An imaginative but jumbled journey through the mysteries of earthly existence.
Blair’s absurdist novella explores space and time from prehistory to the modern day.
The story opens at a cocktail party in Texas in 1999—one that’s full of paleontologists. Their conversation eventually moves to the “sail-backed, four-legged animals” of millions of years ago. One of the attendees posits that such creatures evolved their large sails as “biological telepathy amplifiers”; they may have enabled a form of communication like “Eleventh Generation wireless biotech.” The narrative then shifts to “274,578 millennia and three weeks before The Tunguska Event.” Sail-backed creatures are, in fact, communicating telepathically; as it turns out, they also have different religions that feature divergent interpretations of consciousness. Soon, the book shifts to a message from the author, who expresses a wish to thank various people, including champion chess player Garry Kasparov and a man named Oden Griffin with whom the author “shared a dining experience” at a Burger King. Such wild swerves in time, setting, and content continue as the story goes on. They feature “blueprints” brought to Earth by aliens and an ancient “Dorian-Mycenaean-Teutonic extravaganza,” which is, in fact, an orgy that proves dangerous to its participants. In 2019, a Martian microbe slips through “a shortcut in the fabric of space-time to go directly from Mars to Earth”: the origin of Covid-19, at least in some universes. Also, in one version of reality, Gary Gilmore—a convicted murderer in the real world—becomes the 40th president of the United States. In an epilogue, the author explains oddities from his own experience, including a college football game that seems to have been played twice.
If this all sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Even the seemingly ordinary atmosphere of the cocktail party in the opening chapter has its share of bizarre turns, with characters referred to only as “the buster” or “caddie.” Readers quickly know to pay very close attention—and to abandon all expectations for what might come next, since that could be “a realm of space-time transcending a very exact location in the timelines of being exactly here or there.” The dialogue includes lines such as “Sometimes when I walk on land and sometimes when I fly in the sky I remember them more vividly than when I swim in the sea.” Still, despite the daunting atmosphere, the work has real heart amid all the verbosity; at one point, for instance, the text presents the last two living dimetrodons, who can feel “emanations from what would prove to be the beginning of the end for trillions of quadrillions of the Earth’s inhabitants”—an unexpectedly touching image. Many descriptions, such as a reference to humans as “major mixtures of compassion, passion, dispassion, wisdom, folly, hatred, apathy, love, agitation, and equanimity” have a certain poetry to them. Humans, in these pages, are “like nothing the planet has ever seen before,” even though “the very notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ are sometimes-illusory parts of a cosmic labyrinth of epic proportions.” There’s a lot to dig through, but such gems can be found.
An imaginative but jumbled journey through the mysteries of earthly existence.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2022
ISBN: 9798985909449
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An old-fashioned narrative poem that deftly captures the deadly wonder of the Silk Road.
An old caravan trader tells a tale of treasure and greed in this long debut poem.
With a bit of cajoling, a group of children convinces an old trader who lives in the town’s “caravanserai” to tell them his story—one he seems reluctant to talk about. Years ago, in a time of war and instability, the trader traveled alone, attempting to make money in a neighboring city. He overheard two brothers discussing the location of a hidden treasure: a cup of great power that showed its owner visions of the past and future. The trader imagined himself in possession of it: “With such powers I could rule / with greater sanity, I swore, / than these cruel and heedless / rulers with their cruel and senseless wars.” He presented himself to the brothers as a desert guide, able to lead them to the remote Devil’s Springs that they sought. At the springs, the trader encountered the eponymous demon of the well, who made an infernal deal with the man in exchange for the cup. It was a pact that would have consequences that still plague the trader—and his country—in the storyteller’s present. Hendricks’ tale has an ancient quality to it that comes both from its setting and its form. Told in rhyming couplets, the poem reads like something concocted by one of the Fireside Poets: “I was growing quite impatient / when at last he reappeared. / And brandishing the magic cup, / he brought it up quite near. / ‘A bargain is a bargain / as a trader would agree. / And now for this handsome treasure / you must give your soul to me.’ ” The imagery, which the author says was inspired by the landscapes of the Tarim region in modern China and by the historical Silk Road, is evoked with skill and subtlety. There are a few lines where the rhymes feel forced or the rhythm gets clunky, but overall Hendricks manages to sustain an aura of mystery and magic. One could imagine hearing the poem read aloud around a summer campfire or on a chilly winter night.
An old-fashioned narrative poem that deftly captures the deadly wonder of the Silk Road.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5439-9334-9
Page Count: 74
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A heartfelt and engaging Christian parable about the mechanisms of divine will.
A novella focuses on the hidden workings of God in the lives of ordinary people.
This story by Paul and Bland opens with a seemingly incongruous sight: Two men eating their lunches on a bench in a freezing downpour. And the more readers learn about the men, the more bizarre things get. The younger-looking one is Charlie, a substitute mail carrier who was recently finishing up his route when he suddenly died. And his companion is Everett, an unconventional angel Charlie sometimes suspects may be a kind of substandard model. Charlie knows that it’s part of Everett’s purpose to “show how the mighty hand of God worked in people’s lives.” Witnessing this is a step in Charlie’s own post-death journey. As for Charlie himself, “he could feel evil and how it tried to latch on to anyone within reach”—the diametric opposite of the heaven he had experienced, a place that “pulsated with love.” This eager reaching of evil to seize everyone around it informs the meetings Charlie and Everett quickly have—with Martin, the owner of a local bike shop; Eva, a postal worker already frustrated on her first day on the job; middle-aged waitress Karen, who “went about her life without realizing she was a mighty warrior, a saint who was troubling the Enemy’s plans”; and others. With clear, inviting prose and remarkable concision, the authors draw readers into these separate lives and twine their tales together. The fantasy backstory of angels is seamlessly woven into the well-realized depictions of regular town life, and the chapters are paced with a page-turning sensitivity. One prominent atheist character is portrayed as the thinnest straw-man caricature of an unbeliever, but readers willing to overlook that flaw will find a surprisingly complex and heartwarming tale in the rest of the book.
A heartfelt and engaging Christian parable about the mechanisms of divine will.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982221-36-2
Page Count: 104
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
