeles (where she has moved), Emilia is a much softer, more relaxed character. Then there is Hiko, the blind artist with whom Numb falls in something which is not quite love; she captures the essence of her subjects in her works, but keeps a second, private set of portraits, which sum up her own image of those people – she creates multiple identities of others.
By novel’s end, Numb is on his way to discovering who he is, or at least to becoming comfortable with whatever answer to that question he may choose – and we as readers have experienced an interesting and very entertaining examination of what ‘identity’ can mean.
In The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, lawyer Tim Farnsworth is betrayed not by his memory, but by his body: Tim’s ‘condition’ is that, periodically, he will start walking, and be unable to stop voluntarily, or control where he goes; no accurate diagnosis nor effective treatment has been found. The novel begins as Tim’s condition returns, and chronicles several years in his life, as he goes in and out of remission.
Broadly speaking (the distinction I’m going to make here isn’t clear-cut), if the effects of the condition in Numb are mostly ‘internal’ (e.g. issues of personal identity), in The Unnamed, they’re more ‘external’. In one sense, this is quite literally so, as all that walking has taken its toll on Tim’s body – but that’s relatively minor in terms of the novel. More significant is what happens to Tim’s relationships and the lives of his loved ones; for example, his wife Jane find’s Tim’s condition dominating her life, as she’s the one who has to collect him from wherever he ends up after one of his walking spell (the staccato flow of the story, as chapters and scenes begin abruptly with Jane collecting Tim from who-knows-where, conveys this sense of disruption beautifully), and even gave up her job to keep an eye on Tim during his previous bout of the condition; later in the novel, the strain of coping with all this drives Jane to drink. Tim’s relationship with his young daughter, Becka, also comes under stress, because she doesn’t understand why he keeps going off as he does.
All this is not to say, however, that Tim’s condition has no psychological effects on him, because it does. These emerge particularly in the final third of The Unnamed, which is where the novel really takes off stylistically. Tim starts to personify his condition as another entity inhabiting his body; or perhaps that’s how it really is – Ferris maintains a wonderful ambiguity over the matter. And the final section, which drops chapters entirely in a reflection of Tim’s now-chronic walking, reveals just how much he has been transformed by his condition. But even Tim finds a peace of sorts in the final pages; one closes the book feeling that Tim’s story has ended in the right place, for all that the conclusion is bittersweet.
Elsewhere
Sean Ferrell’s website
Some other reviews of Numb: Elizabeth A. White; In Lieu of a Field Guide; Boston Book Bums.
Joshua Ferris’s website
Some other reviews of The Unnamed: The Asylum; The Book Lady’s Blog; Reading Matters.
There’s been an extensive discussion at Torque Control over the last week about the paucity of women currently being published in British science fiction. I want to do my bit to continue that conversation, and I’ll take as my starting point the magazine that popped through my letterbox a couple of days ago.
Black Static is a horror magazine rather than a science fiction one, but the issues of under-representation/lack of visibility of female writers in the genre are much the same. Black Static can usually be relied upon to highlight the work of female writers; indeed, in its last couple of issues, the magazine has published the twenty short-shorts selected by Christopher Fowler and Maura McHugh for their Campaign for Real Fear, and thirteen of those stories were by women.
In that context, it’s particularly disappointing to note that the current issue contains five stories, all of which are by men. Now, I used to think this didn’t matter with individual issues of magazines (see, for example, my review of Jupiter XXIV, where I don’t mention the all-male line-up) – anthologies, yes, because they make an individual statement; but I was less concerned when it came to issues of magazine, because they could be viewed in the wider context of the magazine’s complete run.
These days, however, I am inclined to think differently: any list of writers or stories makes a statement; to exclude women from a list is to imply that they don’t write that sort of fiction – which is an impression I would never want to encourage. It’s vital for readers, authors, editors, and publishers alike to keep an eye out for things like this, to prevent them from happening, and not let them go unremarked when they do slip through the net.
Going back to the current issue of Black Static, there’s an interview with horror editor Stephen Jones which touches on the subject of female writers in the genre. One of Jones’s comments is another sentiment with which I would have agreed readily at one time, though now I have reservations – that the quality of the story is of paramount importance, rather than its author’s gender (or what-have-you).
I could agree with this wholeheartedly if the playing-field were level, but the playing-field is not level. Historically, more men have been published than women, and the effects of that filter down. I’ve never selected books on the basis of an author’s gender, but my book collection is still weighted heavily towards male authors, and that’s because there have always been proportionately more books by men around from which I could choose.
