Speculative fiction: August's best-written recent release
Read the opening pages from our pick below ^ Plus Part 38 of The Demon Inside David Lynch
Note: Substack’s discount feature has allowed us to drop the rate for new annual paid subscriptions to $20 or equivalent.
In today’s issue:
— ‘A slow mist unfurls to reveal crooked homesteads in its folds, waiting to be shed in a purging between orbs of fire and a fog that will blind the fishermen, that will catch them in their own nets while the sea’s creatures buck against the holes in the boats, sharing one eye, as their wives lose their bottom halves in fevered dreams’: the opening pages of the most stylishly written recent release in speculative fiction.
If you’d like us to consider your own recent release or a work you’ve serialised on Substack, sign up for a paid subscription at the reduced rate above and email a copy of your book to auraist@substack.com. Paid subscribers can also pitch us ideas for articles on prose style, and if we commission yours we’ll pay at industry rates.
A paid subscription also gives readers access to our full archive, including exclusive masterclasses on prose style. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for getting behind Auraist and helping to support fine writing and writers.
You can also join the 19k discerning readers who’ve followed us or subscribed for free access. Please note, though, that after two weeks posts are only available to paid subscribers.
— ‘there was something nicely ambitious and maverick about providing global end-times salvation within a protective bubble of nothingness mystically formed by the ultra-mince of a telly drama.’: Part 38 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.
— Do you know a valid (non-circular) justification for the existence of the self, as that term is normally understood?
If so, send that proof to the above email and if your proof is indeed non-circular we’ll publish it and send you a complimentary lifetime paid subscription to Auraist.
Most answers so far have been a variation on ‘If I hurt myself then you don’t feel any pain’, circular because it assumes the very thing, the ‘I’ that hurts, that it’s trying to prove. Thaddeus Thomas’ prizewinning entry isn’t circular, but his understanding of self is fairly unusual (which is not to say inaccurate).
There is a point to this challenge, by the way, and how difficult it proves, which we’ll get to soon.
If you don’t fancy spending your free time proving that you exist, you can always use it to browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
We seem to be the only publication set up to both champion beautiful prose and to question our readers’ existence, so if you support what we’re doing perhaps you could hit the like button, recommend Auraist on Substack, or restack or share this post today. If you do restack/share it, we’ll send you a complimentary six-month paid subscription (if you share it outside Substack just email the relevant link).
SPECULATIVE FICTION RELEASES CONSIDERED
The Ministry of Time Kaliane Bradley
The Dark Court Vyvyan Evans
The Physics of Sorrow Georgi Gospodinov
The Silverblood Promise James Logan
Heavenbreaker Sara Wolf
You Like It Darker Stephen King
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying Django Wexler
Mirrored Heavens Rebecca Roanhorse
The Stardust Grail Yume Kitasei
Tomorrowing Terry Bisson
The Mark Fríða Isberg
Horror Movie Paul Tremblay
The Gilded Crown Marianne Gordon
Briefly Very Beautiful Roz Dineen
The Sky on Fire Jenn Lyons
The West Passage Jared Pechaček
The Bright Sword Lev Grossman
Curandera Irenosen Okojie
The Lost Story Meg Shaffer
Toward Eternity Anton Hur
The best-written of these is
One
Gethsemane, Cabo Verde, West Africa, seventeenth century
All pregnant, five of us glimmer on the snaky path towards the low cacophony of the humming creek. Dusky goddesses breached through buried carcasses. We hear gifts turning in the ground’s crevices. Barefoot, we sing to Oni, clutching one bone each. Lengthy red beads knock against our chests, the insides of rounded stomachs jostle with the rhythm of parched entities. White markings on our foreheads fade to confuse the forest’s traffic. Inky trickles slither from our braided crowns down craned necks. Our nipples are pert against the morning. Behind us, the mountains of Gethsemane loom. A slow mist unfurls to reveal crooked homesteads in its folds, waiting to be shed in a purging between orbs of fire and a fog that will blind the fishermen, that will catch them in their own nets while the sea’s creatures buck against the holes in the boats, sharing one eye, as their wives lose their bottom halves in fevered dreams. We sing. The mountains, bruised and magisterial in their morning stupor, absorb our voices, sprawling peaks and troughs dimpled with dew. White cloths wrapped around our waists feel loose on sweat-glazed skin, rustling against our thighs. The hems trailing behind us are pale, movable dawns. We ask our reflections to wait patiently for us in the water, tell floating lilies to be soft landing pads for a small reckoning. We ask the light bending to allow our internal bleeding to leak through our nipples into its axis points. We call Oni to build the golden arch marked with her fingerprints so traces of peyote beneath our tongues will know their inheritance. We dance. We chant, hollering abandons our mouths to chase a fleet-footed spirit marking areas for reinventions between trembling trees. At the bank, we scoop translucent sap from conspiratorial trees. The sky is starting to blush blue. The creek’s seductive language threatens to break liquid confines. We call Oni by her name, walk into the water. Form a ring. The water rises, its cold temperature cocooning weeds grazing our feet in the murky depths below. We raise our heads to the heavens as the sky rattles, just as one of us confesses to carrying a foetus that fell from a mountain. .
