David David Katzman

There are many different ways to look at A Greater Monster. There's the obvious analysis: a book about one man's transcendental journey brought about by the use of a psychoactive drug. The novel is certainly enjoyable at that level. To me, there's a lot more too it than that, though. The book is, in many ways, a Katabasis (a journey to the underworld). Early on in his journey, the protagonist meets Charon (who calls himself Ron), implying a descent into Hades. His descent, though, has more to do with Alice in Wonderland than it does with Greek mythology. There's a whole cast of incredible characters: The Trickster Coyote, the Sphinx, the three seer sisters, The Snow Queen, and even G'nesh (Ganesh). Like Alice, the protagonist undergoes a series of transformations.

There is also a sense that the hero is passing through various worlds, much in the same way a dying man passes through Bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Each transition and each transformation leads the protagonist into the next level. He eventually ends up at a bizarre circus, which is beautifully illustrated. The book, in a nod to our modern age, also contains 2 URLS that lead to supplementary material for the book (much in the same way that The Raw Shark Texts has unchapters hidden both in the real world and online.)

A Greater Monster is an enjoyable read. It is not "light" reading, however, and the reader needs to pay close attention. The effort is worth it.

Note: The book does contains sexual imagery and is not appropriate for children.… (lisätietoja)

This novel marks a stark departure from the author's earlier Death by Zamboni. A free flowing prose poem, a devilish series of intense artistic moments, condensed into interlocking and dividing particles - It can be described in many different ways, and I will exhaust several of those approaches in my review, but there is no substitute for picking up the book and sampling its heady bouquet.

As daring as Tristram Shandy was in its day perhaps, A Greater Monster pushes the boundaries of fiction by inventing spelling, formatting, and grammatical conventions to suit the ideas and augment the imaginative landscape on display. Remove the textual innovation and you would have a pointillist rendering of a mind, of a state of mind, and in a way, with the atemporal exploration it undertakes, that is enough. Add the rollicking, galloping linguistic deviations back in and you have a new stratum of complexity. The reading experience becomes a multiple choice test where you must, each and every moment, decide whether you like what you see. There will probably be some yeses and nos, as with any book, but there will also be more flip-flopping, see-sawing, and more decisions on your part that you ever expected.

Give the book time to grow on you. Like a Siamese twin, appearing during adolescence or middle age, suddenly, unexpectedly, your new best friend, but somehow disconcerting... Should you embrace it? Question it?

Get comfortable with the unexpected. This novel is an examination of the inner animal in man. The persuasive otherness of inanimate objects. At least, that's one of my many takes on it. Form your mind around its ungraspable shape, if you can.

Shambalic yet controlled. Entropic, almost. Observe the power of words, which take on an amoebic life in the human mind. Some reappear, others fail to show up after having bought a ticket. Words are a currency of exchange, ideas are the products, and within the bazaar between the covers you will be forced to barter for otherworldly beasts and inhuman forms. Imagination is required, check your hat at the door, as you might lose the top of your head, on account of your brain somehow slithering out - but that's just wild speculation on my part. I think my brain is still there. At least I can feel something in the cavity. Thanks to the amorphous quality of the reading experience, I'm seeing flashbacks to the surreal panorama, with every tickling set-piece secreted onto the page, enough alarming precocity to fluster the complacent among us, until the anomalous incantations build into a memorable unease.

In short, the fractal proliferation of ideation, the extension of the text into alternate dimensions, really worked its way in, took up residence, got comfortable, and then started haunting the corridors of my thoughts. Made me want to write something unbounded, limitless, and psychedelic. Hence this review. Probably.

Utterly startling lines I didn't even have to write down. (They were graffitoed on the interior of my skull: "Glazed with the mists of Elysium," and "the sprite striding through dew."
The text assaults the senses in every possible way, I've found. I also remember two very intriguing portmanteaus: "Breathvoid." and "Drummoning." I suspect there were more, thought my eyeballs might have been cowering as they passed by.

