Whichever you choose, and my moods will differ from day to day, there are treasured moments of anxiety and poignant regret here in this work and retrocausality, and a cutting off of yourself, a self that should keep alongside the horror instead of returning to, say, your dying mother. Take a camera, stare at photographs, hold them properly to see what is pictured, and do not depend on digital but analog, even though you are now a Cloud Architect for IT.

This is a long rambling but structured journey of classic horror Lovecraftian-tending, page-turning, with a Colour out of Space in Siobhan Carroll’s DUST BOWL, but now an area of America, that is either your bag to travel with or it’s not. “Sometimes there wasn’t even enough town to land on the map.” IT’S ALL THE SAME ROAD IN THE END by BRIAN HODGE Horrific and disturbing, with no redemption – as UNDER THE VOLCANO or in the shadow of Trump Tower.

And leads to a madness of stalking that reminds me of the Consul stalking drinks in UNDER THE VOLCANO that I also just finished reviewing!Īnd the inverse hawling or dreamcatching of the gestalt at the end of this substantive work, where body parts are placed this way and that on the cobblestones. This Straub starts with the smell of words, a Gass of words, and I cannot do justice how this is accomplished, conjured as bubbles as well as, inferentially, as dustmotes of meaning. I finished my review of that very GASS yesterday! It also reminds me of William H Gass’s work, where Trump is on every old page of the written past (as he is, as an synaesthesic serialist, in this STRAUB, somehow) and Gass’s ON BEING BLUE, a sensory listing of words and their Siobhan Carroll duststorm of meanings, colours, smells, with a heart of darkness as well as, paradoxically, of colour and fragrance. It is essential reading for those who enjoy either experimental fiction or the conservative horror genre – or both, as this eminently is.

This is an amazing work of fiction straight from the function as well as dysfunction fiction room ( where I shall now put it.).

Significant that a killing blade cuts into “blue broadcloth shirt” much later in this text. “-turns out, words are blue collar guys.” Either he was a dark, disturbing criminal sociopath who wore a more conventional person around him like a perfectly fitted suit of clothing, or he was a conventional person who within himself concealed a being like a wild animal.” “Tilly Hayward was one of those men in possession of two lives. THE PROCESS IS A PROCESS ALL ITS OWN by PETER STRAUB

The best horror of the year volume 11