.
One by one we speak. One of us proclaims she has been plagued by locusts wielding a strain of fever, scuttling through her bloodstream. Hundreds of them gathering in her stomach, digging thin, sharp legs into the lining. Their fluttering ringing so loudly she can hear it while she breathes, as they scale her insides desperate for an exit. Another has had a stained black burial lace dress curling and twitching on a bough, trying to claim her organs to build its own body. Causing her to wake some mornings seeing her gauzy organs inching their way towards the dawn: a retracting lung following a misshapen heart trailing a shrunken kidney, while the dress creases in anticipation, her stomach full of a winding lace horizon.
Another is pregnant with a mermaid’s bright orange tail; flapping, bending, pulsing in her womb, scattering shimmering scales until her tongue is stained silver.
I do not confess. The amalgamation of a hundred hatchings ring in my bloodstream as it heats. Spots of gold appear in my peripheral vision. An echo with the stealth of smoke passes through my eardrums. The gaps between the trees have cloud instruments fragmenting. The volume of our voices increases. Our reflections lose their fingers in branches. Clusters of purple geraniums sprout on their backs from a future spring. We hold our bones up to the sky. Grooves appear on the bank. A gutting of earth as the forest’s creatures quiver, while the golden arch appears.
Oni has kept her promise. We emerge from the water, dripping rivulets onto the bank. My nipples leak blood. There is a deafening sound in my ears, a roar of such magnitude, I wonder if the others are experiencing it too.
We circle the arch; lie in birthing positions raising our knees up. We give birth.
The others place their birthed offerings to Oni in the arch. I do not.
Confused, the women turn away from me to watch the offerings rupture.
I hold Oni’s gift to me tenderly. It is another face like mine. Baby.
I turn my back, drunk with this knowledge, as though I found a silver coin in a dragon fruit. I do not ask Oni how a woman can give birth to herself.
The face begins to flicker, Baby’s limbs seem fragile in my grasp. Her small perfect fist grips mine in an unspoken promise. Letting go, I pick up my bone; white and hollowed.
I break free from the pack.
The sound of a newborn thunders in my ears.
I leave my baby behind. Her piercing scream rings through the air like a thousand clarion calls losing their heads in a treacherous womb. My puckered, bloodied nipple turns towards her waiting new mouth, slick and shrill in its sweetness, its divinity. Born in love, stamped as weapon by a mother’s disappearing shadow. Already commanding the heavens to change fates, we are bound by this second joining then separated. Bone, dense and changeable in my hand, acting as a compass. Pain emanates from my core. There will be punishments to come. I stifle the screaming inside me that is my child’s voice infiltrating my tongue.
Running, I press the bone against a shard of light.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
Photo of Prince Andrew by Thorne1983
Manage Mother’s Poison
At work the following night, César’s first shift back since his knees went, we didn’t meditate or pray but we did play crazy golf and drop some ALD-52.
An early suggestion brought on by the drug and the starlit and One-lit golf was to stop using words such as garbage and trash and to think instead in terms of ‘shoddiness’, with quotemarks to indicate that the series’ shoddiness is deliberate. It was less of a value judgement, we agreed, and so might allow us to better enter Lynch’s headspace as he wrote and filmed The One. ‘I hate slick and pretty things,’ he’d once admitted. ‘I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises—they’re like little flowers.’
And César asked me not to disrespect my former higher power as Dr Evil or a grotesque wanky hatred-filled boomer hermit and to call him Mr Lynch instead, to call the series The Return rather than The One, and to please take him soon to his first AA, GA and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. After running a few GA Steps through my head, I agreed to these requests.
