May's literary fiction: the best-written recent releases

Read the opening pages from our picks below ^ The Absolute Rock Bottom

In today’s issue

— ‘Out here on The Spit, where the sea reaches and erodes, sucks and pulls, We watch them come’: our first pick of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction.

— ‘she’d used a shard of slate to scratch her inner elbow psoriasis, and a puff of dead skin particles danced visibly in the ventilation’: and our second pick.

— ‘See? Now your bottom’s healthily clamping away again, isn’t it? No more shrugging off the Sex Magick! now, is there?’: The Absolute Rock Bottom, part 6 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 already shown this series.

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LITERARY FICTION

Books considered

Perris, California Rachel Stark

Glorious Exploits Ferdia Lennon

The Cemetary of Untold Stories Julia Alvarez

A Short Walk Through a Wild World Douglas Westerbeke

Clear Carys Davies

The Sleepwalkers Scarlett Thomas

The Garden Clare Beams

The House of Broken Bricks Fiona Williams

What Kingdom Fine Grabol

The Alternatives Caoilinn Hughes

Reboot Justin Taylor

Real Americans Rachel Khong

Ava Anna Ada Ali Millar

Caledonian Road Andrew O’Hagan

James Percival Everett

Levitation for Beginners Suzannah Dunn

You Are Here David Nicholls 

The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh Ingrid Persaud

WE

Before Out here on The Spit, where the sea reaches and erodes, sucks and pulls, We watch them come; We will watch them leave; here, where land has passed back and forth so many times no one knows where they are, not England, not Scotland, not Europe, not not Europe; easier just to call it The Spit as people here do; The Spit where there sits or sat a mill, busy at first grinding grains to fine and finer powder, until it became used less, then useless, falling into disrepair, the salt wind corroding into its deep stone walls, no longer a mill then but something else with exposed beams standing hard against the sun setting on this small stretch of land where time runs and ran both forwards and backwards until it too makes no sense at all; stripped of time, nationality and industry, The Spit turned and turns in on itself and so We watched the first day when the interlopers from the city came, lured by the clean air, that particular purity of light so good for photographs, beguiled by the prices; you can get so much for so little; it would have been the mummy who sat all of their long evenings scrolling through house sites when the daddy was at the other side of the sitting room with his headphones on or out running and not drinking as he’d taken to recently, until soon there would be nothing of what drew them to each other left to keep them together; a new home seemed like the best idea, a project! – he’d nodded along; she hadn’t been right, not since … friends agreed for the best; We watched the day they arrived to view the mill, the boy pointing excitedly into space as they walked around it; this could be my room; calm down, came the reply, the daddy deciding not to notice the ivy clinging to the walls or the potential problem of the bats in the outhouse; that evening, a scant mile west, the men in the village pub laughed; did you see her shoes, her legs, her cheekbones; did you see the child; not all there, I’d bet; some shuddered; wouldn’t much fancy buying a place like that; while in the corner teenagers who knew about the things that brushed past faces and lived in the shadows of the old mill stared at their feet and the curious girl took out her phone, looked at The Screen and saw the mummy’s enthusiastic location tagging and peered closer to get a better view of her and the child; after, at home under covers, she’d watched her again, scrolling back through time, finding not one child but two on The Screen; months later, as rain eased and webs formed on the hedges, the heat eclipsed The Spit; it’s so hot, it’s too hot; why won’t it just rain; the family returned with an entourage of mover’s vans, the daddy leaping out of the car first, the girl in the woods not far behind the house, raising binoculars to her eyes but not caring to focus on the daddy; he wasn’t the one who interested her; she was just bird watching after all, the family a distraction, the boy emerging next from the backseat, and finally the mummy, first one leg, then the other, the girl leaning so far forward in the wide branch of the tree she had to quickly steady herself; the daddy striding ahead into the house – she’d seen his type up close too often and was sure she’d meet him sooner than she would his wife; she knew how he’d speak; he’d use words like optimist and survivor, he’d talk about his work the way the ones who had work to talk about did; the rubber-floored corridors, the whitewashed walls and uniforms; he’d not talk about the sharp implements or how they made his heart beat just a little bit faster when he pushed them into someone’s flesh, that first weal of blood rising to the surface and how hard he had to fight the urge to put his finger in it and taste it, just the smallest bit; he’d leave that out but she would smell the desire for it on him the way she could smell snow in the air before it fell; she observed how he needed the mummy and the boy to orbit around him no matter how slowly they went; the boy ran into the newly reconstructed house with the mummy following, moving more slowly than she had for weeks, as if already the great relocation was dislocating her, causing her to unwind, caught in this time lapse until she was space incarnate, forgetting how she’d vowed to keep body and mind united, instead ordering plasterers, painters and kitchen fitters in the months before the move, proudly showing off the results on The Screen, as in her room the curious girl watched, taking care never to press the heart button while the mummy’s own heart became worn as it tried to grow itself a new skin, hoping to harden and calcify, her mind becoming a raw, hot wire-made thing with ends stripped and exposed, each sparking off the other, the daddy taking care not to see as the girl knew he would, choosing instead to believe in happy new beginnings, refusing to see the shape endings took while the mummy boxed herself up into simpler and simpler equations now she was a thing the daddy no longer needed to solve, and the boy, limpid and beautiful, moved away from them both just as the sister had, neither parent noticing.