The dissociation of environments into psychic backdrops causes reality to melt upon the page. The author's gymnastic prose is like the clashing of cymbals, within which cacophony, with some acclimatization, you can hear subtle tonalities, and finally, complex rhythms. Nightmarish indulgence, vivid hallucinogenic pain and pleasure, thought and form, reflective perceptions - it's all in there. An interesting discussion of mythology I will have to reread, and subtle hints at an underlying mythos. Memory's persistence and deception excuses our perceptive but unhelpful narrator. Memory and whatever he took in the first part of the book, I'm guessing...

Luckily, the book unfolds in a dreamlike diorama. I did not feel rushed. One can sort of luxuriate in the boiling tarpit of brain waves. It is, at bottom, a well-paced adventure and a Lovecraftian quest, mixing the tangible and the intangible, the weird and the uncanny. I recall what was one of my favorite two-word combinations of all time occurring. That is: "GORMLESS SLEEP."

That one took me back. It's even better in context. I feel the need to use it somewhere now. Like on a bathroom stall.

By turns bizarre, grotesque, absurd, emotional, exotic, but always interesting and cutting edge, the
permutations of visions, the ersatz realities layering one another, the reincarnation of form and motif, palimpsest, and the vanishings that linger mysteriously, all lead up to an impressive whole.

The cameo of "Kaliban" was appreciated. The improvisational, aggressive prose provides the requisite variety. The parade of chimerical creatures, the symbolic manifestations, and the march of madness through a kaleidoscopic consciousness, all afford a sense of deep scrutiny of the human as a metaphysical entity. Spells and metamorphoses, candid, lurid storms of images, a playful, haphazard, glorious circus of monstrosities - and there's more... A playground for the id, a shifting canvas, an anamorphic eye, a twisted helix of form and ever-immersive delusion, torrents of humor, melancholy and misapprehension, isolationism, profound escapism... I could go on... Helicoptering doom, the manic, systematic unraveling of feverish, polyping concepts. After reading it, you might start to sound like this too...

But again, you have to actually read the book. The reviews can't do it justice - as amusing as most of them are.

The Greater Monster is a place where solitary ideas live out staged existences, under a hypnogogic spotlight, under the etheric illumination of a brilliant artist. While reading this book I couldn't stop thinking about the scene from Eraserhead famously referred to as "Dance of the Radiator Girl." Within the film it stands out as a puzzling mystery, but upon reflection it will likely haunt you to your dying day.
… (lisätietoja)

D by Z by D D Katz is Bizarro. Coming into it expecting anything else will raise zombie-colored flags in milliseconds. And to think I did. And encountered feral mimes on my way in, and then spiraled back, and laughed, entranced ecstatically, I swear I did, on every page. Because almost every book can teach you something you didn't know about writing and thinking, noticeably this one, and repeatedly, as in the concept of surprise and delight, which occurs inevitably behind each door - even the one behind the toilet roll dispenser. A quick and mind-altering laugh and memorable, irreverent scenes makes for a pleasantly dispensed tale, which, through unapologetic satire, is fresh. It is a random collage of dream-logic, but in many instances the author rewards brain-usage. Unconventional chills, thrills and automobiles but not a single zamboni in sight...… (lisätietoja)

”I was having a hard time wrapping my head around...why I was doing what I was doing. And what exactly was I doing? Outlines softened. Surfaces went foggy. What was I supposed to be doing? I was caged in solid smoke, sharp smoke. I saw it settling in, filling the space. A skintight dream with hard corners, corroded metal defined space. I shaped the proportions when I could to avoid the spikes. The hard-beat of work. Pain and pleasure cannot be argued with. They demonstrate me. Touching is just electrons repelling. Nothing can touch. Ever. I passed my arm before my eyes and watched it skip past me like slowed frames in an old movie. Life was stop-motion. Realization: We render times by stitching together moments - flipping pages in the book of consciousness presents a continuous stream. Our senses too slow to realize the separation of moments, like a strand of pearls through eternity. Time is terrifying, time is unspeakable. Clock-time lies down between moments...but distance warps with velocity, time bends with velocity. Frames of Reference. Are not absolute. Are selfish. A private reality. Clocks have a life of their own. Framed by references.”

