Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality

 

Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality by Federico Campagna
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had high expectations for Technic and Magic, since it had come so strongly recommended by my favorite podcast Weird Studies. I was excited for the prospects the book held, but I must admit that, at first, the setup felt a little . . . pedantic? For some reason, the Ralph Bakshi animated movie Wizards seemed appropriate to the opening salvoes of Campagna's analysis. And while I do love that movie, I did not want to simply read a book that was a rehash of the overly-simplistic "technology bad, magic good" argument. Also, I am often suspicious of works that explicitly or implicitly identify themselves as Marxist or Neo-Marxist critique, mainly because these forms can so often be idealized and lacking nuance. But in this case, I can see the utility of these arguments because of the natural mapping of scientific to economic power structures and people's blind faith in those structures. Honestly, I felt the book was largely apolitical, or at least dismissive of both liberal and conservative attempts to subsume interpretations of "reality" under their respective rubrics. Not directly dismissive, but passive, really. I honestly didn't feel like Campagna was concerned with politics here. Or at least, he barely nodded in that direction. This is a book about an individual's view of and participation in "reality". If anything, it's a touch anarchic.

Campagna's outline and explanation of the basic structure of Technic's version of reality felt well-reasoned and organized. Of course, that's easier when one realizes that Technic's overarching "power" comes from the use of linguistic strictures as a way of describing and categorizing . . . well, everything. The logical extreme of the argument is that "if it can't be explained in words, it's not real". I'll leave it at that, but there Campagna does an excellent job of breaking down how this "power" (this is my word, not his) radiates out to encompass all aspects of the way we think about reality. And before you go asking "what is reality," I'm not going to go over it, as Campagna takes an entire chapter to describe in detail what he means, and I'm not about to transcribe an entire chapter of a philosophical work. He wrote the chapter so I don't have to. Sorry / not sorry.

i worried that the second half of the book would not provide some practical examples of alternative paradigms that can provide some kind of escape from the Technic-al world. Without this, this text becomes sheer nihilism, with an especial emphasis on how we are trapped en masse. If one were to finish the book halfway through, the end result would likely be deep depression. Campagna laid out the skeletal structure of the "Magic" reality system, and I was skeptical if he could clothe those bones with flesh (the unsubtle reference to Ezekiel is intentional, by the way).

The arguments on the Magic side seemed a little more subtle, a little less cogent than the arguments about the structure of Technic. Can we think / work our way into a Magic reality? Can we even picture, clearly, what a world outside of Technic would look like? I hoped so, but I had my doubts that Campagna could effectively lead the way.

The main reason for my distrust while reading the second half of the book was that the biggest weakness of Campagna's book was a lack of examples. Perhaps he felt that pulling discrete data out of context was too "Technic" of a move, but a couple of case-studies would have gone a long way in more fully understanding the theory that is the kernel and the whole of his "Magic" proposal.

However, in the last chapter, through the use of "Secret," "Initiation," and the "As If" motif, Campagna gives some hints (though not outright instruction) as to how one can begin to implement Magic reality while living in a Technic world. This saves the book from the pile of pseudo-philosophical texts that present all the problems, but provide no solutions; or, at best, they present the need for "further exploration". But this is not what I came here to seek. Thankfully, Campagna does provide some starting points for a new way of thinking, a magic way of thinking.

It must be said that "Magic" here is not about illusion, but there is a strong element of the trickster throughout this last section. It is more, however, about tapping into the ineffable in the way that only you, as a "self" can. This is strongly opposed to the Technic view of the individual as a cog in the machine of ever-more efficient production and becoming. It is about Being, not Becoming.

Campagna ends on a hopeful note, albeit an open-ended note. As with all difficult texts, the reader is left to ponder what is presented and start on the path to reaching their own conclusions.

I think this book is necessary. It's not a utopian piece, at least not on the societal level. In fact, Campagna makes it clear that Magic is just one more way to contextualize reality beyond that of Technic. And while he doesn't, alas, provide any other concrete examples, he has shown a way (though not the way) to reconstruct reality, along with a roadmap or intellectual structure of how one might find their own way. He's taught us, as it were, how to fish. It's up to us to outfit ourselves and find the best places to drop our nets.

