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Green Lights
Green Lights is a surreal fable set in a neighborhood that goes on forever, where the light is always changing color. It's the story of two people in love, a friend with a problem, and an old man who eats children; but also one about perception, the gaps between universes, and the struggle to find happiness in a dangerous, sometimes incomprehensible world.
"Spacious and mysterious, like a fairytale from Cloud City."
-Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
"Kyle Muntz wants to talk to you about color. And you’ll want to listen, because the light that flickers and floats behind this extraordinarily conceived and executed book will have you utterly transfixed. This is a book about love, loss, pain, and other people – the big important stuff – but also about the way we perceive, the way the world shapes itself, and the way we shape ourselves in response. “The sky can only go so long without a moon,” writes Muntz, and so instead of taking away the moon, he’s given us a new sky – one that seems as fickle as starlight, even as it folds us in and lights our way in the darkness. Green Lights is a singular, beautiful book."
-Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies
"Kyle Muntz has attained an uncanny access to the places where the boulevards of perception and memory veer into the rutted gutters of longing and loss that run alongside them. Ghosts, colors, dreams, and the everyday coexist blissfully in the kaleidoscopic Green Lights. Muntz spins ephemera into koans, koans into stories, and eventually the stories themselves coalesce in a sort of giddy, gorgeous wisdom that feels as elusive and necessary as breath itself."
-Tim Horvath, author of Understories
"A novel freed from time and restriction, by turns impish and sinister."
-Robert Kloss, author of The Alligators of Abraham
"Spacious and mysterious, like a fairytale from Cloud City."
-Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
"Kyle Muntz wants to talk to you about color. And you’ll want to listen, because the light that flickers and floats behind this extraordinarily conceived and executed book will have you utterly transfixed. This is a book about love, loss, pain, and other people – the big important stuff – but also about the way we perceive, the way the world shapes itself, and the way we shape ourselves in response. “The sky can only go so long without a moon,” writes Muntz, and so instead of taking away the moon, he’s given us a new sky – one that seems as fickle as starlight, even as it folds us in and lights our way in the darkness. Green Lights is a singular, beautiful book."
-Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies
"Kyle Muntz has attained an uncanny access to the places where the boulevards of perception and memory veer into the rutted gutters of longing and loss that run alongside them. Ghosts, colors, dreams, and the everyday coexist blissfully in the kaleidoscopic Green Lights. Muntz spins ephemera into koans, koans into stories, and eventually the stories themselves coalesce in a sort of giddy, gorgeous wisdom that feels as elusive and necessary as breath itself."
-Tim Horvath, author of Understories
"A novel freed from time and restriction, by turns impish and sinister."
-Robert Kloss, author of The Alligators of Abraham
- GenresLiterary FictionFiction
100 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2014
2 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
Kyle Muntz
7 books122 followersKyle Muntz is the author of "The Pain Eater", a literary horror novel published by Clash Books in July 2022.
Check out "The Pain Eater" here:
https://www.clashbooks.com/new-produc...
He's also the writer and designer of "The Pale City," a dark fantasy RPG released on PC in 2020.
Link:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/11...
Check out "The Pain Eater" here:
https://www.clashbooks.com/new-produc...
He's also the writer and designer of "The Pale City," a dark fantasy RPG released on PC in 2020.
Link:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/11...
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 28, 2018
I want to talk about color. It saturates and streaks and becomes mottled and fades. Different colors mark each day, which eternally turns into another, and sometimes there are hills to climb and flowers to dwell in. Mountains with pools of water on top steal sections of lives, leaving the observer stranded at the top. Lost colors reappear. They change and yet they persevere.
May 17, 2014
I'm violently torn between thinking this is Muntz's most approachable work and his most complexly enigmatic. The fact that it is beautiful and brilliant would go without saying, if I hadn't just said it. It has both the etherial comfort and disquiet of myth combined with both the bare humor and starkness of alt lit. There isn't a good way to sum this; reading is the only way to get even a fleeting grasp on a little bit of it. Do that.
