The Wilhelm Scream, by Jeremy Behreandt (A Review by Sean Ulman)

Plumberries Press

$5

Jeremy Behreandt’s prose chapbook “The Wilhelm Scream,” an elegant set of ten tarot-sized cards, clasped in a tattooed tissue and tucked in a textured envelope that could very well contain an urgent ancient telegram, is aware of itself.

The story concerns three brothers who “circle the abyss like wolves,” prior to each’s maundering or marauding claims for the city throne. The first brother seems the forerunner for he “makes love like a viper” and the description of his power, “best rendered as a slithering shadow unhinging its jaw on a fabrege egg,” provides a metaphor for usurpation as well as strengthening his symbolic comparison to a snake.

Imaginative anecdotes, like energizing antidotes, though the language channels surge and buzz throughout, branch off the brothers’ tree. The horse doctor’s daughter is poisoned at a wedding and then later,in the 2nd edition, will lose her legs to a giant ant. There’s a belle and an investment banker and

at the heart of the labyrinth within the mountain, accessible only through an underwater cave, the last fighter pilot of the great war plays with spent rounds on a chess board against death… An ex-cavalry man fills his pipe. he will lose his arm to a bear trap; his left eye in a brawl.

The point of view provides a joint foundation on the first card, “we no longer agree on the brief anecdote of our city in chapter 3,”- and is well-supported throughout the deck, “we are each the same face,” “his horse takes fright, we take fright with her… the horse throbs with our sorrowful hands.” The narrator is telling a group’s story, and readers may take pleasure, as this one did, in associating with that voice ‘we, our’, playing at the reflective game of having a part in telling the same story one is being told.

While reading my favorite card (#8) the tricks Behreandt played in terms of series or list sentence structure trumped my elevated expectations engineered by previous sharp word-wielding. Ambrosial foliage is followed by Greece , rinsed with rivers, compared to art.

Acacia, hazel, willow, poplar, boxthorn, olive… boeotia, euboea, phocis, locis, athens, argos… the folio, recto and duodecimo of leviathans… Rappahannock, Danube, nile, niagra… the drawings of Vesalius, etchings of goya, the dancers of toulouse-latrec.

The card set either references itself over and over- various chapters, drafts, editions, footnotes, subtitles- or some other larger text, and this clue-rife scavenger hunt proved felicitous and open-ended, as it greases the author’s slides along the narrative’s expanding timeline.

Allusions to time travel: the underwater cave above, “a delorean daggering through to the hearth,” and the prophetic:”the clock no longer counts into the hideous, days pass through an hour”; “if the langoliers dismantle a space time no longer occupies, then who resembles space on the other side before we arrive,” steady the author’s intended slips in tenses, which he slyly comments on within the text- “in a discarded draft of chapter 12, deemed unfit to publish, wedged between a dream sequence, a story within a story, foreshadowing and a flashback, a terrified dan akroyd lifts away the curtain from the window.”

One might wonder how did Dan Akroyd enter into this polished microcosmic lens on the artwork’s structure? Other appearances of actors (Michael J Fox, Jean Claude Van Damme) or films (“Carrie”; “Misery,”) seemed interruptive strays from a world where “zeppelins float like paper lanterns down a slate black sky,” or “the fig trees in the orchard have cast untimely figs, shaken by the wind,” or the 3rd brother “orders the treasury to scratch his visage from the coin… commands orphans to whisk three eggs in a glass bowl.”

I chose to read for language enrichment, but I sense consistency hints are embedded for plot puzzle chasers.

“The delorean” links Fox to Marty McFly. Stephen King is referenced along with at least three of his projects…Yeah, I bet all those consistency cables have been drawn taut.

 

Sean Ulman, worder birder baller server, is writing a long novel about Seward Alaska and Art. sean-ulman.tumblr.com