SIDESHOW AND OTHER STORIES

[G. S. Carnivals]

I am finally the proud owner of number 192 of the chapbook. (I simply couldn't wait on those Durtro blokes any longer.)

[darrick]

well cool beans, G.S.C.

tell me how you like it. i read it all in one night last week. it was pretty powerful. subtle and grand as if the old master is settling into his stride. few ultra highs and few ultra lows, very even keel. i like how certain themes and words are interwoven throughout the book. Sideshow also felt more personal, and i liked that. although i do miss the more intense horrors of his earlier work (i'm sure you know which ones i mean).

D

p.s. i've just about finished scrawling NN everywhere on my body in black crayon. it looks good...

[Kevin]

I have copy #6 of the paperback version.

[Andrea Bonazzi]

Signed chapbook #337 is here!

[Nemonymous]

SIDESHOW, AND OTHER STORIES - Having reached the end of this ‘story’ and its nightmarish metafiction, I felt paranoiac and like a literary vampire, sucking on its words and depleting what I read, draining it like one of the lavatories in THE TOWN MANAGER. Anyway, this ‘story’ starts with a coffee shop where that previous story ended. All is indeed Show Business, ie. writing these critiques is Show Business, writing “dreamlike vignettes”(as this ‘story’ pejoratively describes as a certain form of story) and I suppose all our cavorting on the Internet here is Show Business, in this sense, too – but by championing the Intentional Fallacy this at least absolves any “autobiographical wretchedness” (as this story puts it).
This story – forgetting any pompous paranoia for a moment – is a wonderful ‘musical’ symphony of such self-ridiculing (?) “dreamlike vignettes”, with almost random (meaningless?) movement titles just like the Horses’ names used as a paperchase in one of the ‘vignettes’ .... touching on Global Warming and the Cern Experiment and Reincarnation as monstrous animals...
There was 'renting' in ‘Purity’, but now seeking a home one fears for its very homeliness!
Like the ‘Purity’ Ghost (cordless TV) and the ‘Town Manager’ lamp, the “stars themselves burn low with a dim flickering light.”
“Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.”
The reader here is his own self-important ‘sideshow’ – but that is another story!
Classic stuff.