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August 5, 2016February 7. 2014
In his semi-world of predominate primary colors, Kyle Muntz depicts a monolithic landscape through the desire of fire and ice and skeleton and cane and in a place where ‘trees looked like flower.’ Like a filmmaker, Muntz uses the literary device of these colorless collapsible reflectors of colors to bring to light and to highlight and to heighten the portrait of his narrative on minimalism. He quickly introduces us to E, the sweetheart of the protagonist, and M, the mastermind behind the machine, and to a girl who plays violin and drinks water, and we are fortunate to be introduced to an impolite, calorie-conscious octopus named Gregory. He is the only character in Muntz’s novella with a full first name. Most drop out of thin air into his world with their first initials. Green Lights reads like fragments of memory delivered out of Ingmar Bergman’s films, and at times, the leap from one section to another, from one color to the next, invites the readers to download quickly the color of the moment into their subconscious to enhance their perception of Muntz’s reductive reality. Once in awhile, we land on a sentence such as ‘the moon said she liked being a girl.’ There is something delicate and tender about this unceremonious gesture that invites us to think that Muntz’s sensitivity and symmetry to words juxtaposed against his casual, nonchalant depiction of violence and vomit, and to the elements of the universe are laudable. Perhaps my favorite moment from Muntz’s childlike cloistral and hermetic world is the part where the protagonist thaws his room and melts people for employment. Perhaps Green Lights is a type of flamethrower for the mind or something that a polygamous street sign wants to marry.
In his semi-world of predominate primary colors, Kyle Muntz depicts a monolithic landscape through the desire of fire and ice and skeleton and cane and in a place where ‘trees looked like flower.’ Like a filmmaker, Muntz uses the literary device of these colorless collapsible reflectors of colors to bring to light and to highlight and to heighten the portrait of his narrative on minimalism. He quickly introduces us to E, the sweetheart of the protagonist, and M, the mastermind behind the machine, and to a girl who plays violin and drinks water, and we are fortunate to be introduced to an impolite, calorie-conscious octopus named Gregory. He is the only character in Muntz’s novella with a full first name. Most drop out of thin air into his world with their first initials. Green Lights reads like fragments of memory delivered out of Ingmar Bergman’s films, and at times, the leap from one section to another, from one color to the next, invites the readers to download quickly the color of the moment into their subconscious to enhance their perception of Muntz’s reductive reality. Once in awhile, we land on a sentence such as ‘the moon said she liked being a girl.’ There is something delicate and tender about this unceremonious gesture that invites us to think that Muntz’s sensitivity and symmetry to words juxtaposed against his casual, nonchalant depiction of violence and vomit, and to the elements of the universe are laudable. Perhaps my favorite moment from Muntz’s childlike cloistral and hermetic world is the part where the protagonist thaws his room and melts people for employment. Perhaps Green Lights is a type of flamethrower for the mind or something that a polygamous street sign wants to marry.
February 6, 2014
An evershifting narrative/world. It's all surreal and beautiful but it manages to capture the feeling of being alive with other humans better than many novels I've ever read. In a way, it reminds me of Samuel R Delany's Dhalgren, although much more focused and compact, but it has that same sort of lawlessness found there, where reality's laws and rules can shift, and the shifting changes so many things, but people are still just people, acting strangely. Humanly.
Interview to come!
Interview to come!
July 7, 2014
Dreamscape; Existentialism; Echoes of Religion and Tradition—these, among others, represent the themes that are presented to us, and challenge us, in the reading of Kyle Muntz’s Green Lights, a novella structured within a surrealist neighborhood that responds to and depends upon the current spectral landscape.
That is to say, color, and the narrator’s fixation on and repetition of the phrase, “I want to talk about color.” Whether or not this is a literal reference to the desire to discuss the color spectrum, and whether or not this desire is ever achieved, is somewhat unanswerable within the context of this work. Green Lights, from very early-on, becomes a dreamscape. This is not to narrow the focus of the novella, or an attempt to devise one umbrella term for it; rather, it explains some of the expectation, and even the overwhelming acceptance, of the surreal, the unreal, the sublime, as they are presented through these various worlds of color, strung within the landscape of one neighborhood.
Imagine, for a moment, one of your strangest dreams in which you felt the need to do something, to achieve a particular goal; you were then probably met with distractions, diversions, tangents, that all at once abstracted that goal, even buried it, until such a time came that an event, a sight, triggered a reminder of that earlier goal. Until that occurs, however—until the narrator can again say, “I want to talk about color”—those distractions are perceived as real (as normal, even) until such a time comes that the actual goal, the reality from which the dream is based, can be presented as a contrasting point, and the strangeness of those previous occurrences, upon awakening, can be scrutinized. Without that contrasting point, without that goal, though, all the strangeness contained in that dream can simply exist without further explanation—which would, in turn, allow some of the beauty of the surrealist aspects of the story to deflate (as the surreal has a way of not only normalizing itself within the context of a piece, but also spends some time drawing attention to itself, its weirdness, and its weird beauty).
