Now, like any good book review, let's start by judging this book by its cover.
Created by local artist, Cherry Valance, the cover to this issue serves as a fitting gatekeeper to the chilling stories inside. The bleached cow skull, in tints of black and beige, is a Jacob Marley-esque door knocker: phantasmal, not so much hanging from the fragmentary backdrop, as it is emerging from it, eyeless sockets alive with a terrible, angry gaze. And then, those linear scratches begin to materialize as the eerie fragments and snatches of horror that they are. Look close, and glimpse unfinished stories in medias res, of 'her dead flesh' and "darkness" and "decay".
For a cover, it is rather eerie, and were I to awake tomorrow morning, locked in a vacant room with metal walls, with only this image on the wall to divert my imagination and growing panic, this would certainly be the hinge upon which my inevitable madness would turn. So... I presume that's a good thing...
In the Foreword to this issue, Moreland makes this note;
This is a rather accurate summation of this issue, although I would add that there is a twist of the fairy tale to this issue as well. This is most obvious in the "The Godmother's Curse," a new and zombified take on the well-known tale of Cinderella, but it is apparent in others as well, in magical gifts, in faults and flaws, and the moralizing punishments that follow in their wake.
Now, I've already written a lot here, and micro-reviewing each individual story will try most people's patience, I am sure, so I'll abbreviate my review under the headings of The Good (creepy, but not visually disturbing), The Bad (creepy, and visually disturbing), the Ugly (perhaps the most disturbing all around), and Honourable Mentions.
The winner of The Good is "Please I May Show You Something", by Patricia Russo. I find this story to be one of the most relatable in this collection. The protagonist is a creature of habit, submerged in routine. He rejects the external world around him, anything that may interfere with this routine, his focus centred on his office building, his eventual destination, and not the journey that will get him there. He is pulled from this obsession by a street urchin, an unemployed, uneducated street-teen with few prospects, who desires to show the protagonist something, something beautiful, something that he feels compelled to share.
The winner of The Bad is "The BugKill Woman", by Wol-vriey. This story waxes surreal, but remains disturbing from beginning to end. John has a problem. He is being followed, he is sure of it, by a cockroach. Irritating and paranoia-inspiring as he finds this, his attempts to eradicate this bug reveal that he is the victim of a far greater infestation than he at first suspected. What disturbed me the most was not the relatively graphic scenes of self-mutilation that this story depicts, but the calm and unaffected attitude that John maintains as his body is carved into and eaten away at. Wol-vriey will come to show you fear in a handful of orange sand.
The Winner of The Ugly is "Women Who Go Down in Fives", by Graham Tugwell. This story has a weird-horror, Lovecraftian/Barkerian feel to it. From the birthing scenes of deformed monstrosities, to the decrepifying sacrifice of the weak, yet again, the most disturbing aspect of this story has to be the easy acceptance that is used to addressed the horrific situation that these people find themselves in, when it seems that, being agents of this situation themselves, they could end it through simple inaction. Yet, however pained they seem to be by the situation's consequences, they cannot seem to imagine any alternative. It is one of those frustrating and painful stories that doesn't attempt to give a reason why. Things merely are; it is the way that things have always been and always will be, and perhaps for no good reason at all.
As for Honourable Mentions, I want to draw some attention to "Rocket Ville Marie", by Alexander Polkki, the excerpt from "Unlanguage", by Michael Cisco, and the poem "Dearly Beloved", by Mike Allen.
"Rocket Ville Marie" is a story of possibility, and the limitations of perspective. Sid, the possibly deranged, possibly only sane person in the world, is our narrator, who interprets people and events in a very singular manner, adding an unfamiliar fluidity to the meaning of the world. We can choose to reject these interpretations, or we can accept that perhaps the rules by which we govern and define our own realities are not at play in this one. It gives an interesting vitality to a one dimensional world, completely abolishing the limiting idea that every signifier relates to only one strict and particular signified. Sure, maybe the Ville Marie is just a building. Yes, that man rambling on the corner is at the mercy of his own mental afflictions. Of course, that earthquake the other day, despite being a geographic anomaly, was just a fluke. But what if they aren't? What if any number of our presuppositions are actually very, very wrong...
"Unlanguage" begins with a very interesting take on the use of prepositions, and their right to be a part of the English language. Just being an excerpt, it's hard to accurately gauge the context, but what Cisco's work, in part, seems to be doing is satirically railing against the constraints of typical language, and proposing a new, radical form of "unlanguage" to take its place, exemplified by the phrase, perhaps, that "the use of prepositions is the grammatical equivalent of sodomy". Although, having looked into another selection from this work (Near the bottom of this page) it appears that "unlanguage" is an infinite thing, and has always existed, and what Cisco is presenting us with is a primer on this autonomous language. Interspliced with these sections are pieces of surreal, interviews and first hand accounts, a focus on books, esoteric knowledge, and Lovecraftian descriptions of ancient technology and mind invasions. The excerpt has a rather experimental feel to it and, as Moreland himself describes in the accompanying interview with Cisco, a somewhat dissociative effect upon the reader.
"Dearly Beloved", the last work I'll comment on, is one of the rare examples of speculative poetry that I've come across. (There is plenty of speculative poetry out there, it has just remained outside of my line of sight for quite a long time.) Inspired by Italian painter Alessandro Bavari's series of grotesqueries, "Sodom and Gomorrah", Allen cultivates a chilling series of images, of people willingly and happily transmogrified. In this poem, they have gathered in rapture and celebration, dancing and warping their forms even further, revealing non-static bodies, while they wait with bated breath to see what greater forms may be birthed before their very eyes. It is interesting and logical that, in describing these new forms, Allen makes generous use of gender neutral pronouns, reminding us that we can't force our own labels on such an obscure world. It is a world that Allen has worked with before, in his "Twa Sisters" and "Still Life with Skull", so it will be interesting to see just how these works could flesh out this surreal poem even more.
Altogether, PstD 5 was a good read, that has left me with a list of other things to seek out: vague references and forbidden knowledge, and the like. While it did not leave me lying awake at night, clutching a crucifix and muttering what scraps of Biblical verse I would probably have to paraphrase, there were some rather disturbing scenes within these pages. If you are into horror fiction, this is a well put together and professional collection that I highly recommend.