None of them, neither the boy nor the curious girl, nor the mummy or the daddy, observed the things We saw as the webs strung between bushes became thicker; We felt it before anyone knew it, the deep sense that far out at sea something was wrong.

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1.

The air is mild for October. Nothing shivers. Nothing smokes. A gentle westerly whistles at the panes of the lab windows like an unwelcome uncle, determined to raise the hairs on some young neck. Twenty necks bend to observe the experiment: a Perspex prism known as the “squeeze-box”— the size of a narrow aquarium—is filled with thin layers of coloured sand. The ends of the box are movable, so that its contents can be compressed to demonstrate the effects of tectonic convergence.

Thrusts. Faults. Folds. Belts. Excuse me. Olwen presses a fist to her mouth to stifle a burp, and a few students snigger. Lo and behold: geologic processes for the puny human attention span.

There is something very bodily about Olwen Flattery that the undergraduates find wildly amusing. Moments earlier, she’d used a shard of slate to scratch her inner elbow psoriasis, and a puff of dead skin particles danced visibly in the ventilation. She placed the shard back in its tray and, with her chalky fingers, lifted out a teeny-tiny sanitised kidney stone for the undergraduates’ scrutiny. Moving this kidney stone involved a person’s hospitalisation, she tells them. Just imagine the force it would take to move a mountain! And we’re not talking about violent, sudden processes, like an earthquake shouldering up a mountain range. No. These forces are so incremental and immense, so imperceivable and unstoppable, that there’s no halting their progress. They’re underway right now, as we stand here, on the shifting foundations of this institute.

The students scan their pals for clues as to how to feel. They have learned to take what levity they can from these light and flaky moments, as Olwen’s lectures so far have been something of a shock wave.

We’re a wreck, she says. Ireland is one big crash site, where the ancient continents Laurentia and Gondwana collided like two humoungous cruise liners . . . long before the nouveau riche were evolved to populate them. The wreckage cuts stupendously across this island, from Dingle in the west to Clogherhead in the east. The island was underwater back then, so that story didn’t make itself known for millions of years. And here we stand, sifting through the evidence of that collision in our desk organisers, all of us above sea level… for another decade or two, anyways.

Several students begin to agitate in the pause that follows. It’s hard to read the undergraduates—to know what’s getting through, what with the scarves cobra’d around their mouths and their minimal eye contact. They all seem hungover, or stoned, or just returned from a silent monastery meditation retreat in Bali they spent their loans on. But they also seem deeply unnerved, and it’s not paranoia.

How information is delivered seems to be more consequential than the information itself, Olwen thinks. She is losing her strength to hand it over gently. But a teacherly muscle memory prompts her now—having pushed—to pull:

Have any of ye seen it?

She makes eye contact with each student in turn, in case—as firstyears—they need drawing out. Shawna, an exchange student with the gall of a parking enforcement officer, asks:

Is it here in Galway? Because car rental in this country is a joke.

It’s not in the immediate vicinity, Shawna, but—

I saw the Rock of Gibraltar, Eric offers out of nowhere—a very tall student, with asteroidal confidence.

