Godhusk: Rebirth by PlastibooMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What is it about genre-shattering books that turns my crank so? Maybe because my expectations are torn apart and rebuilt into something bigger and better than I could have imagined before reading the work? Perhaps it's the hope that something new and radical is being born? Or maybe I just like to think I'm an iconoclast, even if I'm just a metalhead nerd with a nostalgic streak a mile wide?
So many questions. And that is what I find so intriguing about Plastiboo's Godhusk: Rebirth. It raises more questions than it answers, offers peeks into an organic (actually, only to a limited extent) world that seems to have a life of its own. Because of this dimly-lit cavernous world full of ruin and broken ambitions, the tone is existentialist in the extreme. When someone decides to speak plainly, it is in a dark, contemplative tone that simply questions, then questions the questions, then questions where the questions arose in the first place. And where exactly was/is that place, and in whom?
In its bones, this is a book, an incomplete manual of sorts, of a video game that never was. Nor do I think it ever could be. And this is what drives the imagination into deeper dives. The book is a gateway, a smudged portal, into another world. But really, it offers peeks into one's own ideas of being and unbeing. Its dusky beauty makes the journey all the more immersive for the reader/philosopher/explorer/dreamer/dying soul. It is easy to get caught in its gloomy maze.
And yet, for all its darkness, it is at time emotionally moving. Mother creatures care for their babies. Some denizens even offer kindly help to the wanderer, who is most often beset by enemies at every turn. And through all the fear and ominous danger, there can sometimes be a twisted, damaged, barely-recognizable-as-such Hope. Even an apotheosis. Or several apotheoses. This is a work not to be read, but to be coated in, encrusted with, worn. Find comfort in the uncomfortable. Hope in the hopeless. God in the despair.
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