I shared that some commentators had claimed the series was determined to make the cultists feel they were re-experiencing the range of what they might go through on an average day, states like boredom, confusion, despair, incoherence, hatred of old hags, hatred of standoffish young bitches, respect for the bravery of rapists because they disrupted the thing so much, the sense that you’re a divinity amidst degenerates, pondering if chevrons floating above slot machines are trustworthy, and so on.
People who argued Mr Lynch no longer cared about audience reception were dead wrong, these commentators said, as the show badly wants to troll its core audience, to sucker them into defending the relevance of the above kind of 4channishness, into numerous other defences of the clearly indefensible, and into providing entertainment for everybody else with desperate overthinkings of stuff like the sweeping of floors. The show was uniquely tedious onscreen, but not so the offscreen action from Mr Lynch’s cult, and the show’s relationship to its audience, if highly antagonistic, at times seemed so fundamental to its overall project that it might be necessary to define that project as the onscreen action plus the audience response.
It wasn’t easy for César to concede these points, I could tell, but he did so after I got confused about which of these ten balls before me were hallucinations or real, and sclaffed my third-hole tap-in.
Following on from these points was the part Mr Lynch’s interest in Eastern practice and philosophy may have played in The Return’s ‘shoddiness’, specifically their focus on escaping personal narrative, the stories we tell ourselves to maintain the illusion of individuality (what was the Transcendental Meditation Mr Lynch so valued but the ending of personal narrative?), and with wakening from the dream of narrative and time into the actuality of the eternal present. If it turned out that Mr Lynch had attempted a project that audacious, a full-on attack on narrative and the illusions it creates, then he certainly deserved credit for his bravery. The ALD-52 was now working its magic.
So Mr Lynch’s cult, I shared as César putted, weren’t meant to respond to the show with appreciation and gratitude. These implied a handing over of some kind, a gift from the artist to the audience, and The Return was never any kind of gift. Instead it was all about stripping everything away.
I now shared more speculations, with no idea that a couple of nights later they would prove oddly prescient.
Ella’s Advaita Vedanta has a term neti neti, I shared, the nearest translation of which is not this, not that. It’s one of the primary tools employed in this school of Hinduism to help people strip away denial and other illusions and attain a nirvana that makes the world’s ups and downs irrelevant. And nirvana means snuffed out, annihilation, terminal desolation, in the best possible sense. Lights snuffed out, darkness, no-world, void, like the final moments of The Return after Carrie/Laura’s scream. Hence the need for neti neti to strip everything away, the illusions of purpose, coherence, resolution, beauty, significance, decency, basic interest and engagement, love, good versus bad, value in general, separation, time, space, any and all concepts and categories, language itself, the world itself, existence itself, the lot. For some people, this process could be nearly as harrowing, Ella told me, as hour after hour of Season 3.
So in Mr Lynch’s eyes, I shared, the series may have been an attempt to strip everything from the viewer, the viewer’s illusions, as he saw them, to slap them into the terminal desolation so valued in Eastern practice, that blastedness, bereftness, nothingness, no-thing-ness, silence, void that might be our only true refuge, our only home, as the world we know comes to an end.
And there was something nicely ambitious and maverick about providing global end-times salvation within a protective bubble of nothingness mystically formed by the ultra-mince of a telly drama. It had been the least enjoyable watch of my life, there was no denying that, but if some guru told you to meditate for eighteen hours in a cave populated by rats and bats, and snakes and scorpions and tarantulas, plus maybe Abascal, Gove, Ron Jeremy and Prince Andrew circling you as a naked Morris dancing team, you might not find that too enjoyable either. The guru may still prove to be on the side of the angels, though, if—big if—you come out of the dancers’ cave with all your denials stripped away and ready as you’ll ever be to face armageddon.
But considering the cost in audience enjoyment, was The Return’s ‘shoddiness’ worth it? If so many people found the series so minging, could even the best explanations justify this? Which was to say nothing of the possibility that Mr Lynch might also have lost his artistic touch and the show is full of not ‘shoddiness’ or just plain shoddiness, i.e. just plain garbage, but both. That was always the danger with ‘shoddiness’. To make it work in any honourable way you really needed to be at peak form, whereas charlatans who knew they’d made garbage could always claim it was deliberate.
‘As in Tommy Wiseau and The Room,’ César shared.
I smiled at our restored psychic bond.