Olwen hears the clock on the wall tick forward a cluster of seconds all in one go, like heart palpitations: harmless, but horrible. If you tell me you flew down to see the Rock of Gibraltar, Eric, when you haven’t taken a bus to Dingle to ogle our own monumental bodies of rock…

In the pause that follows, Eric takes a seat and runs his fingers through his gelled hair, leaving striations that seem almost infrastructural, as if water might collect in them. Olwen is grateful when Fionnuala—not technically a mature student, but she has a lot of cop-on—cuts in with something likely to be relevant:

I went to Edinburgh during the summer—

For the festival? Geraldine clenches with envy.

Yeah, says Fionnuala, but we took a day trip to Siccar Point. She glances at Olwen.

You did not! Olwen replaces a chunk of granite she’d been using as a stress ball back in the specimen tray, readying herself to shake Fionnuala’s hand.

Fionnuala smiles. It was a little tricky… to get out onto the rock. But it was worth it. Olwen looks around the group. Does anyone know what historic expedition Fionnuala was honouring, trekking out to Siccar Point on Scotland’s weather-battered coast, when she could’ve stayed in Edinburgh town to watch Shit-faced Shakespeare?

Everyone laughs a bit, releasing some pressure.

Do you want to say, Fionnuala, what you saw there? And who saw it first!

Fionnuala pulls at a mini harmonica pendant, travelling it back and forth along the necklace chain. By the end of year one, Olwen will count herself a failure if she hasn’t replaced that pendant with a hand lens.

Fionnuala acts a touch more flustered than she is: Em… so, James Hutton, I guess back in the seventeen hundreds? Found these rock formations. These really crazy layered rocks, kind of like pastry… or maybe I just associate Scotland with pastry!

Sedimentary rock, like the strata of coloured sands—Olwen gestures—in our squeeze-box experiment.

Exactly, yeah. There were horizontal layers like that, and vertical sections too . . . side by side, or on top of one another, at right angles. And the vertical rocks and the horizontal formed in totally different ways, in different time periods. And Hutton basically looked at them and instantly understood plate tectonics. Or a theory that led to it? Or… was it just that he knew that the centre of the earth was molten rock, and that that was how new land was made? Instead of, you know, God making it. Fionnuala keeps glancing to Olwen for confirmation. Because before that, she presses on, he could see erosion happening and couldn’t understand how all land hadn’t been just… washed away by the weather. Like, how was there anything left? And the only explanation anyone knew for new land was God. But when Hutton saw those rocks, he knew they were evidence that the earth was billions of years old, instead of thousands. Because the formations would’ve taken… yeah, a really, really long time!

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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.

The Absolute Rock Bottom

The Return has many aspects that by themselves would turn any work into a disaster, but it also has a rock bottom that’s far worse than anything else in the series and therefore in art generally.

To give you an idea of how bad it is let’s look at the series’ honkingness piechart and Diane Evans’ consensual Sex Magick! (César Grez’s punctuation and spelling) with a crime boss, serial killer and serial rapist who previously raped her, an attack we aren’t shown but that was so horrific it transformed her whole outlook on life.

Throughout the Sex Magick! scene Diane the former FBI secretary, played by Mr Lynch’s friend Laura Dern, has to gaze down upon the face of her Kyle MacLachlan-played violator Mr C as she has intercourse with him cowgirl style, sometimes twisting her face in distress. This experience in an alternate dimension is worth it, though, the tight-trousered, greying-manbunned Lynch cultists say, because by having sex with this man whose forced penetration of her was so appalling it transformed her personality for decades, she is somehow in a way never made clear—it’s Magick!—arguably helping summon across dimensional planes the rumoured ultrahorror Jowday, who will then arguably be destroyed in a way never made clear by a woman’s unexplained scream arguably doing funny things in a way never made clear to the electricity in the house where the rumoured ultrahorror arguably lives, though not a single bit of this gets portrayed onscreen.

You might think if you’re going to have a character voluntarily go the bed with someone who raped them, it’s a moment to be treated with delicacy and can only be justified in the most serious of contexts. All I’ve given so far is an outline of the Sex Magick! + Scream/Electricity Magick!’s rankness, which we’ll look at in more detail later on, but I hope we can agree that this outline is nothing like a serious enough context for this scene. We can agree too that especially in the absence of such a context the scene is artistically vile.