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Get to Know Me! TTRPG Edition

 Okay, let's do this thing . . . This is as of December 2022. Things might change in the next . . . days? Weeks? Months? Anyway, here is a snapshot in time in relation to me and my relationship with TTRPGs;

1. It was a toy store in the lower level of Southroads Mall, Omaha (maybe Bellevue?) Nebraska. Can't even remember the name of it. My mom had bought me the AD&D PHB (1st edition, of course) for Christmas, 1979, and I bought the Holmes box set there, along with Dragon Magazine #33 in 1980. The first *gaming* store I bought something at was Aircraft Hobbies, Bellevue, NE, where I bought The Traveller Book in 1981. 

2. Probably the one I created in the mid-90s: Glamwell. It was a haberdash of Greyhawkian baseline, with a strong dose of Tekumel, and elements from Jorune. I still have all the notes. I even created my first website (now very defunct and no longer available) for that world. It was gaudy as heck and I loved it.

3. Lassiviren the Dark, from the AD&D Rogues Gallery, made a strong impression on me as a kid. In my adult years, at a gaming convention, I sat down to play an all-evil PC game with Alan Hammack as DM. I was the first one there and so he let me pick from the characters. I saw Lassiviren and said "Oh, heck yeah, that's who I want to play". He said "That's who I played in Gary's campaign". Good thing we were on the same level as the bathrooms because I nearly shat myself. I had completely forgotten that he, Al Hammack, had originally played Lassiviren. So I got to play the wily assassin for that game. Well, until I (or Lassiviren) was killed by a bouncing lightning bolt that our lead mage had stupidly cast in the inner chambers of an arch-devil. Way to go. Needless to say, we all died horrible deaths, but Lassiviren was the first to go. And I couldn't have been happier!

4. The first TTRPG I bought directly from the creator was Black Sun Deathcrawl by James MacGeorge. Now I game with James online on Saturday mornings and have been to a concert with him. Good times. 

5. I honestly don't know. It's a toss up between Gamma World 1st edition, AD&D 2e, Classic Traveller, DCCRPG, and Call of Cthulhu. I honestly don't know. 

6. Pheelanx Durrowphael: My entirely chaotic (and, to be honest, borderline chaotic evil by the time that campaign finally fizzled out after five years straight) 1/2 elf Magic User / Thief. He had a penchant for wild magic and just all around chaotic action. If it caused chaos, he was totally in the deep of it. As a result, he got caught up in the blood wars in a limited way, for instance, grabbing a fairly powerful devil (not and arch-devil, though) and dragging him (via teleport - but that's a different story) into the Abyss, to abandon him there once he had attracted the attention of several demons in the area. My DM took the idea of the Deck of Many Things and created a Wand of Many Things, which combined ten different tables of variations on the Deck of Many Things. He would use that wand a LOT, which got him in serious trouble a few times and got him out of serious trouble more than once. That many random results gave a lot of leeway for chaos, and Pheelanx loved every minute of it. It's a wonder he survived, but somehow, he did . . . barely. 

You'll note that some of his stats are preternaturally high. This is the result of using that Wand of Many Things so many times. I think he embraced chaos so much because, as a rule, he was very, VERY lucky!

7. As a rule, if I spend money on a TTRPG, I play it. Life's too short . . .

8. Favorite TTRPG for its art: Has to be Skyrealms of Jorune. Wow. Just wow. Incredible art. 

9. Favorite TTRPG for its writing: The Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Keeper Rulebook, Chapter 10: "Playing the Game". Everyone who runs any TTRPG of any system at all should read this chapter. I think I learned (and re-learned) more about running a game reading this than the previous, oh, 25 years or so of advice I had read before it. Yes, it's that good.

10. I have not yet played a journaling game, but I recently bought and reviewed Thousand Year Old Vampire, so I will be playing it, maybe this next year. 

11. I've played more hex crawls than I can number. But I prefer point crawls over hex crawls. 

12. I've designed many dungeons. I've published and sold a few of those dungeons. 

13. Outside of doing historical fencing with metal swords and daggers, no. But I have done rapier and dagger matches. Got kicked in the nuts the first time I did that and learned really quickly that historical fencing is not a sport, it's COMBAT!

14. See Wand of Many Things in section 6, above. Best. Magic. Item. Ever.

15. I played a really flirty thief character in the last Greyhawk campaign. He had . . . relationships. Um, yeah. 

16. Certain designer? Not really. I'm pretty loose and free with who designs what. If I like it and I think I can use it, I'll buy it. If not, I won't. 