In “A Greater Monster” by David David Katzman

I was first introduced to Bizarro at The British Council when my English instructor, Vicky Hartnack, had us read a story by Carlton Mellick III. A lot of people in the class thought it was stupid, childish, and "weird for the sake of weird." Then the instructor broke it down and explained to us why it was actually an intelligent piece of writing. Those in the class that didn't get it are a lot like the people who dismiss Bizarro: they aren't as smart as they think they are.

Do Bizarro writers get six figure advances? Nah. If someone says they do, they’re wonderfully over-the-top. Most publishers would look at SF, satire and the generally weird as they would a two week old tuna sandwich. The money is in the masses--books one hears about on NPR and Oprah. Bizarro writers have to pay at vanity presses to get their stuff published and, well, yeah: they end up with a storage unit full of books. But with the internet and younger generations, there's probably a steadily growing market/scene for the genre. Nerdtastic books about aliens, robots and sex are not so far off from anime, manga, snarky blogs and the strange worlds of video games. And...seriously: the folks commenting about the lack of literary quality in the genre need to realize that whether or not they like a book is a subjective thing; a genre as it stands alone is a genre only. It's entirely pretentious to presume that one genre above others lays universal claim to the best wordsmithing. Sheesh. Some people watch golf and some people watch half-naked android chicks shooting up crablike security bots in a dystopian future Tokyo. That's just how it is. I won't take a prudish "it's bloody weird that Bizarro nonsense and I like me books linear and with a happy ending..." approach. I'm not really interested in what they do in their spare time though. They could snort ketamine off a dead hooker's back every night while playing SNES games with imaginary friends and it wouldn't make me appreciate what they've written anymore than what I do now. It's either good or it's whack regardless of how much of a frat pack they are. But Katzman’s novel has got me thinking over the weekend. While I hold dear that Bizarro, as a genre, is not for me, I got punched in the face by it; I must have a look to see if there are any *what I would consider* meaningful writers like Katzman amongst the skidmarks. Bizarro writers aren't trying to be Ed Wood. According to some statements made online, Bizarro wants to create the literary equivalent of the Cult section at video stories. The Cult section of a video store isn't simply filled with Ed Wood titles and other bad B-movies. It is varied, though a key distinguishing factor is "weirdness." Can be madcap weirdness. Surreal weirdness. Satirical weirdness. A mix of many weirdnesses. Book stores tend not to have such a section, so people who want truly weird fiction must search a bit more, unfortunately. And it's hard to judge a genre by simply hearing about it, or reading just a few titles. There are many Bizarro authors, and they have very different styles and approaches, not all of which are juvenile. Read “A Greater Monster.” I can guarantee you’ll re-read it like I did. What’s it about? Not sure. It's like jazz, free-forms, free-floating, riffs and fugues, a dive into unsettling textures and ideas. 'Experimental' it is, but not necessarily so far out that you won't find something of yourself in it. I’ll have to re-read it once again to find whether the Monster is within me.

David David Katzman has more imagination in one finger than the Bolex brothers could ever dream of. One of the main reasons SF is subjected to such universal disparagement is the preconceived notion that it is all badly written prose written by infantile minds obsessed with shiny things. So give them good prose (vide quote above). And no shiny things. Mr. David David Katzman please step up to the plate. Nary a spaceship/zap gun/shiny thing in sight (there might be the odd talking toaster). And such remarkable, fluid, humane prose. Although you've got to like your cup of tea dark if Katzman is going to be your cup of tea (and apologies for the pun).

NB: SF = Speculative Fiction.… (lisätietoja)