I’m well aware that the coverage on this blog is also weighted towards male writers, a situation with which I’m not happy. Whilst I may not be able to remove that bias entirely, what I can do is to make sure that I’m looking for and drawing attention to the work of female writers, of whatever genre. I’d urge others to do the same.
Here’s a chain of consequences: early last year, I was at a work conference where, one evening, a group of us went to see Mark Watson in stand-up. His name was half-familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it; but I love good comedy, so I decided to take a chance and go along anyway – and I’m glad I did, because Watson was hilarious.
A few months later, I was in an unfamiliar part of town, and popped into the local library, where I saw a novel by an author named Mark Watson. A quick glance at the biography established that this was the same Mark Watson; apparently he’d written a couple of novels several years previously. If his fiction was anything like as good as his stand-up, I thought, then I wanted to read it – so I borrowed the book and, sure enough, it was very good.
All this meant that, when I heard earlier this year that Watson was going to publish a new novel, his first in six years, I was very interested in reading it. And the reason I’ve introduced this review as I have is that Eleven is all about chains of consequence. The central chain of events begins when Xavier Ireland, the host of a late-night radio phone-in show, witnesses a group of youths beating up another boy and tries to intervene, but fails to stop them. The novel continues to follow Xavier’s life whilst, alongside that, Watson traces the seemingly random consequences of that one incident – the bullying angers the victim’s mother, who then writes a harsher review of a restaurant than she might have otherwise; incensed by the review, the restaurant’s owner ends up firing one of his staff, and so on. We also discover what it was that led Chris Cotswold to leave Australia, change his name to Xavier Ireland, and take such an unsociable job – and why everything comes back to the number eleven.
The fabric of Eleven is shaped by the theme of chance moments and their ramifications. It’s there in Xavier’s life, as the nature of his job means that most of his connections with other people are transitory – the callers to his show enter his life briefly, then dart back out again; and the odd hours Xavier keeps mean that his producer/co-presenter Murray is probably the person he sees most regularly. The theme is there, of course, in the main consequence-chain; but it’s also there in Watson’s many asides, which reveal connections between minor characters, or glimpses into their futures. These asides act as a reminder that, beyond the protagonist’s life (and, in reality, our own), there are countless webs of other stories which remain unknown to us.
Watson also captures the raggedy nature of life in his plot progression, as events don’t necessarily tie up neatly; what seems as though it’s going to become the novel’s key relationship actually fizzles out early on; and an apparently throwaway gag – one woman Xavier meets at a speed-dating event introduces herself as a cleaner, and before their three minutes are up, he’s made an appointment with her for that weekend – grows into one of the main plot strands.
The character development in Eleven is also smartly done. As I said earlier, Xavier’s relationships with other people tend to be fleeting; when someone does start to become more of a permanent fixture in his life, Xavier doesn’t know how to handle it – but he learns to so in a halting fashion which is very believable. More generally, Eleven could be seen as the story of how Xavier slowly breaks out of the old pattern of his life – but then comes the ending…
I really like the ending of Eleven. It reminds me of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, insofar as both books have endings which are no way to end a novel, and yet are completely right for the story they tell. But you’ll have to read this novel to find out what I mean. And perhaps, as a consequence, you’ll have found a new book to enjoy.
Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Eleven: Learning to Read; Booking Passage; Words, Words, Words; Booktopia.
Extract from Eleven at Bookhugger
Mark Watson’s website
This review was first published in issue 2 of The Smal Press Review, 2006.
Kay MacCauley knows how to grab your attention with a single sentence. And that sentence is this: ‘For the first two hundred years or so, his favourite pastime had been to throw himself under the speeding hooves of horses.’ Our reckless friend is Leilo, ‘the Collector’, who wanders the streets of Venice with his cart, collecting ‘all that was worn out, discarded or dead.’ But perhaps he’s not that reckless after all, for a concoction he drank four centuries previously (it is now 1546) has left him unable to die – not that his body is still in perfect condition.
Leilo is one of several secondary viewpoint characters in this novel, but he is not the ‘man’ referred to in the title. That is Marin, whom we first meet as an infant at the San Barnabo Redentore Shelter for Foundlings. Sister Clara recognises something in him: could he be her own child, the one she abandoned? Believing so, she takes him from the shelter to raise herself (though, in the end, she dies while he is still a boy). As Marin grows, he discovers that people see in him who they want to see, which sometimes even leads to his own physical appearance changing in sympathy. This naturally leads to… various adventures.