17. I try to play a new TTRPG at every con I attend (usually I get to Garycon and Gameholecon each year). I'd like to play Vaesen in 2023. Tried to get in on a game in 2022, but they sold out quickly!

18. I'm going to answer the question I wanted to be asked here: What is the most memorable confrontation you've had with a villain in a TTRPG? The flirty thief I mentioned in section 15, above, Ryn was his name, was going through Return to the Tomb of Horrors. That is one tough mofo of a module, let me tell you! Anyway, we were squaring off with some Death Knights (yes, plural). We were getting pounded pretty good. Ryn had been saving a Potion of Gaseous Form for an outright emergency, and this was it. But rather than slink away while the rest of the party died, he made one last desperate attempt, a do-or-die proposition, to save the party. I asked the DM if gaseous form would allow me to enter a small hole, say 1/4" in diameter or so. He agreed, so Ryn, in gaseous form, snuck into the nostril of one of the Death Knights (who did not realize what was happening and failed his save and Magic Resistance rolls), then, once he had wiggled down to where the chest cavity was, shut off the effect of the potion. Ryn literally exploded the Death Knight from the inside out, essentially piercing the thing with his pair of magic daggers. The Death Knight was wearing platemail, so Ryn suffered substantial damage, but managed to hold on with just a couple of hit points left. And that was the end of the Death Knight. True story!

19. I don't know what this means. Yes, I have bled before. Sometimes profusely.

20. I was introduced to TTPRGs indirectly by one of my dad's friends named Bill Walters, in 1979. He actually gave me a copy of the Steve Jackson metagame "Rivets," which I became enamored with. Before he had a chance to get me to play a TTRPG, though, we moved from San Vito AFB, Brindisi, Italy (where Bill and my dad were stationed) to Sartell, Minnesota to live with my grandma while dad was getting cross-training. While in Minnesota, I discovered and bought the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album. We then moved to Offutt AFB, Omaha, Nebraska. A few months later, Bill was reassigned to Offutt and, with my mother's permission, he whisked me off to play D&D with a bunch of people 2 - 3 X my age. And the rest is history. 

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A Trick of the Shadows

 

A Trick of the Shadow by R. Ostermeier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Broodcomb Press is doing some amazing things. Their trade paperbacks are, first of all, beautiful books - about the best quality you'll ever see in a TPB. Secondly, they are distinctive. There is no mistaking a Broodcomb book for something else, which speaks to their dedication to a tight, easily identifiable aesthetic; so kudos for that.

But what really stands out is, of course, the prose. I've previously reviewed The Night of Turns and Upmorchard and noted the style of both. They are smooth and and clean, and yet idiosyncratic, especially Ostermeier's voice. There's a certain "tic" that I can't quite suss out that is a sort of literary fingerprint. I'd have to spend more time than I have to pull out an example, but I know it when I read it. Something for me to watch when I next read another Ostermeier book (which I will). I'd love to know how much crafting goes into the writing - how many rewrites, edits, notebooks full of scratched out paragraphs, etc. I know my own experience, but what I wouldn't give to watch Ostermeier write a couple of stories from beginning to end.

And how do the stories in A Trick of the Shadow fare? I liked all of them, loved most of them. There were two that didn't hit home for me, but that's because of my personal tastes, not because of any fault on Ostermeier's part.

To start, Ostermeier folds Mark Fisher's notions of the weird and the eerie in on themselves in "A Tantony Pig". It is a disconcerting method, to say the least, and deeply affecting. I rarely get legitimately scared while reading a story. This was one of those that scared me, even with the lights all on and other people in the house. The unexplained mysteries left behind in the wake of the story make it even more effective. There's a lingering aura that one feels long after reading the closing words.

In "finery" the old phrase about the clothes making the man is transformed and split into the clothes making the woman and the woman making the clothes. Both are inextricably sewn together, the weave and weft of what one wishes to be and what one one must admit she is.

"The Chair" is as disturbing as the title is banal. A strange device may or may not allow one to see another's dreams. I'm reminded somewhat of the Christopher Walken movie "Brainstorm", but this is much more disturbing on a personal level. Children's dreams meet adult problems in this story of the loss of innocence amidst family dynamics where no one, yet everyone, is to blame. A strongly affecting story!