And when it was first broadcast nobody was even aware of this context involving arguably beckoning a rumoured entity, so there was no context at all, which makes the viewer wonder why a woman might hop into bed with a man who attacked her in this way. We hardly need to spell out the implication here, especially as when Diane covers up her rapist’s face she is extremely turned-on. And we get a full four minutes, among the longest sex scenes in TV history, to let this implication sink in. With this part of The Return, and the equally vile scenes before and after it, we’re close to the essence of why the series isn’t just a letdown but a moral and artistic stinker and why some of us don’t just dislike it but despise it.

But it gets worse. With this series it always gets worse. When you focus on any element of it, even something you’re already blinking your eyes at in disbelief, you find sooner or later you’ve missed something honking. It’s uncanny. It’s like its honkingness is somehow fractal, except that instead of smaller the deeper you go the show just gets more and more honking, yet another quality unique to it and that must surely be down to demonic manipulation of the laws of physics or the laws of honkingness, and so eventually helped uncover the demonic secret at the heart of this mystery.

This sex scene, critic Franck Boulègue enthuses, is a nod to the intercourse Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle have near the end of Finnegans Wake. That’s right, one of the lowest moments in screen history tries to yoke itself to the work of perhaps the West’s greatest novelist.

You may be aware that despite being a famously expansive, imaginative portrayal of humanity, Joyce’s novel features no scene in which someone has sex with their rapist to somehow beckon a rumoured evil entity across dimensions to her offpage doom, arguably, or anything remotely like that. And Anna Livia Plurabelle doesn’t strike you as the type to go in for rumoured-entity-beckoning sex with her rapist, because nobody strikes you as that type.

Notice the lack of correspondence between this moment in the trainwreck and the celebrated work it’s so desperate to allude to, how poorly thought-out and pretentious the allusion is. From start to finish the series keeps including this kind of thing, and it’s toe-curling.

Notice too the failure of the series’ critical admirer, hardly Boulègue’s only failure in this regard, to see that the detail he’s discovered is awful. This failure is standard for the critical wing of The Return’s cult, for whom anything discovered about the series, however minging it is to the rest of us, must by definition be admirable because of the quiffed showrunner’s name.

For practically any other work, this Sex Magick! + the stretched Finnegans Wake reference would constitute its low point. But not for this dud, not even close. Ella said it makes up only about 0.5% of the dud’s honkingness piechart, while Trinna put it at roughly 1%, estimates that are emphatically not to downplay its repugnance but instead give a sense of the scale of the dud’s repugnance in total. It means that at most this twisted debacle of a sequence makes up a mere hundredth of this drama’s honkingness.

You could say the same of no other work of our era, or any era. If Morrissey’s novella List of the Lost contained this debacle it would constitute over half of the book’s honkingness—call it 60%—meaning that The Return might be more than a hundred times worse than one of the worst anglophone publications of my lifetime, which seems about right. A thousand times worse would be too much, I think, while ten times would be nowhere near enough.

These are all guesses, obviously, and due to the fractal nature of the show’s honkingness likely to be revised downwards, always downwards, because no matter how bad you think a particular element is you later see there are new levels of junk to discover beneath it, then new levels beneath them, and on and on downwards. Humans will never get their heads around the vastness of this pie.

So what percentage does the rock bottom make up? Say the figure was 10%. This would mean the rock bottom is between ten and twenty times worse than the Sex Magick! + the stretched Finnegans Wake reference. That’s pretty grim.

But the rock bottom is far grimmer. That sex scene is repellent but it doesn’t induce Rock Bottom Lock, in which not only do your toes curl backwards but your entire lower legs also want to. According to Ella and Les, Rock Bottom Lock curls your knees not downwards but upwards, and you have to face the ultrahorror of that rock bottom with your thighs horizontal but your shins pointed up above you. Ella found herself on the floor with her legs lifted involuntarily and her ankles curled so far back her toes were pointed at her face, and she remained stuck like that for four days in San Rafael hospital.

I’m convinced no other artistic effort in history could induce such urges in your legs, and that no archaeologist has ever discovered a human corpse with Rock Bottom Lock, or such a posture daubed in prehistoric times on a cave wall. It’s not impossible that were it able to perceive The Return’s rock bottom on Planet Earth, the Milky Way would curl in upon itself a little more.

And it was the knowledge their hero Mr Lynch was responsible for the worst artistic choice in history that caused Rock Bottom Lock in so many. As you can imagine, that was a really horrible time. Lots of folk couldn’t deal with it. Bodies locked and hyperventilated. Molars were ground to dust. Anuses clamped so hard and long their owners had to get colostomy bags, or as people labelled the things, Bottom Bags.

Many cultists have of course gone into denial about the rock bottom, and who can blame them? If it’s a choice between teeth ground to dust, and denial that your hero made a surpassingly humiliating decision, who can blame you if you choose denial? Although as you’ll see, thankfully a third option came along when the showrunner was revealed to be not Mr Lynch but his Demonic Twin.

I’ll only give a rough estimate here, because the human mind just isn’t equipped to accurately map these levels of honkingness: the fact is that of The Return’s enormous pie, the rock bottom makes up between 30% and 40%. Les says this is too low, but if the rock bottom’s sent you to A&E then you’re likely biased. Call it 33% for now, a third of that colossal honking pie. It’s that bad, up to sixty-six times more awful than the Sex Magick! etc. It isn’t as sick, or its sickness isn’t as unsubtle, but because its repercussions permeate every scene and are so artistically cataclysmic, it is many times worse.

It is the series’ masterstroke, its honkingness Ragnarök. If the rest of it feels like having hook after hook tear and tug at your skin, as in Hellraiser but over nearly twenty hours and with not dozens of hooks but thousands, then the rock bottom is that climactic explosion that splatters every part of you throughout the room: Jesus wept. List of the Lost’s pie wouldn’t have enough space to fit it in. You’d need nineteen more pies.

If you haven’t already heard about it, I challenge you to guess what this rock bottom is. No prizes or anything, but if you can guess it you’re probably a genius. A frightening genius, but a genius nonetheless. So unlikely is it that any merely three-dimensional being can guess this rock bottom, though, that you’ll need some clues. One is The Return making Mr Lynch look a supreme diddy.

The fact is that with this production, I’m sorry to say, the entities decided for some murky 10D reason to make David Lynch look the biggest human diddy who’s ever lived. Not among the biggest, but the biggest, and by quite a distance. All four of us—Ella, Les, Trinna and I—agreed on this. Unbelievable cruelty, and I said so when I eventually merged minds with the Twin.

No other project has made its artist seem a more egomaniacal diddy than does this farce. It’s not the pure heroin vision of David Lynch but the pure cocaine vision. Certain projects have made their artist look more vicious and have been more harmful politically, but none has made them look a bigger diddy, throbber, eejit, balloon, galoot. The show makes Mr Lynch look vicious as well, but its speciality, its obsessive focus is on making this folksy grandpa who meditates twice every day seem an even bigger diddy than the second-biggest diddy of all time, who is of course Mr Trump. I’m not saying Mr Lynch is a bigger diddy than Mr Trump, never mind more vicious, certainly not, but what the Twin did in this show makes him look it.

As Les pointed out when we played noncompetitive table tennis after discussing my deteriorating state of mind at the time, and agreeing a plan to stave off complete collapse: ‘Trump’s strengths, in this match-off anyhow, are in the volume and breadth of his arseholery. Or in its relative volume and breadth, the incredible relentlessness of it and the incredible range of areas of life where he’s been a dick. But in The Return the strength of the unhinged hermit,’ as he now called Mr Lynch, ‘is in just how low he sinks.

‘The only time Trump’s dickishness has been well and truly Returnian, in public anyhow, was when he came close to surprising them bereaved parents of that runover teenager with a meeting with the woman who killed him. Near sprang a surprise face-off between them. Remember that? A meeting like that would have made a classic scene in The Return, wouldn’t it, lapped up by the fans and chortled away at by them tools recapping the thing in the papers.

‘But a compilation lasting eighteen hours of even Trump’s utmost dickish public moments couldn’t compete with what the series done to how we see the hermit, because it wouldn’t be supernatural enough. A bit supernatural, no doubt, but nothing compared to the demonic demolishing of the hermit’s reputation by eighteen hours of previously unimaginable shit like the Sex Magick!’, to say nothing of the erasure of the erasure of the erasure, and other abhorrent elements we’ll cover soon that accompany this. ‘Compared to all this,’ Les said, ‘Trump calling women pigs and dogs isn’t just not too bad behaviour, but gentlemanly class and charm.’

This is one of several facts about the series that it took me longer than Les to realise, that it makes Mr Lynch, the higher power I chose to help me stop physically and mentally wrestling people outside the bedroom and stop boozing, look the most farcical person who’s ever existed. Which will sound like hyperbole, I’m sure, but it won’t for long.

I have got hysterical on this subject. Red-faced, wide-eyed, squeaky-voiced. All four of us have. Our tone when discussing it was sometimes panic-stricken or worse. None of us has experience with anything as historically unusual as this, anything this abnormal, let alone how you’re supposed to talk about it. Even so, we still weren’t too panicked for the subject matter. I insist on that. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and just because you’re panicked doesn’t mean this atrocity doesn’t deserve it.

Nonetheless it took much watching, rewatching, palpitating, and squeaking for us to understand that The Return is not merely the worst-ever TV drama but the worst artistic endeavour of any kind. What finally swung it was wondering if we’d seen stuff as bad as the Sex Magick! and the like elsewhere, in any medium, from any era, or even heard of anything that bad, and the answer being Never, nowhere near so often that eventually it became clear no other work in history could possibly have been this rank.

That’s a question you might ask yourself, therefore, as we look at aspects of The Return: When have I ever come across anything as bad as this elsewhere, that makes the artist look this bad, or even heard of anything as bad?

There may come a point where you’ve been brutalised by so many Return horrors that they no longer seem horrific. This is the point where that Sex Magick! sequence gets little more than a shrug. So what, you think, I’ve seen worse. And it’s true, you will have seen worse in this abomination, far worse. Nonetheless, to shrug off that sequence as no big deal means you’re on the brink of derangement.

Thankfully there’s a solution, however, a way to bring you back to your senses, and that’s to imagine it was you yourself who inserted into a long-awaited TV revival a scene where a woman played by your friend becomes fiercely aroused getting it on with her rapist to arguably summon a rumoured ultrahorror across dimensions so she can be foiled offscreen by a scream/electrics miracle, arguably, and that this sex is a stretched allusion to Finnegans Wake. Yes, you. You did this.

See? Now your bottom’s healthily clamping away again, isn’t it? No more shrugging off the Sex Magick! now, is there? You’ve pulled back from the brink and are once more comfortably among the sane.

You may doubt too for a while that The Return’s as historically notable as the invention of language. You’re going to see much sooner, though, that performances of Shakespeare’s plays at the original Globe, Europe’s discovery of the Americas, the Crucifixion of Christ, or the Buddha’s enlightenment beneath his tree are perfectly reasonable comparisons, if anything somewhat underegged. Because the fact is that something took place in recent years whose historic nature is easily on a par with those events, and you can watch clips of it anytime you want.

Think of it. You were around when the two biggest diddies of the last three thousand centuries were alive and kicking and diddying about the place, two white male septuagenarian US reactionaries with attention-grabbing hair and the most galootish megalomania ever witnessed, and also when the most grotesque art catastrophe of all those centuries occurred. And one was lauded as the greatest exponent of our most influential artform, one as the greatest example of that artform, and one was handed the nuclear firepower to destroy life on earth forever. What a time to be alive!

Like the very Dark Matter that spawned it, The Return was all around us yet hardly anyone knew it was there. This is why at times you feel like an apostle as you collar people at recovery meetings or Atlético games or Santa Rita’s, corner them in the carpark with Trinna and actually grab one collar each and insist this visitor hears out what we’ve witnessed and what we know. Please don’t ever mistake these pages for mere whines about a disappointing telly series. They are instead the equivalent of acolytes’ stunned and therefore sometimes gibbering recitals of everything we just learned from Christ himself, albeit in reverse. Our Good News is Very Bad News. Our Tidings are by no means Glad.

There will be more clues to the rock bottom as we go along, which we’ll mark like this: ^^. An important clue is that this artistic rock bottom was caused by the same factors, precisely the same, as cause the rock bottoms of alcoholics and those addicted to drugs or sex or grappling or similar. You have a better chance of guessing The Return’s rock bottom, therefore, if you’ve experienced your own and understood what lay behind it.

In a sense this challenge isn’t fair, because what the Twin did in this instance is unprecedented. No other TV series, or any film, novel or play’s come close to doing it. No human’s managed it in its entirety in any context and never will, not even any addict (though, and here’s your next clue ^^, one part of it’s been managed by pharaohs who thought they were gods). So you won’t only have to think outside the box but outside the human. You’ll have to think like a seriously sadistic demon.

The Descent into Hell, the next part of The Demon Inside David Lynch, is here.