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The Beak Doctor: Short Fiction, 1972-1976
For years, Eric Basso's novella, The Beak Doctor, has sustained a cult reputation among a hard core of avant-garde writers. This collection of short stories begins with a tale of death and hideous resurrection, moves on through a quest for the great horse who rules a subterranean polar kingdom, an atmospheric cycle of short prose pieces, a tragicomic roman noir set in exotic Istanbul (in which the great horse appears in a new guise), and concludes with the harrowing odyssey of a masked man in a fogbound city turned upside down by a plague of sleeping sickness: The Beak Doctor.
186 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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510 people want to read
About the author
Eric Basso
22 books13 followersEric Basso was born in Baltimore in 1947. His work has appeared in Asylum Annual, Bakunin, Central Park, Chicago Review, Collages & Bricolages, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, and many other publications. His novel, Bartholomew Fair, is available from Asylum Arts. He is the author of twenty-one plays. His critically acclaimed drama trilogy, The Golem Triptych; the complete short plays, Enigmas; his play The Sabbatier Effect; a book of short fiction, The Beak Doctor; and five collections of poetry, Accidental Monsters, The Catwalk Watch, The Smoking Mirror, Catafalques, and Ghost Light, are available from Asylum Arts, along with Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature 1973-1989 and Revagations: 1966-1974, the first volume of a book of dreams. Basso's most recent previous collection of poems, Earthworks, was published by Six Gallery Press in 2008.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 29, 2017
Dense, fractured avant-occult stories of the crypto-equine and cities dismembered by fog-banks, physical and mental. Eric Basso is great, I'm sorry to have now swept through his entire prose output. Perhaps I'll check out some of his plays next. Breakdown:
Gothick Eschatology :: In a nocturnal house, a bizarre rite unfolds. Its subject is sleeping, or dead, or perhaps in some uncertain state between. The rite may be alchemical, or a demonological (a summoning?), or a resurrection. The dark wings that stir the air may be those described in occult medieval texts, or those of a specimen under scientific inquiry in an old observatory, or those glimpsed in a macabre mausoleum seemingly drawn from lesser Lovecraft (or all of these could be the same). These gripping details never entirely add up, reading like a disordered pile of notes, logs, myths found in some dust-laden library vault, connected via unclear logic and nouvelle roman glissements. It's about as confused as anything could be yet still keep me totally engaged. Abstract pulp writing, perhaps.
Equus Caballus :: Refining the tantalizing confusion of the first story, this one follows an arctic expedition after a mythic horse, accompanied by conflicting personal accounts and rendered circular by the narratorial disorientation. Basso has a knack for telling just enough to convey strong sense of place and narrative urgency, while keeping everything vague enough that the action is impossible to completely pin down, allowing potential understandings to proliferate and grind against one another. Also published separately in the first series of the Printed Head
Logues :: Eerie vignettes that bear the marks of dream and automatic writing exercises, perhaps, but each manages to knit a tight web of inferred narrative behind its lasting images.
Equestrian Scenes :: A fragmented, echoing noir with a strange protagonist in strange but familiar genre locals. Echoing in that bits of an event are referenced before and after they happen, it seems, prompting deja vu.
The Beak Doctor :: In the limited vision of dense fog, only small parts of each structure and street can be seen at a time, places and actions are broken up and abstracted into parts with sums carefully hidden, narrative becomes a series of almost-disconnected moments. Perhaps more atmospheric than narrative-driven, but nonetheless strung with disconcerting incidents and held together by its overarching search. Though for what exactly?
Gothick Eschatology :: In a nocturnal house, a bizarre rite unfolds. Its subject is sleeping, or dead, or perhaps in some uncertain state between. The rite may be alchemical, or a demonological (a summoning?), or a resurrection. The dark wings that stir the air may be those described in occult medieval texts, or those of a specimen under scientific inquiry in an old observatory, or those glimpsed in a macabre mausoleum seemingly drawn from lesser Lovecraft (or all of these could be the same). These gripping details never entirely add up, reading like a disordered pile of notes, logs, myths found in some dust-laden library vault, connected via unclear logic and nouvelle roman glissements. It's about as confused as anything could be yet still keep me totally engaged. Abstract pulp writing, perhaps.