While I do like vagary in short stories, I don't like downright inscrutability. I found "The Object" more affecting than effective. Yes, there was an emotional response to reading it, but the utter chaos of the elements didn't work particularly well for me. Utter nihilism and loss, without some stirringly emotional connection feels empty and a bit academic. I supposed nothing's more horrific than academia. Still ... I liked the story, but didn't love it as much as I loved the others.

Body horror just isn't my thing. And "The Intruder" is all about body horror. It was highly unpleasant and disturbing, just like the experiences of the main character. The story was "clunky," and maybe that was by design. If so, it clearly engendered discomfort in this reader. Not that I like my reading comfortable. Au contraire. But stories that leave me feeling almost physically ill are not for me. Maybe for you? If so, this story is definitely for you.

I love folk horror. For folk horror of a different sort, "The Bearing" is hard to beat. The rurality and ritual tropes are present, but the horror doesn't arise from the strange inhabitants of the area. In fact they are trying to prevent the evil from gaining a foothold. Or a hoof-hold. One is left wondering if they actually succeeded, and the need for an annual rite all but ensures that some day they will get it wrong. But only once.

The longest story in the collection, "Bird-hags," is not easily categorizable, which means it's right in my wheelhouse. Part psychological horror, with a slight flicker of body horror, but a huge dose of cosmic ur-horror from the depths of our dreams, this novella hits many different notes, but hits each one soundly. The cosmic aspect is something disruptive to our world, yet uncaring. Not malevolent, just uncaring. I believe this is the sort of thing that Lovecraft was striving for, but Ostermeier uses far more simple language to greater effect, in this instance. This is possibly because the horror here is so darned personal. Perhaps it's because the narrator, while an adult, is showing the story from his childhood point of view, where innocence is slowly being eroded away.

A Trick of the Shadow is another gem in the Broodcomb Press crown. Gaze into it and let it dazzle your eyes! You will . . . see things . . .

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Rayguns & Robuts an RPG Review

 Take one part Flash Gordon and one part Space Riders, mix liberally with system-agnostic role-playing game accoutrements and package in a digest-sized comic book. This is Rayguns & Robuts by Planet X Games.

Look at that fantastic sea monkey spoof. This gives you a pretty good idea of the mood of the whole thing. It even comes with a soundtrack!

And what do you get for your hard-earned deneros? Well, here's the TOC:

Yes, all that tasty goodness with a brief explanation of what "system agnostic" means. In short, no, you're not going to compromise your religious values by using this supplement (well, maybe you are, but there's no guarantee). What you will do is use the brains you've been gifted to slide the narrative pieces here into an existing game structure. Best to use this with a system with which you are familiar (I would suggest DCCRPG or The Simplest RPG System Out of This World, but you can use whatever you feel like. The offerings here are not tied to any particular system. There is almost no crunch here. You want crunch, you add crunch. You do you, man.

So, you might ask "is this a campaign world"? Well, yes and no. Mostly no. You'll find in here many heroes, antiheros, robuts, and worlds. The narrative descriptions act as signposts or "points of interest" in a potential campaign universe, but you fill in all the gaps. It's what we do with TTPRGs, right? Rayguns & Robuts is a starting point or, more properly, several starting points and waypoints. What's the end game? Up to you. Incidentally, I've been thinking that this could provide great material for a campaign that starts in the Ultraviolet Grasslands, then goes off-planet. If I were to do that, I'd be sorely tempted to use the Troika! RPG as my system. 

Well, if it's not a full campaign world and doesn't have any rules, what does it do for me? What am I paying for anyway?

You are paying to have your mind BLOWN! I'm listening to some heavy psych metal while I'm typing this and, you know what? It's entirely appropriate. R&R is a mind-expanding supplement meant to crack the spaces between your synapses clean open and let psycho-pulp laser pistols, killer robots, cyborg chimps, and astro-zombies worm their way through into the depths of your brain. This is all about vision and mental expansion, it is, dare I say it, a prompt for your imagination to run wild. And all this without the use of mind-altering substances (or with, if you prefer - I won't judge). I don't want to spoil all the fun by telling you about every little detail to be found herein, just be aware that there is a depth to the ouvre of this work. A "voice" if you will, like a writerly voice, that is unique and memorable and, above all, playable.

