The Lateness of the Hour
As promised, I’m finally FINALLY getting around to posting my review for Kyle Winkler’s Enter the Peerless (sorry, Kyle!). I’d meant to get to it much sooner.
Absences seem to define the American Midwest, vast stretches of flat land, crushed under all that sky. It’s a theme in John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester and is also present - in a more literalized sense - in Enter the Peerless.
But first: introductions.
Meet Elpenor, newly minted Craigslist detective.
Our hero.
He’s been hired by a trailer park’s nosy neighbor.
His job: to find out what's happened to 29 people who've entered the Peerless mobile home next door. Helping him are Don, a local knife enthusiast, and Hugh, the custodian for the Peerless itself. Once they figure out how to get in, they're transported to an alternate Earth, to the outskirts of a St. Louis as clean of people as if a neutron bomb had scoured them away.
It's this emptiness that stands out - the standard template of many a post-apocalyptic narrative that itself serves as a wish-fulfillment for people who believe modernity's too complex, and yearn for a return to a pre-modern simplicity. All 29 of the missing that Elpenor's been hired to find have been seduced by the idea of starting over, of having a clean slate. The promise of terra nullus all over again, 21st century edition.
This compulsion is familiar. The return to a pre-lapsarian moment before the original sin of modernity had not yet befallen humanity is an enduring fiction. As enduring as the yearning towards childhood because it was a time untroubled by obligations or responsibilities. Let go and let god - in this case, quite literally. But what happens when your god is petty? Vindictive? Perhaps this is a comfort to people who've confused starkness with simplicity, who prefer harsh truths because everyone just needs to grow up, and the quicker the better. Their conscience less Jiminy Cricket and more Dr. Phil. It feels resonant to our As-Seen-On-TV moment, our lives cheapened by exactly these types of fictions
The largest, howling absence is this emptied world’s petulant god. Fiascoal purports to rule over the competing cult-like communities, himself a not much more than an empty skin surrounding a yawning hunger for cruelty. Sadistic though he may be, however, he seems to need flesh and blood vessels as hosts. Promising them power and agency, he tends urge his hosts toward enacting his violent fantasies, only to renege whenever his hosts do anything Fiascoal doesn’t like. Oh, did I mention his hosts end up transformed into ten-speed bikes? Even in victory, he cant help but mock those fools who served as his vehicles.
Perhaps feeling that he could keep Fiascoal occupied, Elpenor agrees to let the demigod possess him for a stretch. That is, until Don - who has taken to the idea of creating cult-like community like a knife to the grindstone - decides he wants to cut a deal with Fiascoal.
There’s something tragic about Don falling for the scam because for all that he’s a bit of an asshole, there’s a certain blunt charm to him. It’s a bummer watching him become more of an antagonist, even more so when he decides to not be a part of Elpenor’s escape plan. He’s been lured by the promise of power, the chance to mold this world to something more to his liking.
As a result, Elpenor returns with only a handful of people. Not the 29 he was hired to bring back, not even close. But that’s a big reason why this review is so late in coming. Given our Present Moment, I wanted to let things play out to see if I could approach this with some distance. Fat chance. The reality is that I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what happens when people turn away from the world we live in, in favor of something else, something they’ve convinced themselves they need in return. Because at heart, the world we share here is cruel, is unjust, for all that we may work to keep those forces at bay. It’s insufficient, but it’s what we’ve got. Granted, many of the people who are lured to the other side have also been targets for the cruelty of our world. Angry that they have slipped through the cracks, they would prefer a place where all the pretense has been stripped away. I get it - cut through the bullshit, let the scales fall from their eyes, and so on - but also: what gets left out is that kindness, community, helping each other out when things go bad are all part of that “bullshit”. Instead, Fiascoal has encouraged (or at least hasn’t punished) factionalism and internecine conflict between the cult-like groups living under his tender ministrations.
It makes a sad sort of sense that the people entering the Peerless are turning away from whatever’s flawed about our world, but they’ve also decided to reject anything good as well. How do you reach such people? Can they recover? We’d all like to believe this to be true - and to be exceedingly clear this isn’t to say that such attempts shouldn’t be attempted. And like any noir detective worth their salt, Elpenor does his best.
Sometimes, that’s all one can do.
Short Story - Ojos Golositos
As promised, here’s the flash piece selected for Cursed Morsel’s zine (accompanying orders of Shaky Pictures of Vanished Faces by D. Matthew Urban). In Spanish, a “golosina” is a candy, so “ojos golositos” - a term of endearment in certain contexts - is meant to evoke eyes gleaming with sweetness just like a sugary candy. Enjoy!
Tatarabuelo Nicolás hadn't been much of a husband and even less of a parent due to his love of the bottle, but his death enshrined him in our family. Originally hired to cut cane, he was ordered to help in the Central's boiler. Drinking cheap rum wasn't much of a problem out in the fields. Inside, using a heavy pole to stir simmering cane juice while perched on a swaying catwalk, was a different story.
Minutes before the whistle sounded, he toppled over, head-first.
The Colossus ground to a halt for a week as they fished him out. The warm brown of his skin had been leached away, replaced by a ghastly white. Worse, as his family later found out, his corpse had been candied. Much to their horror, his funeral was interrupted when, like clouds darkening the sky, bees descended to swarm the casket.
The priest in attendance was said to have called upon the divine to smite them.
The last anyone saw of the priest were his black robes flapping in the distance as he attempted to fend off the swarm.
The rumors began immediately that Nicolás did not rest easy in his grave. His former co-workers talked in low whispers about a curse—at least whenever the boss had his back turned. It was the priest's fault. He should've performed the mass correctly. That they hadn't been at the funeral that day didn't stop them from believing this, of course.
Months after the accident, workers tasked with stirring the same vats that had claimed his life said they felt Nicolás behind them. One or two workers swore his cold, sticky hands had tried to push them in as well.
Years later, one of our distant cousins who'd moved to Connecticut for work came back with a story about an old spook. When children spooned sugar into their tea, they'd chant ojos golositos three times over their cups. If they'd done it right, they saw a ghastly figure instead of their own reflections - someone who looked like a sugar cube left out in the sun.
When asked, the children admitted that ojos golositos wasn't very scary. For one, he never did anything. He didn't even make their tea taste weird or gross. It was sad. They felt sorry for him.
It was as if our great-great-great-great-grandfather's ghost was pulled and pulled until, not content with haunting locally, he went global. Stretched as far as the sugar trade itself.
Until depreciation sets in, sugar stops making the Central money, and it's abandoned.
Now it's a heap of bricks and a smokestack about to fall over, and among the ruins the diminished ghost of Nicolás, of ojos golositos, walks alone.
One More Thing. . .
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And that’s all she wrote!