Equus Caballus :: Refining the tantalizing confusion of the first story, this one follows an arctic expedition after a mythic horse, accompanied by conflicting personal accounts and rendered circular by the narratorial disorientation. Basso has a knack for telling just enough to convey strong sense of place and narrative urgency, while keeping everything vague enough that the action is impossible to completely pin down, allowing potential understandings to proliferate and grind against one another. Also published separately in the first series of the Printed Head
Logues :: Eerie vignettes that bear the marks of dream and automatic writing exercises, perhaps, but each manages to knit a tight web of inferred narrative behind its lasting images.
Equestrian Scenes :: A fragmented, echoing noir with a strange protagonist in strange but familiar genre locals. Echoing in that bits of an event are referenced before and after they happen, it seems, prompting deja vu.
The Beak Doctor :: In the limited vision of dense fog, only small parts of each structure and street can be seen at a time, places and actions are broken up and abstracted into parts with sums carefully hidden, narrative becomes a series of almost-disconnected moments. Perhaps more atmospheric than narrative-driven, but nonetheless strung with disconcerting incidents and held together by its overarching search. Though for what exactly?
December 14, 2024
In 2012 Weird Fiction Review conducted an interview with Eric Basso in which he patently refused to be classed in the nebulous genre of 'weird fiction' no matter how hard the interviewer tried to fit him there. It's amusing how Basso at first deflects the interviewer's very use of the word 'weird' to describe his work and that of others which he admires, before finally resigning himself to its continued use throughout the interview. This just emphasizes what little control writers hold over what even their most ardent fans think of their work.
Nate did a neat and thorough job in his review of breaking down this collection, and I don't have much to add. In fact, I will even quote from Nate's review, because I think this observation of his goes to the heart of where Basso excels and what I found most appealing about this collection:
Nate did a neat and thorough job in his review of breaking down this collection, and I don't have much to add. In fact, I will even quote from Nate's review, because I think this observation of his goes to the heart of where Basso excels and what I found most appealing about this collection:
Basso has a knack for telling just enough to convey strong sense of place and narrative urgency, while keeping everything vague enough that the action is impossible to completely pin down, allowing potential understandings to proliferate and grind against one another.This observation meshes with Basso's own professed predilections, as noted in his interview with Kirpal Gordon:
I like presenting ambiguous situations. It seems to me a great part of our inner and outer lives are ambiguous, if we’re honest about it. Maybe I’m a realist, in that respect.Another quality that attracts me to these pieces and Basso's work in general is his strong interest in dream life. He even published a book of his dreams, and his work in this short fiction collection is also imbued with a dreamlike quality. Basso talks at length about his interest in dreams in the interviews referenced above, both of which I recommend to anyone considering reading him. The other point he makes there that I found particularly noteworthy is about his drama trilogy The Golem Triptych being the pivotal work in his canon—i.e., 'the sum of all that came before, and the origin of what came after'.
You could go to sleep tonight in your bed and never wake again, without realizing that the rest of your life is a dream. (—'The Beak Doctor')
September 1, 2016
This is a phenomenal novella demanding multiple reads, coupled with short works of fiction. I first discovered it in "The Weird", edited by the VanderMeers, and lucked into a copy of this edition awhile later. It concerns the wanderings of a doctor in a mist-saturated town plagued by a sleeping sickness. There isn't a great deal of plot, and as such it has been described as "Joycean" in certain respects due primarily to the reader being subjected to a stream-of-consciousness narration from the protagonist's perspective. This is a work of tone, atmosphere, and character, all of which are handled excellently. Although there may be influences from Joyce as well as Kubin, Basso's voice is distinct among them and worth reading. People with an interest in the Rabelaisian/carnivalesque will also find much to dissect.
June 11, 2022
The short fiction included are all highly enjoyable works of experimental horror, but the titular novella is the real highlight here, an absolute masterclass in atmosphere and the uncanny. Dense to the point of being basically indecipherable, it's a piece propelled entirely by mood. It's impressive if a mood-piece manages to sustain its momentum for 15 pages. Miraculous if its 30 pages. Practically unheard of as a full 85 pager. The most compelling story I've never understood a lick of.