You are also paying for some of the best eye candy I've seen in an RPG supplement. Artists Ed Bickford, Lawrence Hernandez, Je Shields, Dan Smith, and James V. West (who did some of the art for my own Beyond the Silver Scream) provide a shockingly-effective visual treat that is eclectic, yet "of a piece". Think of the movie Heavy Metal (one of my favorites of all time), where several different artists come together to form a complimentary work of art that is greater than the sum of its p(art)s. 

There is an adventure in the back, which should provide a good starting point (or later waypoint, if you like) for a potential campaign. Now, I am partial to adventures with environmental hazards, but I realize that not everyone likes these. But if you do, you're in for a treat. Sure, there are a couple of monsters, but player characters are much more likely to accidentally bump themselves off than to be killed off by sentient (or at least semi-sentient) nasties. Not saying they won't be killed off by those nasties, but they are more likely to succumb to environmental hazards.

Don't you succumb to the hazards. Go buy this thing, already! Strongly recommended for acid-tripping psychonauts out to defeat killer machines - or those who want to be. Grab that raygun and GO!

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Asterix und die Goten

 

Asterix und die Goten by René Goscinny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a kid, I grew up with Asterix, having discovered him when we moved to Italy in 1975. Asterix and the Goths was one of my absolute favorites. They're all great, but there was something about all the factional infighting among the various tribes of Goths that I found hilarious.

Fast forward to 2019, when my wife and I take a long-anticipated trip to Europe. A large part of that time was spent in Austria, with a couple of days in Germany (Frankfurt and Munich). We stopped in multiple bookstores, including a comic book store in Vienna and a used bookstore in Munich. I was specifically looking for this Asterix book auf Deutsch, but I could not for the life of me find it. Several stores had ALL of the Asterix books in German, except this one. Then I remembered that one of the speech bubbles had a Goth chieftain, who had just been thumped on the head with a club, swearing up a long string of explicatives (I thought of my German-swearing grandmother when I saw this). The swear words were represented by lots of different symbols, including (gasp) a swastika.

Then it dawned on me: the book had been banned because it has a Nazi symbol in it.

Germany, Austria, I love you, but . . . seriously? I'm all about punching nazis, but really?

Anyway, I eventually found a copy . . . on Ebay. I bought it right up because who knows how many of these will survive?

It's kind of strange how things turn. Banning books, in particular . . .

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Waystations of the Deep Night

 

Waystations of the Deep Night by Marcel Brion
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I recall a night. It was probably 1982, if I've triangulated correctly. In Bellevue, Nebraska, a suburb of Omaha. My friend Ray and I were staying at our friend Shawn's house. Shawn's dad was kind of a celebrity to us. He had a killer conversion van (though, unfortunately, no barbarians painted on the side), a copy of Rush's 2112 in the tape deck, and he knew the guitar player from REO Speedwagon. Pretty cool to us 13 year olds!

Back then, young teenagers were pretty "free range". I recall Saturdays and summer days where I would ride my bike for hours, covering many miles, just sort of going from place to place, running into friends, creating adventures. There were no helicopter parents back then. At least I didn't know any. Needless to say, Shawn's dad was not a helicopter parent. We stayed out in the conversion van, listening to Rush while playing Tunnels & Trolls, with no adult influence whatsoever. It was bliss.

When it comes to exact details of that night, I can only recall a couple. After finishing our T&T session, we went out for a nighttime stroll. It was one of those strangely surreal nights where the three of us seemed like the only people out on the streets. We went to Top Dog Hot Dog for the arcade games as much as for the hot dogs. I recall playing Moon Patrol, Zaxxon (I still suck at that game), and then playing the Centaur pinball game (still my favorite board) until they closed at about 11 PM.

Then, we wandered. I can't tell you where all we went and what all we did, though I am certain involved a lot of trespassing and maybe some breaking and entering.

What I can tell you about is the feeling I had. Did I mention that we had stayed awake the entire night before that night? No? It's true, we had been awake for close to 36 hours straight before the night began. For those of you who have done this, first of all, don't continue. I have first-hand experience of a loved one becoming temporarily psychotic and having to be hospitalized in the psych-clinic due to lack of sleep. It's terrifying to see from the outside. I wonder if I hadn't experienced something similar that night. How could I know? When you're in the middle of psychosis, your thoughts seem pretty logical (even hyper-logical, to coin a term) to you.

