[Coelacanth]

Hello all,

As the person that suggested Shipley wrote the piece for LitHub I wanted to post the entirety of it, unedited, for posterity.

There's absolutely no desire in me to go anywhere near the whizzing blue touch-paper of Land's politics, but in the wider sense of testing the boundaries of literature-that's-acceptable-to-read, I did think that the opening quote to Clarice Lispector's book from Bernard Berenson was startlingly apt:

"A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die"

Here's Shipley's recommendations:


6 Abstract Horror Novels

Having had the “abstract horror” label applied to my own work on numerus occasions, most recently to my latest novels Warewolff! and The Unyielding, I began thinking about the distinguishing features of this rather sparsely populated area of literature, about novels that embrace impenetrability, in subject matter and/or exposition, and by doing so unnerve, intimidate and dissect not only themselves and their characters but their readers as well. These works invariably offer a way in but no way out, and spend their time establishing an absence where we would otherwise expect to find a something, a tangible adversary. And the reason we do not escape from them is that, for all their variant weirdness, the underlying horror is just the simple fact of being alive in the first place. The holes they excavate are not only inimical to our sense of ourselves, but also immediately recognizable as integral to it, where the inscrutable functions as an affliction, as mortal antagonist and human inevitability. This is not, then, just the slightly tired notion of not revealing the monster, but more that the reader and the novel’s protagonists cannot work out what the monster could even be in order to accurately see or encounter it. The thing pursued is conceptually elusive, while at the same time resembling in many fundamental ways the life you already find yourself living. All these books, in all their different particulars, remind us of an inescapable paradox, remind us that, in the words of Clarice Lispector, “being alive is inhuman.” Below are some of my favourite examples.


1. Blake Butler, There Is No Year

There is a family and a house, but no sooner has the family been introduced, documenting in particular the father’s odd compulsions and nighttime voyeurisms, there is another family, a copy family, already there in the house waiting for them. These peculiar circumstances set the tone going forward, as we cannot help but wonder why it is that the discovered family are to be considered copies and not the family that discovers them pre-existing in their home. And ultimately it is from bizarre insecurities and contingencies such as this that Butler weaves the aberrant logic of this haunting family drama. For, while being wilfully and relentlessly experimental in its language, tones and arrangement, it never wavers in its steady accumulation of eerie specifics and the all too pedestrian details of family life: accounts of the son’s classroom experiences, the father’s commute to work, and phone calls to the realtor, etc. are seamlessly interspersed with a concatenation of lacunas, anomalous illnesses and sinister packages. Butler it seems is perennially mindful that for all the novel’s improbabilities, all its insidious layering of paranoid delusion and ominous light, it’s the slyly constructed everydayness of the horror that will allow these things, and indeed the novel as a whole, to leave their unnerving and indelible mark.


2. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials

We follow American artist, Kristen Alvanson, to Istanbul, where she has arranged to meet none other than Reza Negarestani, who though failing to arrive in person is discovered in kind when an arcane and puzzling manuscript turns up bearing his name. The manuscript, found in a dust-covered box under her hotel bed, is Cyclonopedia itself, and from here on in we follow Alvanson inside its involuted tangle page by mystifying page – and like her we do not emerge out the other side. Famed for its tortuous intricacies and deanthropomorphized brand of horror, this work of theory-fiction is a sui generis opus of various intellectual accretions, its subjects ranging from archaeology, esoterica and philosophy, to Islamic lore, geopolitics, and demonology, through the entirety of which runs the conscious entity of the Middle East. We are told that “the Middle East is the best place to go missing … the best place to get lost,” and Negarestani is surely one of the best possible guides, as he theorizes our disorientation into this snarling and magnificent network, this hole of the earth, this unctuous and tentacled nowhere we call home.


3. Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything

We arrive in Pontypool with Les Reardon, garbage truck driver cum drama coach, who is recovering (or not) from a bout of psychosis, and continue to arrive with a variant coterie of likewise damaged characters. “In the beginning was a virus,” or so we are told about halfway through the book, by which time we’re already fully immersed in its effects; but then for a virus thought by some to resemble déjà vu, this postponement feels shrewdly germane – as does the identified host of this incomprehensible infection, that may or may not exist, which is nothing less than language and memories and even reality itself. In sum, this adrenalized and fragmented take on the zombie apocalypse is a masterclass in how to coalesce the visceral and the nebulose, where nothing is stable and all the better for it, its many narrative derangements being pursued with a rare vigour and tenacity of style. As you might expect, Burgess’s zombies often defy expectation: they are prone to shouting and verbal mimicry, seemingly fascinated by alliteration and ethical quandaries, and their cannibalistic ferocity is mirrored by an equally self-destructive force, whereby the snapping of a victim’s neck invariably results in the assailant’s own neck being snapped. Articulate and witty, with imagery to bite the faces off your loved ones for, the end of humanity never looked so good.


4. Nick Land, Chasm: 89 Manifesto for an Abstract Literature (also see Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator)

Teeming with Lovecraftian refrains, Chasm is ostensibly a tale about five men on a boat (called appositely enough the Pythoness) tasked by the mysterious and indifferent QASM corporation with the disposal of an inscrutable object into the deepest extremity of the Mariana Trench; and while the boat they are in is scarcely more than an idea, and the object due for disposal in many senses a non-thing, a void, their eventual effects on the crew prove most deliriously and violently real. All that is established in this novel is absence, but an absence “that wants us to think about it,” and it is this thinking that unravels the crew and the reader alike. We watch on as the narrator, Symns, surrounded by enigmatic insanities and fevered aporias, becomes aware that there is no working it out, this nothing, only its working you out, and inside out – like the telekinetically inverted tennis balls he remembers from his youth. In addition to this narrative there is a 25-point appendix, titled Manifesto for an Abstract Literature, in which Land makes his case for abstraction with consummate flair, albeit a case already made, with atypical eloquence and persuasiveness, in the pages preceding it.


5. Dennis Cooper, Zac’s Haunted House

If, as Nick Land points out in his manifesto, “pictures are mistakes” when constructing a work of abstract horror, then my inclusion in this list of a novel made from nothing but a series of Gifs would seem to suggest I’d done so in error. However, the horror inculcated here is less in the images than in the movement between them, in the diegetic struggle, in all the unseen obscenities manufactured by the reader in an effort to make narrative sense from its fractured parts. The reader is immersed in a sprawling house in which the silly, the slapstick, the cute and the banal sit comfortably with endless children spewing blood, with decapitation after decapitation, with hands reaching inside bodies over and over again, with stabbings, with spontaneous combustions. It’s all equally cartoonish, all equally hideous. It says falling is just falling, liquid just liquid, collapse just collapse, fire just fire, death just death, we chop bread we chop humans: to be squeamish about one half is to miss out on the fun of what is, in Cooper’s world, inevitable anyway. Point being: the horror is not in the sameness or the difference, but in our futile yet inevitable attempts to assimilate them both into a meaningful whole.


6. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

G.H., an affluent sculptor, enters her maid’s room and does not return. Inside she encounters a cockroach that she subsequently crushes in a wardrobe door, and from this point on is utterly mesmerized by the expiring insect and the hell they share. It is G.H.’s realization of the fragility of the forms that exist around the formless (the roach’s carapace around its soft, white insides) that invite the horror in. Ultimately, it is not the reality of death that G.H. finds has been previously denied her, but that she is alive in the first place, and how this living is an infirmity, inescapable and fundamentally inhuman. And for once someone has the nerve to stay faithful to the enigma of these moments of crisis, to the “hell of living matter,” to the disenfranchising of the human being, the pale, twitching ugliness of life for once clearly and cruelly seen (as opposed to always being seen as and in relation to something else). The oozing miscreation at the nucleus of this novel is nothing other than life itself, taking its revenge and refusing to die. What more penetrating scope from your horror could you rationally anticipate?