Although the judgement was made well before The Return aired, The Room is famously ‘The Citizen Kane of bad movies’. The two works are curiously similar in a number of ways, if not in their scale. Notoriously poor acting, ridiculous amounts of dead air, awful dialogue, an edit that accentuates all of this, plotlines that lead nowhere, prolonged sex scenes, a risible ageing male lead with long dyed-black hair who implausibly attracts young women, other narcissism on the part of the writer-director-producer-star, and the cults devoted to their ridicule. So similar, in fact, that along with the works of Hieronymous Bosch, Jean Cocteau, Neil Breen, No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, Donnie Darko, Swan Lake, The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, the Arthurian legend of Sir Perceval, and many more, an additional source text for The Return may be the Citizen Kane of bad movies, although because it’s much shorter and isn’t sick or vicious or so unfunny you want to die, this text doesn’t have a honkingness pie you can see from space.
The honk did grow considerably, however, when its writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau claimed he’d made The Room as a so-bad-it’s-good sendup. It was this thought that led to the night’s final and most radical explanation for The Return’s boggingness.
A seemingly clever aspect of The Blair Witch Project is the ‘shoddy’ use of bad acting to augment the story. The performances are so amateurish they call into question the sincerity of the characters being played, which in turn drives the suspicion that they’re driving one another mad with headgames. It was as though the filmmakers realised beforehand that the acting would be shoddy and asked themselves how this might be used to advance the narrative.
And who knows, I shared, gesturing up at The One’s lettering with my putter, perhaps an equivalent decision was reached with this production. Mr Lynch and Mark Frost get fifty pages into writing the script together and find that it just isn’t happening. The story, characters and dialogue are pitiful and they know it.
We aren’t the craftsmen we used to be, they conclude. We’re both old men, after all, and half of our partnership keeps doing things with his fingers that make him look not just zany but sectionable. We haven’t worked together or had a TV drama aired in decades. This script sucking is hardly a shock. But we do want to get a series made, so might there be a way for the story to make use of our decline?
Taking The Blair Witch Project’s approach, then, they come up with the Experiment/Jowday/Mother as a transdimensional Big Bad so negative she infects everything.
The world of the series is presented as a place where everything appears somehow infected, the town of Twin Peaks, personal relationships, how ugly the US often looks, entire scenes tinted/tainted weird colours, eerie silences, and the like. Even among the series’ admirers there was agreement that the world of The Return as a whole and the Twin Peaks where Jowday lives in particular seem not just damaged but infected. Mr Lynch and Frost’s ploy is this: Yes, Jowday has tainted everything, not only the world and town of the series but the series itself. She taints the very portrayal of that world and town. The showrunners will manage mother’s poison.
In The Return misjudgement, incompetence and confusion are widespread, among the series’ characters and also its creative team. Rampant bumbling about on both sides of the camera. Almost everything is off in some way, not only in terms of content but also of technique. Cinematography, edits, and the music are poor, both deliberately and otherwise, the acting’s generally poor, deliberately and otherwise (Chrysta Bell is now perfectly cast), most aesthetic rules are broken or ignored since everything is tainted, including the actors, crew, the creators’ previous works, and sacred Twin Peaks moments such as Laura’s death. One of Mr Lynch’s central projects had long been Eastern-style non-duality and other erasure of boundaries, especially between content and technique.
‘And there does appear to be something totalising about the show,’ César shared on the final green. ‘It does feel like it coheres in content and technique, in its very taintedness.’ He knew we’d cracked the case.
I sank a long putt complicated by ALD-52 hallucinations, which were making the course extra-‘crazy’.
César squatted on the green, lifted his healed legs into the air and to my surprise began to do his upside-down dervish-whirl. Just on his scarred head this time, as he no longer had a bun. I watched him whoop there in his untilted cap, his Bottom Bag centrifuging away from his torso as he celebrated the discovery of the rationale behind his former Master’s dud.
‘We’ve come a long way, you and I,’ I shared, ‘since Wock‘n’ wewl.’
Even Mr Lynch himself is tainted, I continued as César whirled on. Allowing himself to be seen as an egomaniacal lech because this badly taints him—here Lynch has really taken one for the team. Jowday has tainted everything, even the men who dreamt her up, but in the process they may additionally have got a reprieve for their limitations as ageing craftsmen.
There was an impressive cleverness and elegance about this solution, a high-stakes gambit that was also pioneering. This explanation therefore accounted more persuasively than any other for The Return’s deliberate ‘shoddiness’, those defects so blatant and central they had to be part of the overall conception. The disappointment of so much of the audience, we agreed, was intentional. Jowday was allowed to taint not just the world and town of the series but their portrayal too, not just Twin Peaks but Twin Peaks.