I want to say there was a dulling of the senses, but "dulling" doesn't describe what I felt. It was more a compartmentalizing of the senses. The "I" in "me" was one step removed. I heard things, but it was as if it was from a distance. Vision came as if from a television or movie screen. Even my own voice felt like it emanated from somewhere outside or "behind" me. It was summer, but my skin felt numbed. A high-pitched whining continually sounded from the back of my skull.

And I felt like anything was possible. Everything, though one step removed from my senses, was alive and full of potential. I wouldn't have been surprised by a miracle, and wouldn't have been taken aback by the end of the world.

Since then, I've had a few other experiences late, late at night that I won't detail here. There is some kind of physiological and psychological reaction to the deep night that makes each of those experiences to feel "of a piece," as they say. And the same is true of the stories in Marcel Brion's excellent Waystations of the Deep Night.

The title story is exactly what you would expect from such a title: an oneiric tale straight out of a de Chirico painting. I'm honestly shocked that the Brothers Quay haven't done a short film based on this story. It would be a perfect fit, as Brion's painterly prose is beautifully imagistic. Or is that magicistic? Borderline majestic. It's everything I hoped for, judging by the title. Dark and refulgent, at once.

"The Field Marshal of Fear" is a quiet, somber piece, but steady as marching feet. The short, simple sentences, however, do not fail to evoke a stupendous sadness, an eternal drudgery experienced by the dead veterans of wars long since won or lost. A graveside sleepwalk, full of night's heaviness.

In "The Fire Sonata," Brion's voice reminds me of Calvino, but with a sinister edge much sharper and darker than anything the Italian master wrote. I had to split this story into two readings, and I had high expectations for the concluding read. My expectations were met and then some! This could have been an episode of the Twilight Zone that Rod Serling would have been proud of. That's the highest praise, coming from me, as TZ is my favorite shoe of all time.

I would swear David Lynch had written "Incident on a Journey," had I not read it in this collection. The ending came as no surprise, but the inevitability of the tale made it all the more uncomfortable and awkward, like you know you're walking into a trap, but there is no way to avoid it, so you take in every excruciating detail and just watch in desperate silence as the void closes in on you, closer and closer.

Though it could be read merely as a fabulously well-written eerie tale (in the Fisherian sense), "Dead Waters" is, pardon the pun, much deeper than that. It's a story primarily about agency, manipulation, creation, and causality, with many of the characters being potentially marionettes or God Himself, or neither. There are no clear answers, but plenty of compelling questions about what transpires on dark streets. This was the most blatantly "dreamlike" story in the collection, and a deeply-intriguing read.

"La Capitana" is a child's long, slow fading into a dream-world of potential adventure beyond the seas. It is simultaneously happy and sad, bittersweet, full of hope and, yet, utterly hopeless. Imagine your eight-year-old self on a boring, sunny afternoon, given the power to disappear into mysterious dreams of exotic lands on a ship named "La Capitana," a name that you gave the ship, because it is yours, in dream.

"The Glass Organ" was every bit as ephemeral and strange as the object in the title implies. It is a multi-faceted story, but tenuous, images slipping onto one another, transforming into a world that may or may not exist.

"The Lost Street" is a more traditional ghost story. I use the word "more" intentionally, as it is not a fully-traditional ghost story. There are enough more surreal elements that take this beyond the realm of, say M.R. James and approach Bruno Schulz by way of Dali.

Overall, Brion's stories evoked a visceral familiarity within me, feelings I've felt mostly when I've had too little sleep (day or night) and some of the oddities of life in the deep night. Here's sampling of what I mean - Brion describes it much better than I do, from the story "The Glass Organ":

That nocturnal stroll through a park that merged imperceptibly with the forest - certain domestic trees having recovered their wild freedom - already contained within it the qualities of a labyrinth. I didn't choose paths. When several opened before me, I accepted now the darkest, with the childlike hope of encountering a marvelous creature, now the brightest, for the pleasing reward of a downpour of moonlight like a narrow stream between the serried darkness of the trees. Concerns about time or direction would have diminished the sense of the unreal that I received from the night. To let myself be carried along by it, to consent to the paths it offered me, ah! the sheer bliss of no longer choosing. What did it matter if dawn overtook me in the middle of the forest or at the first houses of a distant village? The joy of abandoning myself to the indefinite character that moonlight bestows on deeds and things ruled out any directed action on my part. There was nothing I sought, nothing I fled. For several hours I was at peace with myself, relinquishing both desire and regret, indifferent to wherever, in the end, I must inevitably arrive, not caring whether that place was one of fulfillment or one of oblivion.

