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Moieties
- GenresHorror
102 pages, Hardcover
Published May 28, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 15, 2024
If you like horror and transgressive fiction and books that require some effort (like House of Leaves) then I would recommend you try Moieties. This is not a typical reading experience and is more involving than just reading it from front to back. Here we have not only a story, or multiple stories, but also footnotes, annotations and illustrations. It's a gorgeously designed book. I loved the writing style and there is plenty of vivid and visceral imagery involving religion, sex and surgery amongst other things. Other than that I don't want to say much more about this one since I think going in with little knowledge and discovering its uniqueness for yourself will be the best experience.
Thank you to Elytron Frass and Subtle Body Press for sending me a copy for review.
Thank you to Elytron Frass and Subtle Body Press for sending me a copy for review.
August 2, 2024
Elytron Frass’s Moieties is a formally innovative and dense novel combining science fantasy and occultism, telling a story via three separate teams of narrators telling their stories simultaneously on each page.
The story’s protagonists, identified only as L and R, are conjoined female (L) and male (R) twins, connected at the skull. Theirs is the novel’s primary narrative source.
The secondary narrative consists of italicized endnotes written by the twins’ surgical team at the bottom of each page. The surgical team separates the twins less for the sake of separating them than to study how the surgery affects the twins’ previously shared cognitive functions: What happens to the conscience and soul of each twin because of the separation. The twins are also members of a minority religion, which seems to serve as another reason for the secular scientists to experiment on them.
After their surgery, L and R explore the islands around them known as the Seven Enigmas. The islands’ poisonous atmosphere first alters the appearance of exposed flesh, then kills whatever is exposed to it. The twins communicate with each other telepathically and interpret their experiences through the lens of their religious upbringing.
The tertiary narrative is written, like the secondary narrative, by anonymous parties, whose identity is guessed at from the content of what they write. In this case, the narrative seems to be by those parties given to (re)unite the cognitive and spiritual lives of L and R. This supernatural narration is handwritten as marginalia. Moieties has two parts consisting of pages 1-46 and 46-1, both parts including handwritten marginalia written on one side of the page that is mirrored (i.e., reversed) on the other side (the reflection switching from the recto to the verso page after the halfway point), beginning with L’s narration, which dwells on R’s communications with her.
The surgeon’s note hints that something might be off in the relationship between L and R: “Subject L is being prepared for a novel separation from Subject R, her conjoined form.” Note that the surgeon does not say that the two will be separated from each other but that L will be separated from R, as if R lacks subjectivity. This attitude is reinforced by L’s claims that, while the two may be conjoined and thus identical, they are nonetheless “ever asynchronous—two incompatible, opposite unequivocals,” begging for “defilement and erasure by [L’s] fervent hands.” As the novel progresses, the story is also told from R’s point of view and the point of view of the twins as a single consciousness.
Each enumerated page in the novel has its double, so that one page feeds back into the other, like a Moebius strip. Specifically, the statements making up the handwritten marginalia on each page are completed by their twin page. Thus, the handwritten marginalia of L’s page 34 is completed on R’s matching page 34, running from the top of L34 to the top of R34, down R34’s side, then upside down along the bottom of R34, and continued to completion back on L34, also upside down along the bottom then one side of the page. Here’s an example. (Breaks from page to page are indicated by double slashes. All irregular spellings and punctuation are the author’s.)
"WE WERE CAREER SCIENTISTS EMPLOYED AS // NEOPHYTE THEURGISTS BY AN ANDROGYNOUS FRANKENSTEIN OUTSIDER TO BIND THEE DISPARATE HALVES OF THIS BOOK WITH THEE RESOLUTE EFFORT TO ACTIVATE // METAPHORICAL PHILOSOPHERS STONES THAT WILL BEAR AN ILLUMINATE THEE ULTIMATE COMPLETENESS OF INCOMPLETION"
While the concerns of the occult don’t compel me as a reader, nor do discourses about the science/religion dichotomy, I appreciate and admire Frass’s attempt to represent in physical form the psychological and spiritual relationship between the twins, which is a success. An aspect of Frass’s writing that could be improved would be to replace adjectives (which run too thickly in for my tastes) with verbs. For every adjective used to describe a noun is a noun untapped that would make the visual elements do work. Thus, scenes that are visually rich may contain little action, despite their profusion of, say, gore, body parts, and wyrms. Frass clearly has talent; it just needs some refinement to bring about narratives complex, compelling, and wholly satisfying.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
The story’s protagonists, identified only as L and R, are conjoined female (L) and male (R) twins, connected at the skull. Theirs is the novel’s primary narrative source.
The secondary narrative consists of italicized endnotes written by the twins’ surgical team at the bottom of each page. The surgical team separates the twins less for the sake of separating them than to study how the surgery affects the twins’ previously shared cognitive functions: What happens to the conscience and soul of each twin because of the separation. The twins are also members of a minority religion, which seems to serve as another reason for the secular scientists to experiment on them.
