Literary fiction: the best-written recent releases

Read the opening pages from our first pick below ^ Plus Aftermath of the Finale

Art by Patrick McConahay

In today’s issue

—’There he was, one and done, state of grace achieved in forty minutes. St. Augustine had said that drinking to excess was a mortal sin, but as the Church had not established a blood alcohol limit, Hal had decided that he had to confess only if he lost consciousness’: the opening pages of our first pick from recent releases in literary fiction.

—‘Millions of people that had never questioned the capability of any FBI Deputy Director to get erections, or sustain them to everyone’s gratification, stood outside their homes and wondered what was happening to their world’: Aftermath of the Finale, Part 24 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. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have continued to show this series.

You can also 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.

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LITERARY FICTION RECENT RELEASES

Books considered

This Is How You Remember It by Catherine Prasifka

Three Burials by Anders Lustgarten

All Fours by Miranda July 

Henry Henry by Allen Bratton

The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas

How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix

Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler

How to Read a Book by Monica Wood

Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

América del Norte by Nicolás Medina Mora

The Stolen Child by Ann Hood

The Body Farm by Abby Geni

A Question of Belonging by Hebe Uhart

The Lady Waiting by Magdalena Zyzak

Liquid, Fragile, Perishable by Carolyn Kuebler

Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski

The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

My First Book by Honor Levy

Swimming in Paris by Colombe Schneck

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn

Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli

Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg Sunny Gale by Jamie Lisa Forbes

The Man in the Banana Trees by Marguerite Sheffer

Our first pick is

ONE

At Jack’s flat, he let you smoke indoors. Hal went out for a fag anyway and saw that the sun had risen; there was warm spring light on him. He walked up the road against a perpetual flow of small children in embroidered jumpers and rounded collars, and got on a bus that would take him northwest across the Thames. The sun was on his right shoulder and his temple was on the window. He struggled to fix his eyes on the back of the man in front of him. His own stink hovered about him: skunky weed, spilled Pimm’s and gin, cigarettes smoked in a flat that had had a lot of cigarettes smoked in it before, the vile mix of sweat and deodorant that had congealed under his armpits and was soaking through his pale blue oxford shirt. Sensing he was about to feel very bad, he took his aviators off the neck of his shirt and put them on his face. The bus was passing across Vauxhall Bridge; the sun was in the scummy green water, making it look almost translucent, as if it were more water than filth. Literally the most fucking beautiful thing, he thought. Here I am in London in the twenty-first century, and there’s the Thames that was there when the first Duke of Lancaster was born, and there’s the long-lived sun.

He got off the bus in Kensington and went into St. Edward the Martyr’s just as the Wednesday morning Mass was beginning. He’d avoided Mass since Lent began because his father had been pleading for him to go. Hal liked to have fun, he liked not to suffer. It was just that he had decided when he left Jack’s flat that going to Mass would be better than going back in. There was something soothing, after a night of hard drinking, about reciting, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God …” Though his throat was sore, Hal’s voice was resonant, dominating the dozen others. At twenty-two, he was the youngest there by decades. He’d been avoiding glances so zealously that he hadn’t been able to tell whether any of the congregants were people he knew, but he thought they must have been. The back of his neck, and the damp stains on the back of his shirt, had the feeling of being looked at. The interior of the church was cool and airy, the sunlight bright but without heat, floating above the shadows that circled the nave. Still, an overfamiliar line of sweat dripped down the inward curve of his lower back. His mouth was dry, his lips were cracked and aching from being licked.

The priest who led the Mass was the particular confessor of Hal’s father. Father Dyer was an old man and had known Henry since he was young, Hal since he was baptized. He had known Hal’s mother. Hal was only third in the queue for Communion; Father Dyer looked him in the eye as he offered him the Body of Christ, which Hal took obediently. He was going to vomit—Oh God, not here …—oh, no, it had passed, he felt better … oh, no, there it was again. The vivid light coming through the stained glass in the chancel vibrated at the edges. He slurred, “And with your spirit,” when it was asked of him, and timed his exit so that he passed Father Dyer as he was shaking someone else’s hand. There he was, one and done, state of grace achieved in forty minutes. St. Augustine had said that drinking to excess was a mortal sin, but as the Church had not established a blood alcohol limit, Hal had decided that he had to confess only if he lost consciousness.