This is how it feels to flee into the deep night.

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The Beauty of the Death Cap

 

The Beauty of the Death Cap by Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze


I admit that I have a certain soft-spot for "plotless" books. And while The Beauty of the Death Cap isn't completely plotless, the plot is a mere wisp, a skeleton or an apparition, if you will. But it's barely necessary in this book.

The central conceit of the book is the gradual peeling away of layers around the ultimately sociopathic Nikonor (a name of a "certain Slavic, vaguely menacing quality"), his various career pursuits, love of mycology, and his paranoia, engendered by his twin sister. This is all done in a tongue in cheek manner, but by the end, we realize that the tongue is boring completely through the cheek and exposing a bloody mess. It's not a horror book, nor a psychological thriller; no, this one really does defy categorization. You hear that about many books, but this one means it. I can't think of any subgenre in which this book comfortably sits outside of grim humor, and that's not really a genre so much as an attitude. And The Beauty of the Death Cap has that attitude in spades.

This isn't some clumsy, oafish attempt at morbid slapstick, though. Any book that begins by quoting Pliny the Elder either can't take itself seriously or is full of sinister deceit. Or both. I learned the hard way that here it was both.

Take a look at my limited notes:

I do appreciate a good, mildly-neurotic narrator.

I absolutely love this snarky, secretly-insecure narrative voice.

Just keeps getting drenched in gentlemanly insidiousness. I love the narrative voice, but despise the narrator. Okay, who am I kidding? I love the narrator, though I should despise him.

What's so grimly beautiful about this book is the progression one sees in Nikonor's revelations. The old analogy of peeling onions is apt. One could be moved to tears by the recognition of the narrator's growing (or is it just more and more obvious?) psychosis. And it stinks and stings, but you just can't help but keep digging deeper, like you're some kind of OCD psychiatrist who has to see what makes this man tick.

Or you just have a morbid curiosity. Okay, let's face it, it's the latter. We can't wait to see the ultimate end to this oncoming train wreck. We have to stay till the end. We are, as they say, "completists".

Along the road (strewn with bodies in our wake), we get some deliciously devious and understated gems, such as this:

I have long been in the habit of cooking for myself, which is useful when one lives in autarky. This way, I am not forced to depend on a sullen, nosy, or preachy cook. Marie came back to work for me for a few months after my mother moved to Creuse (three or four years after my father's death), but I must admit that the co-habitation did not proceed smoothly. Age had embittered her; she muttered constantly under her breath and had to be handled with kid gloves. She talked endlessly about Anastasie in the most outrageously hagiographic terms, and had the further audacity to ask me completely inappropriate questions about old Legrandin (I wonder if she hadn't carried something of a torch for him in her youth) and, in the evenings, after dinner, she had acquired the habit of wandering morosely - and suspiciously - down to the fishpond.

Claiming that I was spending more and more time in Paris, I eventually dismissed her completely, sweetening the deal with a goodly sum to ensure her a comfortable retirement (and assure me of her eternal gratitude). Thus we parted on the very best of terms; I even went so far as to accompany her to the train station in Ussel. Just as she was climbing with astonishing agility into her compartment, I surprised her with one last parting gift: a packet of the dried parasol mushrooms she loved so much.

And so Marie returned to her native Indre, and I never heard anything of her again (I must also admit that I have never been in the habit of following the obituaries in the various regional newspapers too closely).

And so it goes. On and on in a similar vein until things really come to a head and the plot resolves.

But, really, the plot is just a side issue. I can take it or leave it.

I love how Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze turns the banal into the fantastical, but without any truly outre methodology. Perhaps this is reflective of the psychoactive qualities of some mushrooms. Common fungus, really, until you eat one. It reminds me of Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Irreality a bit, or Roland Topor's The Tenant, but with a more gentlemanly approach (I use the term very loosely). Dousteyssier-Khoze nudges the imagination, just barely, but it's enough to push the reader into phantasmagoria, even without such things explicitly appearing on the page.

It just seems appropriate that the push into morbid fantasy would not take place via ink on the paper of the book, but in the reader's head.

Which might say something about the reader.



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