I keep wanting to describe The Man Who Was Loved as ‘picaresque’, though I’m not entirely sure how far it is appropriate to use that word. I wouldn’t say the book was a picaresque, not least because Marin doesn’t really seem to me to be a picaro (though other characters would fit that description quite well, notably the escaped eunuch and master of disguise Agostino). No, MacCauley’s novel is more picaresque in the sense of being episodic. Such an impression is perhaps inevitable given how short many of the chapters are, but it’s more than that: the whole novel seems structured to focus on Marin’s journey through life, rather than on any particular destination (however temporary the stay there may be).
This is fine as far as it goes, because the journey through the book (our journey as readers, at least) is enjoyable. MacCauley’s prose is peppered with striking and insightful turns of phrase, such as this description of one character, the Contessa, as a hostess: ‘She plied her guests with food and gifts and addressed each that came as “true, dear friend,” because usually she did not know their names.’ Then there is the sustained interest in exactly where the events of Marin’s life will lead him next; not to mention scenes depicting some of the sights of Venetian life during the period.
I’ve chosen to gloss over the latter because, to a certain extent, Venice itself seems to fade into the background, so focused is the novel on Marin: the city is more a backdrop for his story than a place in its own right. This isn’t a problem until the ending, when the mysterious plague afflicting Venice that has appeared intermittently throughout the book swings to the fore. The denouement seems to happen more suddenly than it should, upsetting the pace of the novel as a whole.
That’s not the only flaw in The Man Who Was Loved. The author has an irritating tendency to switch viewpoint characters within the same scene (sometimes seemingly just to indicate that the stranger whom one character has met is already known to us from earlier on), which can make the book rather difficult to follow. In additiion, some characters remain distant despite our being ‘in their shoes’ for part of the plot; for example (without wishing to spoil anything), I was never sure whether Agostino went as far as he did just because Marin caused him to be captured and enslaved previously.
As noted above, The Man Who Was Loved is more about journey than destination; so perhaps it is appropriate that I am not sure quite what to make of it ultimately. By novel’s end, there has been a resolution of sorts; yet it’s clear that life will go on and the story has not ‘ended’ as such. One of the book’s recurring themes is the mutability of identity: Marin’s changes depending on who is looking at him; Agostino disguises himself physically; the Contessa flatters others to maintain appearances; another character considers that ‘the truth of anybody’s life’ is merely ‘a rough piling together of all they had chosen to accept as real’ – but, despite all this, the theme doesn’t really seem to go anywhere, and I’m left unsure how much MacCauley intended to say about it.
In summary, The Man Who Was Loved is a promising début which is good whilst you’re reading it, but which feels somewhat less satisfying once you’ve finished.
Elsewhere
Telegram Books
Bobby Flopkowski had few natural advantages – he’s average-looking and from a poor background – but he has been lucky in life, and arrived at age forty with a loving family, a lucrative career as a paediatrician, and a plush Beverly Hills house. It all unravels, though, when Bobby’s baby son Jack disappeared one night, after being left alone for just five minutes; Bobby’s wife, Ava, leaves him, and he spirals down into a drink- and drug-fuelled depression, frittering his money away on expensive hotel bills. He ends up living on the beach in a tent, with no regular companions save Eddie, a fellow homeless man, and Cecilia, a cafe owner. And then, one day, Bobby spots Katie Turner, his first girlfriend, who walked back into his life shortly before Jack’s disappearance. She doesn’t seem to recognise Bobby any more, and has apparently changed her name – could this be because she knows what has happened to Jack?
Gabe Rotter’s second novel is a marvellously elegant construction. On one level, it’s a sharp study of one man’s decline; Rotter is particularly good at showing how innocent and apparently small decisions might cause a chain of major repercussions: no harm in getting in touch with the old flame, Bobby thinks; but then she turns up at his party, and she needs a place to stay; well, Bobby and Ava have room, so why not invite her – and so on. Bobby’s descent into addiction has a similarly all-too-plausible momentum; he knows that he’s destroying himself, but, having lost everything, he is unable to stop; it’s powerful, and appropriately uncomfortable, reading.
But there’s another layer to The Human Bobby, which is all about perception: just what is going on with Katie Turner? Is Bobby right about her, or has he lost his grip on reality? In a brilliantly disorienting journey, Rotter leads us through several possible interpretations, before finally settling on one that seems just a little too neat – and then wryly undermines it at the last, in a way that could be seen as either opening up the possibilities once more, or showing the depths of Bobby’s desperation. It’s a fine ending to a very fine novel.