Bordering the south wall, shaded by two old lime trees and several taller, newer buildings, was a small graveyard. It had been opened some years before the Catholic cemeteries in Kensal Green and Leyton; most of the headstones were thin, leaning, illegible remnants. In a spot of sun, there was a small white marble grave marker so brightly new that it seemed unreal, as if there couldn’t really be a body underneath. The body belonged to Hal’s grandfather’s elder brother’s only son, whose name was Richard, and who had been born the same year as Hal’s father. He had died young, childless. Henry was the one who had buried Richard here. The previous dukes were interred side by side in St. Michael’s and All Souls in Lancaster, with the exception of the sixth duke, who had died of mysterious causes while imprisoned in the Tower of London. Hal felt he should pay his respects. If Richard hadn’t been such a degenerate, Hal’s father wouldn’t care nearly so much that Hal was too. It was like Oscar Wilde had said: to have one queer in the line of succession was a tragedy, to have two looked like there was something fucking wrong with your family. And, in fact, the Lancasters had had three: Hal’s great-great-grandfather had died in exile after going wrong with a Frenchman. Now Hal was son and heir, possessing nothing but a subsidiary title, an unignorable sense of his own preeminence, and a daily terror of this preeminence going unnoticed by everyone in the world except his father, who had rung him nine times back-to-back while he was at Mass.

It was fine, Hal had his phone on silent. He made the sign of the cross, prayed for Richard’s soul, and said a very genuine Our Father.

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"Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere..."

It’s London, 2014, and Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, is in a holding pattern: his mother is dead, his father is dying or remarrying or both, his siblings are fighting, his internship is pointless, and nobody will leave him alone. 

Everything is as it should be and yet nothing is right. Over the course of a year of partying, drinking, and flirting to dubious consequence, Hal is tested by brutal family legacies, Catholic guilt, and the terrifying possibility of being loved. All of which is complicated by a pattern of abuse that threatens to chase Hal into adulthood. The House of Lancaster will never be the same. 

Crackling with intelligence and wit, Henry Henry is a brilliant recasting of the Henriad in which Hal Lancaster is a queer protagonist for a new era. Allen Bratton arrives as a successor to Waugh and St. Aubyn with this lush, stylish novel of family, legacy, and what it means to be alive today.

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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.

Aftermath of the Finale

[Ella]

Through the September night there built a reborn sense of American self-worth. It felt like people could almost grasp this new feeling in their hands as it burst out of foamy waves crashing against abandoned fishing boats, as it floated through dynamos in power stations, through flames from workers’ blowtorches, through the showers of fire which came exploding off them into workers’ visors.

It was certainly felt by drivers of trucks as they watched headlights cut the dark ahead of them, the blackness above dotted with stars which twinkled more magickally than they had ever before. The tired faces of these drivers were somehow gleaming with pride even though they knew nothing at all of The Return, a cheerfulness which would stay within them until the last sip of Monster of the night, the last coil of cigarette smoke as it rose proudly from their lungs.

Across most nations of Planet Earth sentient fields white with starlight were dreaming of the most inspiring facts the show had shared, for example that all that is needed to stop fathers battering their daughters to death is a giant teapot which sounds a little like a dead popstar which will helpfully send you back in time to stop this father in his tracks. Millions of people that had never questioned the capability of any FBI Deputy Director to get erections, or sustain them to everyone’s gratification, stood outside their homes and wondered what was happening to their world. Alone or in groups of two or three they later went walking along the pavements and peered up into the sky for clues which might explain this new feeling in the air.