After their surgery, L and R explore the islands around them known as the Seven Enigmas. The islands’ poisonous atmosphere first alters the appearance of exposed flesh, then kills whatever is exposed to it. The twins communicate with each other telepathically and interpret their experiences through the lens of their religious upbringing.
The tertiary narrative is written, like the secondary narrative, by anonymous parties, whose identity is guessed at from the content of what they write. In this case, the narrative seems to be by those parties given to (re)unite the cognitive and spiritual lives of L and R. This supernatural narration is handwritten as marginalia. Moieties has two parts consisting of pages 1-46 and 46-1, both parts including handwritten marginalia written on one side of the page that is mirrored (i.e., reversed) on the other side (the reflection switching from the recto to the verso page after the halfway point), beginning with L’s narration, which dwells on R’s communications with her.
The surgeon’s note hints that something might be off in the relationship between L and R: “Subject L is being prepared for a novel separation from Subject R, her conjoined form.” Note that the surgeon does not say that the two will be separated from each other but that L will be separated from R, as if R lacks subjectivity. This attitude is reinforced by L’s claims that, while the two may be conjoined and thus identical, they are nonetheless “ever asynchronous—two incompatible, opposite unequivocals,” begging for “defilement and erasure by [L’s] fervent hands.” As the novel progresses, the story is also told from R’s point of view and the point of view of the twins as a single consciousness.
Each enumerated page in the novel has its double, so that one page feeds back into the other, like a Moebius strip. Specifically, the statements making up the handwritten marginalia on each page are completed by their twin page. Thus, the handwritten marginalia of L’s page 34 is completed on R’s matching page 34, running from the top of L34 to the top of R34, down R34’s side, then upside down along the bottom of R34, and continued to completion back on L34, also upside down along the bottom then one side of the page. Here’s an example. (Breaks from page to page are indicated by double slashes. All irregular spellings and punctuation are the author’s.)
"WE WERE CAREER SCIENTISTS EMPLOYED AS // NEOPHYTE THEURGISTS BY AN ANDROGYNOUS FRANKENSTEIN OUTSIDER TO BIND THEE DISPARATE HALVES OF THIS BOOK WITH THEE RESOLUTE EFFORT TO ACTIVATE // METAPHORICAL PHILOSOPHERS STONES THAT WILL BEAR AN ILLUMINATE THEE ULTIMATE COMPLETENESS OF INCOMPLETION"
While the concerns of the occult don’t compel me as a reader, nor do discourses about the science/religion dichotomy, I appreciate and admire Frass’s attempt to represent in physical form the psychological and spiritual relationship between the twins, which is a success. An aspect of Frass’s writing that could be improved would be to replace adjectives (which run too thickly in for my tastes) with verbs. For every adjective used to describe a noun is a noun untapped that would make the visual elements do work. Thus, scenes that are visually rich may contain little action, despite their profusion of, say, gore, body parts, and wyrms. Frass clearly has talent; it just needs some refinement to bring about narratives complex, compelling, and wholly satisfying.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
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January 14, 2025
I'm not educated/informed enough on Gnosticism to tread further into the story's consumption of this field but I have read enough Huysmans (to somewhat understand Satanism) or Klossowski (to dissect the medieval aura surrounding some (or one) of his works) to join the dots and see the potential influence here amongst other writers specifically closer to the field - Gnosticism - itself.
A lot of marginalised-text and footnoting and back-and-forth and reversed-text in this piece acting as additional sub-narrations to the main body of work acting as separate characters to the overall piece; my main takeaway was: it was an experimental work, it was transgressive, it introduced me to a whole new style of writing to love reading and love learning from, it has a beautiful lyricism to some of the sentence flow, the visionary aspect is to be awed.
I loved it, I just, loved it.
A lot of marginalised-text and footnoting and back-and-forth and reversed-text in this piece acting as additional sub-narrations to the main body of work acting as separate characters to the overall piece; my main takeaway was: it was an experimental work, it was transgressive, it introduced me to a whole new style of writing to love reading and love learning from, it has a beautiful lyricism to some of the sentence flow, the visionary aspect is to be awed.
I loved it, I just, loved it.
January 28, 2025
Wow that was fun! Eyeballs and worms and snakes and wings and lots of blood and semen. Wonderful stuff!
June 23, 2024
Let us be clear about something: this book is PROBABLY not for you.
But if you really think it is made for you, continue reading.
The premise is simple, conjoined twins share neuronal space, they are studied by cold apersonal scientists whose only interest are the abstractions they can wrestle out of the suffering and delirant twins.
The story, too, reminds one of one of Thomas Bernhard's short early novels, maybe AMRAS, in which two twins are locked up in a tower, of their own accord, really, and are regularly visited by a doctor. In that case, they are each intellectual autists of high reach and high disfunctionality.