Elsewhere
Gabe Rotter’s blog
It seemed like a good idea at the time to Matt Prior: to leave his job as a financial journalist and set up a website focused on providing financial writing of a higher literary quality than usual – financial advice in the form of poetry, anyone? The site proved unpopular, and Matt is now just a few days away from losing the home he shares with his wife Lisa, sons Frankiin and Teddy, and his ailing father Jerry – not that he’s told any of them. What’s more, Matt thinks Lisa has reconnected with her ex-boyfriend online. It’s a pretty dire situation, then; but a chance encounter with some youths at a 7/11 leads Matt to think of a way out of his problems – dealing in dope. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time…
The Financial Lives of the Poets is, above all, a very funny book. Much of the humour comes from Matt’s narrative voice, which is dense with observation. For example:
The advice you get when your mortgage is in danger is to “contact the lender.” The last time I contacted my lender, some twenty-five-year-old kid answered the phone and talked me into forbearance, this six-month amnesty of procrastination. I should have known it was a bad move when I contacted my lender the next time and found out the kid had been laid off, that our mortgage had been bundled and sold with a stack of similarly red paper to a second company, and that the second company had been absorbed by a third company. Now I have no idea how to “contact my lender.” I seem to spend hours in automated phone dungeons (“For English, press one”) desperately looking for a single human voice to gently tell me I’m dead. (29)
Walter achieves a nice balancing act with Matt’s voice and character, I think: there are wisecracks, but there’s also enough desperation in Matt’s narration to keep him grounded firmly in the messy business of the story, rather than floating freely above it where a quip and a raised eyebrow could save the day.
Matt is (appropriately, I’d say) simultaneously sympathetic and unlikeable. There’s something almost endearing about the way that his attempts to dig himself out of a hole end up pushing him further into one; but we can see that he has the best intentions at heart – except that, sometimes, he doesn’t. He’s under pressure from about five or six different angles and, though his responses aren’t always commendable, they ring true emotionally. There’s also an undercurrent of poignancy when Matt confronts issues like his father’s dementia, which acts as a counterpoint to the humour.
The Financial Lives of the Poets feels very much like a novel that belongs to today: it’s a story that grows out of the current economic climate, and examines the lengths to which someone might go to deal with a bad situation – and there are plenty of laughs along the way. Warmly recommended.
Elsewhere
Some other reviews of The Financial Lives of the Poets: Just William’s Luck; Bookmunch; Raging Bibliomania.
Jess Walter talks about the book
Jess Walter’s website
It’s the end of the line: after ten years and as many volumes, Nemonymous has come to an end. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the stories in each volume were published without bylines, with the authors’ names being revealed at a later date. Null Immortalis is a little different: as it’s the final Nemonymous anthology, bylines are already assigned to the stories — which gives us the following contents list:
Daniel Pearlman, ‘A Giant in the House’
David M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’
David V. Griffin , ‘Violette Doranges’
Ursula Pflug, ‘Even the Mirror’
Andrew Hook, ‘Love Is the Drug’
Joel Lane, ‘The Drowned Market’
Mike Chinn, ‘A Matter of Degree’
Richard Gavin, ‘Only Enuma Elish’
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., ‘Icarus Above…’
Reggie Oliver, ‘You Have Nothing To Fear’
Cameron Pierce, ‘Broom People’
Stephen Bacon, ‘The Toymaker of Bremen’
Mark Valentine, ‘The Man Who Made the Yellow God’
Steve Rasnic Tem, ‘The Green Dog’
Bob Lock, ‘Haven’t You Ever Wondered?’
I’ll be blogging these stories one at a time, with links appearing in the list above as I go.
(One last note before we start: last year, Nemonymous editor/publisher D.F. Lewis ran a competition to see who could match the greatest number of authors to their stories in the previous anthology, with the prize being the chance to appear as a character in every story in Null Immortalis. The winner was Scott Tullis, who is also a contributor to the book; I’m particularly intrigued to see what he’s written…)
Elsewhere
Prep is my second choice in the Transworld Summer Challenge. I chose it because a) i didn’t want all my selections to be by men; and b) this was the only book by a female author on the list that sounded as though it might be of interest (I say this without knowing whether ‘Tim Davys’ is the pseudonym of a male or female writer). It probably wouldn’t have appeared on my radar if not for the challenge… and there’s a big ‘but’ stopping me fully from celebrating the fact that it did.
Prep chronicles four years in the life of Lee Fiora, a girl from Indiana who gains a scholarship at Ault, a prestigious Massachusetts prep school. The book is structured episodically, effectively becoming a series of linked novellas that reveal how Lee struggles with the reality of life at Ault being very different from the rosy image presented in the glossy brochure, and the difficulties she faces finding her niche in the school as an outsider.
What Curtis Sittenfeld does particularly well here is capture something of the confusion and contradictions of teenage life, those years when identities are still being formed, the perceptions of others seem so vital, and friendships are constantly in flux. Lee is never quite sure what she wants from her life at Ault (‘I was always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely’ [25]). Her relationships with her fellow-students can be fluid: for example, the way Lee and Cross Sugarman, the class basketball star, behave towards each other resembles an elaborate dance – moving closer together, then further apart, then again closer; they never become anything as straightforward as boyfriend and girlfriend. Lee puts on an air to get by at Ault, then finds it taking over as her real self. One senses just how difficult these waters are for her to navigate.
Sittenfeld does something else with Lee’s character that makes the depiction of her more interesting – and, I suspect truer. Lee is not easy to warm to: she can be cold and selfish; she can push away people who like her. For all that she goes on about not having friends at school, Lee seems uncomfortable if people get too close to her – when one character tells her that her tendency to spend time alone is not as strange as she thinks it is (because anybody dedicated to a pastime has to spend time alone on it), to be understood in that way is ‘the most terrifying thing in the world’ (453) to her. Lee is a complex character, and it’s her characterisation which is at the core of Prep.
Now for the ‘but’ – I think Prep is too long to sustain the story that it wants to tell, particularly as Lee’s character doesn’t seem to change all that much over the course of the novel. I think it could probably still work at even half its length. That quibble aside, Prep is an incisive study of a teenager not just trying to fit in, but trying to decide if she even wants to fit in.
Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Prep: Iris on Books; Amused, Bemused and Confused; Fervent Reader; The Bookish Type.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s website
If you thought Cloud Atlas was a little too conventional, Ultrameta may be the book for you. Trying to interpret (let alone synopsise) Douglas Thompson’s extraordinary first novel is probably a fool’s errand, but let’s see what happens anyway. Subtitled “A Fractal Novel”, Ultrameta is constructed as a series of linked short stories and story-fragments, but exactly how they’re linked is open to debate.
Ultrameta centres on Alexander Stark, a university professor who disappeared, and then apparently began sending letters to his wife Charlotte – letters written not as by him, but as by a series of different characters, some describing events thatcross over into the surreal. Later, Stark reappeared, with no memory of what had happened, but took his own life – and more notes were found on his body. Subsequent investigations undertaken by a journalist named Martha Lucy, and DI Walter Dundas of Strathclyde Police establish that many of the people named as the “writers” of Stark’s letters actually existed. Is Stark deluded. Might it be that Stark was all of these people? Could there really be such a place as Ultrameta, the “city of the soul” to which Stark refers, that constantly refashions itself? Or is Stark just deluded?
The novel Ultrameta is presented as the collected notes of Alexander Stark, bookended by correspondence between Martha Lucy and Charlotte Stark, and introduced by Walter Dundas. But Stark’s notes link together in an unusual way: the first fragment ends with the narrator listening to a radio play whose words begin the second chapter, narrated by a ten-year-old Stark in the library of his house; that chapter ends with the boy reading a manuscript which begins with opening words of the third chapter, and so on. The twenty-five chapters are arranged in twelve pairs, running from 1a to 12a, and then from 12b back to 1b, on either side of the central chapter 13 (also called ‘Ultrameta’. In effect, the novel is a journey through a series of nesting shells, and back out again.
A complicated structure, then, but what does it do? To my mind, it sets up two contrasting views of what Ultrameta is: on the one hand, a linear narrative; on the other, a set of smaller narratives. The first view, perhaps, invites an interpretation of continuity (i.e. the narrator is genuinely the same person throughout, taking on different personas); the second, an interpretation of separateness (i.e. these are all different people, and Stark is deluded). But no single interpretation quite fits.
Identities and realities are constantly shifting in Ultrameta. Multiple characters return home with amnesia and start reading through their mysterious notes. The letter from Charlotte to Martha placed at the end of the book is a world away from the one at the beginning to which it’s replying. Even the novel’s structure cannot be relied upon to stay the same: the chapters don’t all flow neatly into the next; and the second chapter in a pair isn’t always a direct continuation of the first. There probably isn’t a definitive interpretation of what’s going on in Ultrameta, but that hardly matters when the ride is so intriguing.
And, though Thompson’s prose can be overly dense at time, there are some very fine moments to be found within the pages of Ultrameta – to name two, I was struck by the chapter that brings Icarus into the present day (rendering modern technology strange by having someone from the past describe it isn’t a new idea, of course, but Thompson does it very strikingly); and the eerie section in which the narrator makes an organism out of his house, with himself at its centre. But it’s the entirety of Ultrameta that impresses the most; there’s nothing else quite like it, I’m sure.
Elsewhere
Douglas Thompson’s website
Eibonvale Press
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