October 26, 2014
Read "The Beak Doctor" in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. It was lauded in the intro as a having "had a cult following among avant-garde gothic writers since it was first published by the Chicago Review in 1977". Since the Gothic and the Avant-Garde are two of my favourite things, I was eagerly holding my breath for greatness. However, I´m not sure if that ´greatness´ ever came.
It starts with a plague doctor (the name of the text is from the famous ´beak masks´ these plague doctors used to wear) going to a house to see a plague victim. Her father, an old man, has found her in the street and he and the plague doctor hover over her in the shuttered half-light. It says a lot that the thing that has stuck with me most from this story is the nauseatingly vivid description of her plague-infected genitalia. One pinpoint of grotesque realism in the midst of an endless monologue of amorphous stuttering.
Our protagonist, the plague doctor, then leaves the house and goes out into the fog obscured streets. He is trying to find a place, what that place is or where it is is unclear. It is the metaphorical ´end point´ of the narrative. During this journey the protagonist and plot is diffused. Instead we have a mosaic like procession of dream-like images and sensations with no central point or focus.
Don´t get me wrong, the prose is beautiful, the language distilled to a fine point. However, it still left me cold. I am not a person who is into straightforward realist narratives, but this left me gasping for something, anything, to hold on to.
Unfortunately that "something" never arrived.
The text felt intensely self-indulgent and artificial, with the images becoming so opaque and repetitive that there was no space left for the reader. The paragraphs that had felt so breathtaking at first lost all sense of emotional urgency when repeated ad-finitum, leaving a work that felt turgid and static.
Basso said that he got a lot of his inspiration from his dreams. And this work clearly demonstrates that fact. For much of it you feel like a guest in somebody else´s nightmare. I love this. I love how Burroughs does it. I love how surreal writers and film makers do it. Do I love how Basso does it?
Truthfully, no, I don´t.
The Beak Doctor is an amazing work of art, but one that is to be admired, not enjoyed.
It starts with a plague doctor (the name of the text is from the famous ´beak masks´ these plague doctors used to wear) going to a house to see a plague victim. Her father, an old man, has found her in the street and he and the plague doctor hover over her in the shuttered half-light. It says a lot that the thing that has stuck with me most from this story is the nauseatingly vivid description of her plague-infected genitalia. One pinpoint of grotesque realism in the midst of an endless monologue of amorphous stuttering.
Our protagonist, the plague doctor, then leaves the house and goes out into the fog obscured streets. He is trying to find a place, what that place is or where it is is unclear. It is the metaphorical ´end point´ of the narrative. During this journey the protagonist and plot is diffused. Instead we have a mosaic like procession of dream-like images and sensations with no central point or focus.
Don´t get me wrong, the prose is beautiful, the language distilled to a fine point. However, it still left me cold. I am not a person who is into straightforward realist narratives, but this left me gasping for something, anything, to hold on to.
Unfortunately that "something" never arrived.
The text felt intensely self-indulgent and artificial, with the images becoming so opaque and repetitive that there was no space left for the reader. The paragraphs that had felt so breathtaking at first lost all sense of emotional urgency when repeated ad-finitum, leaving a work that felt turgid and static.
Basso said that he got a lot of his inspiration from his dreams. And this work clearly demonstrates that fact. For much of it you feel like a guest in somebody else´s nightmare. I love this. I love how Burroughs does it. I love how surreal writers and film makers do it. Do I love how Basso does it?
Truthfully, no, I don´t.
The Beak Doctor is an amazing work of art, but one that is to be admired, not enjoyed.
February 13, 2018
3.5 Stars
The prose is so strange, it feels insane. There were parts that were really great, and others that made little, if any, sense. The scrambled effect is intentional and actually kind of cool. The unique writing added to the weird vibe and I felt like I was looking at an impressionistic art piece. I didn’t understand it fully, but I think that is how it’s meant to be.
The prose is so strange, it feels insane. There were parts that were really great, and others that made little, if any, sense. The scrambled effect is intentional and actually kind of cool. The unique writing added to the weird vibe and I felt like I was looking at an impressionistic art piece. I didn’t understand it fully, but I think that is how it’s meant to be.
December 14, 2012
All the words in this book -- and even moreso the sentences -- are weird and thick and leave a smear of s-s-something across the outer and inner eyes. My mouth is filmy after reading only the title story, which was good like good port is good -- in treasured sips.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews