It is all too human to feel despair, and oh so easy to fall in love with it. Those moments of anguish that nobody can avoid, their chill darkness, the numbing of our colonized minds, they all offer us the bliss of oblivion. Blot out our thoughts. Let us slide from life.
Mark Samuels' short story collection 'Written in Darkness' bubbles up out of those depths and with each story, slips us as readers another comforting round of numb. This is an abyss that is not content to merely gaze back. For Samuels, nothingness is everything.
The collection is short, a mere 128 pages, but feels full. Reading 'Written in Darkness' is the literary equivalent of an ice bath. You're engulfed. If you survive, and you will, you will want more. Start with the elegant presentation. Egaeus Press books are offered sans dust jacket, and the creepy, indistinct but uglifying image on the cover, overlaid with a satiny red scrawl, upsets you before you begin reading. Stay that way, upset. Cling to life.
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Reggie Oliver offers a brief but incisive introduction, followed by nine stories. And though that chill feeling, almost like an anesthesia that leaves you deadened but able to witness your own surgery, is consistent throughout the collection, the stories display
a nice variety of textures. "A Call to Greatness" offers, inside a wrapper, a historical narrative with tinges of the fantastic, about a Tartarean warlord. "The Other Tenant" evokes urban isolation in a highly concentrated prose form.
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"An Hourglass to the Soul" is the first stake in Samuels' march (in this volume) to craft a sort of hybrid gothic science fiction. It's the dark and disturbing tale of an IT worker sent to complete an unhappy assignment. "The Ruin of Reality" takes another firm step in this direction, as the outfall from our recent economic decline is re-imagined as a sort of bureaucratic nightmare. Samuels language, his prose and pacing show a real mastery of mood.
The story "Alastair" loops back in on the family, as Samuels crafts an unbalanced father who cannot compete with his wife and his own son. In "My World Has No Memories" a man must rebuild his life in a dark and dreary city. While there's a bit of the personal here, the setting and mood tack back towards Samuels' vision of a post-industrial slow-pocalypse. "Outside Interference" crystallizes these themes, and establishes itself as the centerpiece of the collection. Here Samuels fleshes out his doomed cubicle farm workers and brings bit of hell to earth in his own unique manner. The prose and descriptions are truly stunning, dark and moody.
The collection concludes with "In Eternity Two Lines Intersect," a story that finds another isolated narrator on the edges of life who arrives to a similar conclusion as those before but who takes that ending in an inverted fashion, finding ecstasy rather than despair. It proves to be just as unnerving, and yet offers a nice shading to all that has come before.
Samuels' work in this collection is really quite unique, part science-fiction horror, part mystical horror with a very nice dose of up-to-date cubicle farm depression. His prose and style are rather mannered, but these are manners that grow on you even as they pull you into the darkness within which Samuels dwells. 'Written in Darkness' is an essential buy for those who enjoy unusual fiction. Darkness, you will discover, can be tempting.
12-16-14:Christopher Hobbs and Leslie Gardner 'Grow It, Heal It'
Natural and Effective Herbal Remedies from Your Garden or Windowsill
The practices are ancient, some more than 5,000 years old. In another age, not so long ago, really, Christopher Hobbs and Leslie Gardner would have been called hedgerow witches. But what was once sorcery is now science.
Happily, we've come far enough in both our cultural acceptance and our scientific understanding to realize that as amazing as modern medicine may be, ancient medicine has some pretty astonishing lessons to learn from as well. An easy and practical way to do so is Hobbs' and Gardner's beautiful book, 'Grow it, Heal It: Natural and Effective Herbal Remedies from Your Garden or Windowsill.' What so great about this is that, yes, it is science, but not rocket science, or even garden science. Rank amateurs and armchair agriculturalists are invited, and easily able to participate in this party.
The setup here is smartly simple. There's a nice introduction that lays out where the authors are coming from and where you're headed when you read the book. From there, the book is divided into flour sections; Know It, with a list of 50 herbs, what they're good for and how to grow them, Grow It, with more detailed instructions for setting up a variety of home gardens; windowsill, front yard, back yard, planters, etc; Make It, how to cure, dry, produce teas, tinctures and more; and Heal It, a guide to how you can use what you have grown.
Make no mistake, the authors are all about care and caution. It's obvious, but repeated early and often in this book, that acute illness requires a doctor's appointment. That said, there are lots of great cures to be found in here that are all-natural, the virtue of which is becoming increasingly underscored by scientific research. Until they're growing us over at Monsanto, natural products have an intuitive and actual advantage. Nothing here is seen as a re-placement for the doc-in-a-box, but rather, as a low-key way of nipping some problems in the buds, often with buds. (No, not those!)
One of the attractions of this book is the lovely layout. Credit Rodale with making this a book that is perfect for perusing before you head out to your local independent garden store to pick up some of the plants described, from Aloe Vera to Yerba mansa. The authors offer a wide range of herbs, but not so many as to seem overwhelming. Clearly, they've learned the virtues of brevity.
Ultimately and charmingly, what you get here is a cookbook for natural remedies. At the very least, you get a guide to growing some interesting and easily maintained herbs. At best, you get to replace some of the more noxious pills in your medicine cabinet with something you created. You'll know everything in the remedy, which is itself a source of comfort.
Whether or not you think yourself the sort of person who would grow herbs, 'Grow It, Heal' proved readers with an easy-on-the-eye guide to growing plants that may prove useful beyond being green things in your immediate vicinity that you have brought to life. But even meeting that baseline is not a bad place to start. Growing anything is itself a healing experience.
[Disclosure Note: I am currently creating a Living Well podcast for Rainbow Light Nutritional Systems, who employ Christopher Hobbs.]
New to the Agony Column
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
