I’m nearly done with a new book. There’s maybe a week left in the first draft.
I started this thing the day after I submitted a manuscript to my agent, and I’ll finish it before that manuscript is sold to the traditional publishing industry.
If it’s sold.
This is the time scale of traditional publishing. I mentioned a variation of this exact story last month. It’s slow.
Don’t dream otherwise.
Here Be Leviathans by Chris Flynn
Reading Chris Flynn’s 2020 novel, Mammoth was a reminder of just how hemmed in most Australian fiction is. Trucking in movements more than linear plotting, Mammoth’s strength is its willingness to jump around, and the engine of the book is Flynn’s up-for-anything approach. It is — after all — a novel about a talking woolly mammoth skeleton. I loved it, but I think this follow-up collection of shorts is even better.
Only one story in Here Be Leviathans is told from the perspective of a human. This is the premise that ties the collection together. It works like this: in each story, Flynn pushes a strange idea so far that the reader stops questioning the logic of the scenario. You go layers deep, and in the best moments, all this groundwork is staging for a tender resolution.
Deeply weird — but insanely enjoyable — I felt things about fatherhood, for instance, while reading the opening story. Fair enough, except these feelings were produced by a story about a grizzly bear that eats teenagers in the forest. How did this happen? He does it again and again. By the end, it’s energising rather than confounding. It feels good to give yourself over to the point-of-view of a cruise ship, a hotel room and a space monkey. It’s a type of relief.
In my hands, this would have become post-humanism. I know myself well enough to know that I can never, ever, be allowed to do stuff like this because I will make something resolutely awful. The human body will quickly be a soulless meatbag if I take one step in this direction. But no, Chris resists this at every turn. Here, he uses the abstract and the inhuman to contrast life itself.
It’s fucking good.
Letting Out The Devils by Kelby Losack
One theme emerging from this newsletter is the difficulty of discovery. Not a big finding; everyone in books and writing knows this is the hard part. I’m shocked by my own winding stories of discovery. Part of the problem is that there’s no centralised corridor for book discovery that isn’t prone to regularly publishing unfiltered promo copy or full spectrum butthurt. No one wants to read that shit. Thus I go months without reading book reviews or publishing news.
But like every other author online, I’m now connected with very successful writers who re-feed their press clippings (no shade), and yet almost every press hook arrives with that same deep-seated feeling of, Does anyone even still read or listen to that outlet? I can’t remember the last time I was impressed with anything an author did or achieved in public, other than the book itself. But to get to that book? I feel like I’m just picking things out of a flat, undifferentiated mass. It’s random.
This is all preamble to the fact that Kelby Losack’s earlier novels have been on my Kindle for years and I’m only now getting to him. Letting Out The Devils is his 4th book (or thereabouts). An admirably slim 128 pages, it’s the story of a shop cashier circling the rim of crime and violence. As an Australian, I’m not at all literate in the everyday madness of Losack’s story world (or is it a harsh reality, pushed a little?), but his writing is so vivid and close, I landed in it hard. Bittersweet, weird and wry. He’s done the work here. It’s compelling.
Looking back through Losack’s biography, none of this should have been as much of a surprise as it is. He’s been chipping away at his writing for years, all from the margins of publishing. He works primarily with J David Osborne’s Broken River Books, something that now resembles an artist collective more than a publishing imprint. Think, the energy of a hip hop collective, layered over DIY publishing. It looks to be working, creating its own pathways of discovery. So Letting Out The Devils acts as a series of verses in a longer song, but it’s also that moment where you hear someone and think, Who is that guy? and look him up.
That’s all.
— IAIN
PS: Read my thoughts here and see how I live my life here.
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