It's everything you never wanted to
hear or that perhaps you or somebody you knew suffered through,
whether from the human misery of this universe or a criminality
intruding from the supernatural.
-Essay I: The Myth of Falling
I've been known to mutter that one of
the best reasons to create art, to spin the patently unreal out of
vapors and dust, is to process the incongruities of reality. To
reflect and refract this perpetually shifting blob of experience into
something a bit more reasonable. But what do we do when the mechanism
of collection itself becomes twisted, when the funhouse mirrors begin
to buckle and shift like slow-pulled taffy, in unintended and
unreasonable directions. What, then, becomes of the product, the art?
I ask because I'm having a particularly
tough time reviewing this work in a coherent fashion. This product of
a woman whose work has always moved and often changed me. If you
don't know what I'm talking about, read Soma or Vectors.
Even if you do, read them again. But, due to an abominable
conglomeration of illnesses, I was sure I would not have the
opportunity to travel through her mind again.
What does that have to do with The Myth
of Falling? Nothing and everything, as the cliché goes. It is a
collection that is inseparable from Charlee herself. From a past
steeped in the types of things no one should have to even be aware
of, let alone experience. From a present mired in alien flesh and
misfiring nerves. The lens warped enough to show the fissures in the
firmament we try so hard to tell ourselves is solid.
This isn't something that can be dealt
with in the manner of most collections. There are stories here.
Tight, concise bits of prose that do more in three pages than most
writers can pull off in a series of thousand page novels. But there
are more of what I would tentatively call prose poems, though they
likely squirm their way free of that tidy cage. These beautiful and
terrifying and heroically horrific tangles of words that would writhe
and wrap and slink just out of the grasp of my feeble mind. Waves of
emotion and sensation that I had to read three or four times just to
begin to sense the outline of reason. Like walking on that putty you
can make with cornstarch. And don't be fooled when you catch that
“essay” epithet; those hold some of the slipperiest thoughts of
the book.
On several occasions, I was brought to
tears. On others, filled with elation. Quite a few times, I got angry
and frustrated while overextending myself grasping at a meaning I was
sure lurked just outside of my reach. Worse, all of these experiences
have blurred into each other so that I can barely distinguish what
pages brought about which emotion.
What that means for you, oh dear
reader, is that you will likely either consider this a work of genius
or absolute bullshit. I don't see any middle ground
on that. It certainly is not a book that will engender apathy.
Cover art: Nick Gucker's work on this
cover carried a rough texture that enhances the surreality of the
content. Playing off of the cultural context of the Fall from Grace,
using the simple guttural horror of nightmare to reflect this
dichotomy. It's interesting that the Hellscape is wrought entirely in
terms of flesh while the Heaven of the bed seems to use iconography
of the unfettered mind and spirit. But this is something that is
reflected in the torments present in the book, that what we see as
our salvation is often what dumps us into damnation. The limited
edition also contains an interior piece that further underscores this
line between hope and hidden reality that is quite effective.
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