Here in Madrid troubled Andy’s troubled colleague César posted videos on Instagram of his face as it wept with euphoria at a finale party held in Embajadores where everyone there was white and over forty. As he butted his forehead in joy off balloons and disco lights. As he tried to slap a nearby fan into please stopping with the annoyingly euphoric squeals, and was then slapped back and a fight broke out which featured scratching of faces and pulling of each other’s buns. As he took hold of the waxed ends of his moustache and pulled hard and released a primal scream which eventually faded into mumbled difficult to understand insights about his mama. Men in their forties, fifties and sixties charged around the party with their arms out as though they were aeroplanes and then gathered in a circle to clap and cheer, firstly around César’s breakdancing to the whole of The Return’s original soundtrack, and then the impressive feat of whirling like a dervish performed upside-down atop his bun.

Other Return cultists posted videos reacting to the finale, videos in which their face switched from pain and bewilderment to pain and bewilderment as they tried to become something else, anything else, and then at last to a biblical-conversion face with wide eyes and wide mouth which meant the fan could get more stims into him and glory in the finale’s unprecedented and unarguable genius.

Clips were posted of the pained and then impressed and then full of joy faces of Rian Johnson, Damon Lindelof, John Waters, Bryan Fuller and Jim Jarmusch (see if you can spot anything those people have in common). Next you saw clips of beards and sideburns which were stroked by mainstream critics, followed by gradually comprehending nods and grins of éxtasis. An especially happy clip was posted of New Yorker magazine’s Richard Brophy, who had nearly cracked the case when he said of the early episodes that‘Though they’re directed by Lynch, they play mainly as Lynchoid, like the work of a skilled and dutiful imitator’, before he fell back in Line with the rest of the admiring cultists.

On YouTube and Instagram I watched shots of members of the series’ cast and crew and Showtime executives as they made attempts at There is lots to consider and discuss there, but I am late for an appointment faces. Another clip featured the showrunner we took to be David Lynch, as he ignored a handshake of congratulations from Mark Frost, the quiffed legend’s eyes aglow with fire. Just photographic red-eye, was what everyone assumed.

I watched the finale and these clips, did Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®), and exchanged rubs of toes and ankles with Andy and with Trinna whose smallest toe was bigger than my biggest, and with Les who was already shaken up by his first wrestling relapse in many years (on a bohemian who turned up at a GA fancy-dress party as Dougie Jones). Also my sexdoll Chica got up for the occasion in high heels and a suit which showed off her curves, just like the one Chrysta Bell wore as Tammy Preston.

‘Even Yugoslavia’s war,’ Trinna said, ‘and even the first sixteen episodes, they did not have me prepared for the ordeal of that finale, which was like seeing your good friends and family shot one by one.’

Les adding, ‘By a conspicuously quiffed but still stealthy cunt of a sniper.’

We watched a video on my phone in which a choir of men in late middle-age that were wearing lime-green braces and lime-green beanies sang hymns which poured out their feelings of gratitude and awe, and stretched their arms up towards the Master they seemed to believe was far above them in the sky.

We watched a reaction vlog in which a man that called himself Meeckk, a veteran ‘bat-barber’ that worked hanging by his legs from a trapeze, compared his enjoyment of the finale to his tastes in sex.

As soon as some Dom’s tugging my tongue or waxed nasal hair everything becomes quiet. It gets quiet and calm and I’m just here and now. It’s such a liberation. And it was the same when I was watching the finale and the Master and Genius Auteur had me, figuratively speaking, and in the nicest possible sense, splayed across his rack.

We watched another video which was suggested by the algorithms of YouTube. This one was called Season 3 Subspace, which was a phrase we all immediately took to our hearts, and it featured the thoughts of a scent artist called Lex Lux.

I feel like the Master’s holding my brain in his hand. It’s a little lump of jelly and I’ve given it to him as an offering, an expression of my gratitude. I’m far gone in Season 3 subspace and I’m really thrilled and have masses of endorphins in my body and no control at all.

It’s as though the Master is right there in the room with me saying, ‘Now I’m going to undo the murder of Laura Palmer and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Would that excite you, Lex Lux?’