What becomes so fascinating about this repetition of a fairly-simple want—the desire to talk about color—is not only the return to it, from strange observations of large flowers and a man eating children and a talking octopus, but how its simplicity draws greater attention to the impact of these colors on the neighborhood and its inhabitants within. We find ourselves—or, at least, I find myself—looking for patterns in this varying spectrum: How does the narrator’s mindset change from color to color? How do we explain E’s disappearances? The connections between the moon and the girl with the violin and her hiding places? The octopus? The man who eats children and later attempts acts of sacrifice? How do these inhabitants, this neighborhood, change with the passing of colors—everything in green, everything cast in a blue light, seeing red, et cetera?
Can we actually create a correlation between color and act, color and mood, color and the mind?
Perhaps, if given enough time, we could—but I don’t think that is the point. Given that this is a surrealist piece, and (in my mind) a dreamscape of sorts, such a set of correlations would ultimately contain exceptions, inconsistencies, and would fall apart. And that is the point. While the narrator may be under the guise of wanting to talk about color, trying to portray specifics of what can occur within each color-scape would be overly systemic for something so rooted in the surreal . . . But this fascination with the correlation between color and mind, however brief, remains so because of our very-human desire for explanations, for answers, which dreams often do not (cannot, will not) give us, just as the surreal doesn’t.
. . . Which is perhaps where the importance and power of the existential, and even religious, ties come into play. I’ve come to expect certain complexities in Muntz’s work, including (but, by far, not limited to) questions rooted in existentialism: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What do these happenings mean? While Green Lights does not constantly ask these questions verbatim, they are rooted, both, in the happenings of the story, from color to color, and in the narrator’s reactions to and thoughts about such happenings. Such moments as the narrator’s interactions with M, or the confrontation with the octopus, or the inability for the moon to remain out of the sky forever all point to this larger interconnectedness. What’s interesting, too, are the subtle elements of religion and even tradition that occur in the text—from M’s ritualistic act with water that seemed to take root from a Native American wake, to the ritualistic aspect of sacrifice with the old man. These moments, when paired with the more existentially-rooted questions, stand out against the dreamscape, because (whether or not they are occurring in a dream-state) they are real to us, these questions and the desire to connect, whether or not the situation in which they are presented is unusual, or even impossible, in waking context.
Perhaps that is what I love most about Muntz’s work, particularly Green Lights—the connections we as readers can make, through the interconnectivity of dreamscape and existentialism. Whether or not we are meant to know the exact role of each color, whether or not we are meant to know the exact consumeristic meaning behind the man who eats children or the moon’s rendezvous with this neighborhood, we are in some manner meant to connect through those experiences we possess and those acts we perform: we dream, and we desire, and we desire to know our place and purpose within a larger context, whether that context is the size of a neighborhood or the universe.
Kyle Muntz’s Green Lights may, at the foundation, be about the goings-on in a town in which a color spectrum is highly integral and what occurs in these various color settings, but when we begin to look deeper, at all the layers beneath, we find questions of possibility and purpose, and observations of joy and wonder, weirdness and beauty . . . We find life, in all its complexity and strangeness, through one of the scopes of greatest potential for exploration and observation: the dreamscape. This novella, while complex and with many possibilities of interpretation, leaves itself open to our intentions of connection as readers, while continuing to confound us and present us with new avenues through which these characters may traverse and transform and grow, with us and before us.
That is to say, color, and the narrator’s fixation on and repetition of the phrase, “I want to talk about color.” Whether or not this is a literal reference to the desire to discuss the color spectrum, and whether or not this desire is ever achieved, is somewhat unanswerable within the context of this work. Green Lights, from very early-on, becomes a dreamscape. This is not to narrow the focus of the novella, or an attempt to devise one umbrella term for it; rather, it explains some of the expectation, and even the overwhelming acceptance, of the surreal, the unreal, the sublime, as they are presented through these various worlds of color, strung within the landscape of one neighborhood.
Imagine, for a moment, one of your strangest dreams in which you felt the need to do something, to achieve a particular goal; you were then probably met with distractions, diversions, tangents, that all at once abstracted that goal, even buried it, until such a time came that an event, a sight, triggered a reminder of that earlier goal. Until that occurs, however—until the narrator can again say, “I want to talk about color”—those distractions are perceived as real (as normal, even) until such a time comes that the actual goal, the reality from which the dream is based, can be presented as a contrasting point, and the strangeness of those previous occurrences, upon awakening, can be scrutinized. Without that contrasting point, without that goal, though, all the strangeness contained in that dream can simply exist without further explanation—which would, in turn, allow some of the beauty of the surrealist aspects of the story to deflate (as the surreal has a way of not only normalizing itself within the context of a piece, but also spends some time drawing attention to itself, its weirdness, and its weird beauty).
