Nemonymous
Grimscribe
DR. LOCRIAN'S ASYLUM
Just as its Prison is the avatar of the town where it was situated in 'The Frolic', the town in this story is defined by its Asylum. Arguably, this is a theme and variations on Poe's Tarr and Fether fiction, Mann's sanatorium (ostensibly a lung disease one) in the Magic Mountain and Aickman's 'Into the Wood', but here the text also radiates, 'exasperates', paradoxicalises madness as a positive through a Locrian who remembers his grandfather Locrian's views of the Asylum establishment that he ran, a building where faces could be seen at windows even after it became derelict, soon for such faces to become a diaspora into the top storeys of the town's buildings surrounding it, upon the Asylum's perhaps unwise demolishment as a sinister blot on the landscape. What is indeed unleashed, in tune with its puppets as stars and planets, and vice versa, has a power that presents a path, I feel, towards a preternaturally premonitory vision of Asylum-seekers or migrants from the "ashen rubble" of, say, Syria, almost an acceptance by this enticingly dark poetic sermon in the shape of fiction that there can no longer be an Asylum anywhere from Asylums, nor should there be. Another step along this dark prophet's path towards the present day.
"Day and night we became sleepless vagrants, strangers in our own town."
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
Just as its Prison is the avatar of the town where it was situated in 'The Frolic', the town in this story is defined by its Asylum. Arguably, this is a theme and variations on Poe's Tarr and Fether fiction, Mann's sanatorium (ostensibly a lung disease one) in the Magic Mountain and Aickman's 'Into the Wood', but here the text also radiates, 'exasperates', paradoxicalises madness as a positive through a Locrian who remembers his grandfather Locrian's views of the Asylum establishment that he ran, a building where faces could be seen at windows even after it became derelict, soon for such faces to become a diaspora into the top storeys of the town's buildings surrounding it, upon the Asylum's perhaps unwise demolishment as a sinister blot on the landscape. What is indeed unleashed, in tune with its puppets as stars and planets, and vice versa, has a power that presents a path, I feel, towards a preternaturally premonitory vision of Asylum-seekers or migrants from the "ashen rubble" of, say, Syria, almost an acceptance by this enticingly dark poetic sermon in the shape of fiction that there can no longer be an Asylum anywhere from Asylums, nor should there be. Another step along this dark prophet's path towards the present day.
"Day and night we became sleepless vagrants, strangers in our own town."
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)