And I just say, ‘Yes, yes, Master. Please undo Laura’s murder and wipe out everything that’s ever happened in my favourite show. Please do that to me and let me hand my little brain to you in appreciation.’

The next suggested video featured Bradley, a skateboarder older than my papá, whose first experience with Season 3 subspace occurred as he watched Dougie Jones very, very slowly play slot machines for eight screened minutes in Part 3 and each time he wins money shout out a long idiota “Helloo-oo-oo!”.

I felt as though I was seeing myself in the third person. That I was floating outside myself. And to be honest it was damned scary. I thought, what is this? I did feel aroused because I knew the Master and Genius Auteur had written and directed this scene. But also… what on earth is happening? No one had told me Season 3 would mean this many hours spent hovering outside my own skin.

It wasn’t until I went on reddit that I learned there was already a name for what I’d gone through and would keep going through. I’d been in Season 3 subspace.

One time after being engulfed by it I was unable to sleep and instead just ruminated on those slot-machines and skateboarded around and around in my duplex, tearing at my dreads and keffiyeh in bewilderment and shouting out ‘Helloo-oo-oo!’ so frequently and loudly my neighbours called the cops.

When I told the cops about Dougie and Season 3 subspace they misunderstood me. They thought I was complaining about the show and to reassure me said the FBI were investigating how bad it was, at which point I asked them to leave and got my board and in the hallway nailed a bitchin frontside Lynchian 180 pop shuv-it and a kickflip while calling out the night’s loudest and bitchinnest ‘Helloo-oo-oo!’.

Quietly Andy asked me if as I watched The Return I had ever experienced this kind of out-of-body subspace. I shook my head, cuddled into his chest and listened to this needy Conor McGregor’s heart, still pelting away despite our TRE®.

‘Only with you,’ I whispered, wiping a crust of dried tear from his cheek. ‘When you go on about it all the time.’

Next up on YouTube was a man called Kryztle in his early sixties who had three buns on his head, one on top and also a couple of Princess Leias.

The Master does not so much trespass over any well-policed moral boundaries but rather immanently recasts extant taboo-transgression axes and vectors operating within the contemporary media culture. We might thus claim á la Dansereau, Isadore, Delahoussaye, Degrange, Imbert, Eppinette, Sauveterre et al that the Master’s ferociously transgressive tour de force poetically re-arranges extant signs and symptoms in a novel fashion, albeit while granting them new textures, shapes and meanings within the confines of a TV drama that ignites febrile forms of metaphysical cogitation, in my own case at any rate.

Les asked me to replay Kryztle’s comments. When I did this he asked for a second replay. He shut his eyes and made his fingers into a kind of steeple, sí? He finished off his premium ginger ale and tickled Stanley’s throat. He told Andy it was time to find a higher power other than the unhinged hermit.

The next video which was suggested had nothing at all to do with The Return. In this video a submissive man and Proud Boy called Paulo spoke of the links between BDSM, religion and watching the speeches of Donald Trump.

Practising BDSM and watching the president talk to Boy Scouts about millionaires’ orgies on yachts are both rituals for people like me, and the church is built on rituals. In the context of politics God would be the president himself, though he’s also a Dom, obviously, Don the God-Dom, while the Dom priests would be Mr Tucker or Mr McInnes telling us to kneel. The dynamics are similar to the intense rites of passage in shithole countries.

Tuts and rolled eyes at this point from Trinna, who believed Trump was sent to earth by heaven. There was nothing ironic in this, no winks or smirks. Trinna was a true believer of the old school. She put on her sandals and left without saying goodnight.

Beside Paulo’s video was a documentary about outbreaks of speaking in tongues among Morrissey fans that attended group readings of a novella he had written called List of the Lost. One of these fans tumbled about the floor in ecstasy or despair and with bulbous salutation after reading out

Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

And so began our interest in this astonishing book.

Reworks material from Charlotta Carlstrom’s ‘Spiritual experiences and altered states of consciousness—Parallels between BDSM and Christianity’ and from David H. Fleming’s Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films.