What becomes so fascinating about this repetition of a fairly-simple want—the desire to talk about color—is not only the return to it, from strange observations of large flowers and a man eating children and a talking octopus, but how its simplicity draws greater attention to the impact of these colors on the neighborhood and its inhabitants within. We find ourselves—or, at least, I find myself—looking for patterns in this varying spectrum: How does the narrator’s mindset change from color to color? How do we explain E’s disappearances? The connections between the moon and the girl with the violin and her hiding places? The octopus? The man who eats children and later attempts acts of sacrifice? How do these inhabitants, this neighborhood, change with the passing of colors—everything in green, everything cast in a blue light, seeing red, et cetera?
Can we actually create a correlation between color and act, color and mood, color and the mind?
Perhaps, if given enough time, we could—but I don’t think that is the point. Given that this is a surrealist piece, and (in my mind) a dreamscape of sorts, such a set of correlations would ultimately contain exceptions, inconsistencies, and would fall apart. And that is the point. While the narrator may be under the guise of wanting to talk about color, trying to portray specifics of what can occur within each color-scape would be overly systemic for something so rooted in the surreal . . . But this fascination with the correlation between color and mind, however brief, remains so because of our very-human desire for explanations, for answers, which dreams often do not (cannot, will not) give us, just as the surreal doesn’t.
. . . Which is perhaps where the importance and power of the existential, and even religious, ties come into play. I’ve come to expect certain complexities in Muntz’s work, including (but, by far, not limited to) questions rooted in existentialism: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What do these happenings mean? While Green Lights does not constantly ask these questions verbatim, they are rooted, both, in the happenings of the story, from color to color, and in the narrator’s reactions to and thoughts about such happenings. Such moments as the narrator’s interactions with M, or the confrontation with the octopus, or the inability for the moon to remain out of the sky forever all point to this larger interconnectedness. What’s interesting, too, are the subtle elements of religion and even tradition that occur in the text—from M’s ritualistic act with water that seemed to take root from a Native American wake, to the ritualistic aspect of sacrifice with the old man. These moments, when paired with the more existentially-rooted questions, stand out against the dreamscape, because (whether or not they are occurring in a dream-state) they are real to us, these questions and the desire to connect, whether or not the situation in which they are presented is unusual, or even impossible, in waking context.
Perhaps that is what I love most about Muntz’s work, particularly Green Lights—the connections we as readers can make, through the interconnectivity of dreamscape and existentialism. Whether or not we are meant to know the exact role of each color, whether or not we are meant to know the exact consumeristic meaning behind the man who eats children or the moon’s rendezvous with this neighborhood, we are in some manner meant to connect through those experiences we possess and those acts we perform: we dream, and we desire, and we desire to know our place and purpose within a larger context, whether that context is the size of a neighborhood or the universe.
Kyle Muntz’s Green Lights may, at the foundation, be about the goings-on in a town in which a color spectrum is highly integral and what occurs in these various color settings, but when we begin to look deeper, at all the layers beneath, we find questions of possibility and purpose, and observations of joy and wonder, weirdness and beauty . . . We find life, in all its complexity and strangeness, through one of the scopes of greatest potential for exploration and observation: the dreamscape. This novella, while complex and with many possibilities of interpretation, leaves itself open to our intentions of connection as readers, while continuing to confound us and present us with new avenues through which these characters may traverse and transform and grow, with us and before us.
March 29, 2023
Green Lights is an infinite fantasy. Many things at once. Funny, strange, sad. I can’t say exactly what Green Lights is about, because I think it will be different for everyone who experiences it. To share what I found in it would somehow betray my relationship to it. Rest assured that what you will find in these pages is a brief but deeply illuminating personal experience.
October 9, 2014
One of the weirdest little books I've ever read (in a good way). I picked this book up because it's so small and unassuming, it seemed like a good way to kill an hour; I found myself transfixed throughout. "Green Lights" takes place in a violent, surreal dreamscape, and follows the narrator in his interactions with a variety of people (including an old man who eats children and the moon come to earth). The horror is offset by humour; the narrator's attempt to forge connections with others leaves us with insight as to how this strange, senseless world has shaped the people in it.
I'm still not entirely sure what I just read, to be honest. But it's a good sort of confusion -- the type that makes me want to revisit this book again.
I'm still not entirely sure what I just read, to be honest. But it's a good sort of confusion -- the type that makes me want to revisit this book again.
June 24, 2014
Surreal is the word. Green Lights is a surreal adventure on an ordinary street, where the colors are shifting, the sky is uncontainable, interactions with friends and foes are wildly unpredictable. I'd compare this book to one of my all time favorites In Watermelon Sugar, if it was compact, in-flux, packed with danger.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews