An impressive first foray into the realm of dark fantasy.
For Aiden Haunt, being born is a matter of life or death in this fantasy tale.
In Knight’s richly envisioned debut, middle-aged couple Marigold and Jeff, and their gestating child, Aiden, travel through a strange world: an alternate level of existence that operates as an anteroom before birth and after death. The Inner Landscape is hardly a place of comfort; indeed, it’s more confounding, cutthroat and violent than the inner-city Paterson, N.J., public school where Jeff teaches. Here, sentient babies grow on trees, and resident archetypes, including Instinct, Imagination, Logic, Love and Purpose, swear, put on disguises, and battle both the visiting humans and one another. Good and evil beings identify themselves clearly in the outer world, but not in this stark inner realm fraught with ambiguity; sometimes Instinct seems friendly, or perhaps Imagination is, or maybe both will eventually lead the humans astray. Aiden may or may not be symbolic of the salvation of a steeply declining world, and God may or may not be sitting behind the door in Purpose’s castle. Some of these beings want to prevent the child’s birth at any cost, and even Aiden himself is disinclined to go through with it. Meanwhile, his fate unspools in scenes of full-throttle, fever-pitch action reminiscent of those in a graphic novel. (Fittingly, a deftly rendered graphic version of the tale is available at thedarknessofthewomb.com.) The book’s own illustrations, by four artists, capture the tale’s darkness in wildly varying styles, including a charming, apparently hand-drawn map of the Inner Landscape that brings to mind J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Knight, a public school teacher, crafts a tightly structured narrative with an intelligence that transcends its occasional hiccups in word choice (“lied” for “lay”; “feinted” for “fainted”; “effected” for “affected”). He also wisely leaves some key questions unanswered, and some ambiguities unresolved: Why these parents? Why Aiden? Who created the archetypes and the Inner Landscape? Why are their language and behavior so crude and vicious? Indeed, the tale is like life itself: messy, painful and chaotic, yet laced with love and compassion.
An impressive first foray into the realm of dark fantasy.Pub Date: June 16, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 225
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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