Good Writing, Everywhere

There’s so much good writing going on that I need to talk about it.

A new story is up at Necessary Fiction—The Moon is a Star, by Peter Markus. I’m not going to describe it lest I detract from the goodness.

Then, there’s the Wigleaf Top 50.

Also, there’s a lot going on at DOGZPLOT. In a previous post, Matt mentioned Elizabeth Ellen’s I Will Fuck You Like a Fat Girl. At a meeting last week, we continued to wax poetic about the excellent nature of that story. So filthy gorgeous. I can’t hardly stand it.

There are fantastic issues of decomP and Word Riot. And if I may be so humble, PANK.

Via mail, this week, I got two books–Sam Pink’s I am going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat it and Matt Bell’s The Collectors.

In terms of Pink’s book, I don’t think I’m the ideal audience BUT having said that, I was still able to appreciate it. I read an interview with Pink that called him a romantic and after reading the book, I would have to agree, strangely enough. Some of the prose poems (?) and short stories were so brutal and beautiful, they gave me serious pause. And there were several times I laughed out loud which doesn’t happen often. I am hard to please.   I loved the Spartan quality of the language and the obsession with physiology. The prose felt relentless, and predatory.

This book is one of those books that challenges you. I know lots of people read stuff like this and just smile and shuffle along and say, of course its literature so that they don’t seem old-fashioned and unhip. I will openly admit that at first, I really struggled with some of the pieces because I thought, seriously? This is publishable writing? But then I put my inner bitch (not all that inner, really) in check and decided to open my mind and it was only after reading the entire book that I was able to say, holy shit, this is some really good writing. So, lesson learned.

Matt Bell is a contributor to Pank No. 4, coming out in January 2010. This has nothing to do with that. After reading The Collector’s, I’ve decided that I hate Matt Bell. I know that writers are supposed to be supportive of other writers, but whatever. I’m keeping it real. I first got hip to his talent when I read An Index of How Our Family Was Killed. At that time, I began to develop a mild dislike that I further nurtured by reading some of his other stuff.

Now, this guy has gone and written one of the most amazing things I’ve read in a very long time. I read The Collector’s twice last night, it was so good. I’m going to read it again today. Then, I will contemplate fatwa. When I read the description, while awaiting my copy, I thought, okay, Grey Gardens, with brothers instead of a mother and daughter. I love movies. My natural instinct is to make comparisons between anything and a movie. This has nothing to do with that.

The Collector’s, much like Pink’s book, is relentless. The way the story is told creates such an aura of claustrophobia that you are in that house trapped in the detritus of those lives. You can feel the slick surfaces and the humid stench. You can hear the scurrying of creatures, the floors groaning beneath the weight of things seen and unseen.   In the mid 20th centur, a guy name Hans Laube developed a system that would release odors while a movie was playing called Smell-O-Vision. It never took off, but it was a grand idea, the idea that you could add an extra dimension to the movie going experience by associating visual images with certain smells. While reading both of these books, I thought about Smell-O-Vision, because using words, both writers were able to add that extra dimension to the reading experience.

The Collector’s was heartbreaking and heartwarming. To think of these two brothers, living in their own world, one trapped by his body, both trapped by their minds, and the ways they cared for one another, surrounded by a bewildering inventory of things. I don’t want to give too much of the story away but the most painful and beautiful part of the story is the aftermath, when we, as readers, are forced to witness a sort of betrayal as strangers breach the perimeter of their home and excavate their things and their bodies and their secrets and then take it all way.