In contrast with Bernhard's account, in which the surrounding main image of the story is flat and composed of legal matters, drug-induced meaningless descriptions of situations without reason except that extracted by other autistic overthinkers, Elytron Frass gives you layers of metaphysical worlds that may or may not be real, but which are very real to those who experience them.
The twins each live their own world, and also a shared world, a world and the many worlds of monsters, of divinity, of surrealist symbology, all housed or stacked on the physical one. How the reader wishes to create a hierarchy or a circular structure out of these, remains a deeply personal affair.
Underpinning the whole thing are the feelings of the reader, the perceptions of the reader, which are shaken through the experiential protocol designed by the author: that of having to flip back and forth in the book, of reading in two different directions, of reading footnotes not as comments to something on the main text on the page but as a third narrative of its own, also flowing in two directions.
The book starts on either side of the cover, front and back, and flows towards the middle.
This might seem like a game, and it is.
If you like to play, and you like to play with your sanity from the apparent comfort of your home, you can challenge this.
Beware, though, and accept responsibility for the results thereof.
But if you really think it is made for you, continue reading.
The premise is simple, conjoined twins share neuronal space, they are studied by cold apersonal scientists whose only interest are the abstractions they can wrestle out of the suffering and delirant twins.
The story, too, reminds one of one of Thomas Bernhard's short early novels, maybe AMRAS, in which two twins are locked up in a tower, of their own accord, really, and are regularly visited by a doctor. In that case, they are each intellectual autists of high reach and high disfunctionality.
In contrast with Bernhard's account, in which the surrounding main image of the story is flat and composed of legal matters, drug-induced meaningless descriptions of situations without reason except that extracted by other autistic overthinkers, Elytron Frass gives you layers of metaphysical worlds that may or may not be real, but which are very real to those who experience them.
The twins each live their own world, and also a shared world, a world and the many worlds of monsters, of divinity, of surrealist symbology, all housed or stacked on the physical one. How the reader wishes to create a hierarchy or a circular structure out of these, remains a deeply personal affair.
Underpinning the whole thing are the feelings of the reader, the perceptions of the reader, which are shaken through the experiential protocol designed by the author: that of having to flip back and forth in the book, of reading in two different directions, of reading footnotes not as comments to something on the main text on the page but as a third narrative of its own, also flowing in two directions.
The book starts on either side of the cover, front and back, and flows towards the middle.
This might seem like a game, and it is.
If you like to play, and you like to play with your sanity from the apparent comfort of your home, you can challenge this.
Beware, though, and accept responsibility for the results thereof.
July 27, 2024
How far shall we go to be reunited, even if it should destroy us? This is the question at the heart of Elytron Frass’s Moieties, a meditation on the mystical dictum that pure being, the immediate oneness of Pleroma, is for us indistinguishable from absolute nothing. In pursuit of this revelation, Moieties pushes past the formal and material limits of the novel itself, which must be read forwards, backwards, and out of sequence if the inquisitive reader is to extract its truth. This work transpires in a mise en abyme, in two parts which mirror one another and converge on a central point that can only be inferred from its reflections. Though we glimpse it askew, the halves fuse in a Gnostic syzygy, in which the separations of inner and outer, one and other, love and death, come crashing together into oblivion.
November 12, 2024
‘MOIETES’ proudly displays its violence and depravity in extreme. Yet it is important to note that the work is not one of self-flagellation or a means to be ‘edgy’ in a bid to coerce the reader into thinking they are sinning by indulging in the text. Nor does the work feel like a personal insight into its creator, with Frass understanding how to wield tools of suffering and excess to deliver depth hidden behind a visceral strike. There are fundamental truths buried behind the gore and various goopy emissions after all.
Full review here: https://theaither.com/book-review-moi...
Full review here: https://theaither.com/book-review-moi...
June 23, 2024
Elytron Frass
has created worlds of beautifully brutal, mind-blowing imagery that stir deep feelings of reflection, longing, lust, death, and conquest in MOIETIES. I'm about half way thru and I feel I may never get out in one piece.
Amazing dark fantasy adventure and so much deeper than that. It's made a mess of my brain. This is what a good book should do, engage and consume you. I'm split right down the middle in serious thought and wonder. A must read
has created worlds of beautifully brutal, mind-blowing imagery that stir deep feelings of reflection, longing, lust, death, and conquest in MOIETIES. I'm about half way thru and I feel I may never get out in one piece.
Amazing dark fantasy adventure and so much deeper than that. It's made a mess of my brain. This is what a good book should do, engage and consume you. I'm split right down the middle in serious thought and wonder. A must read
September 25, 2024
Truly gorgeous.
The word "transgressive" surrounding this work is a mistake. This is just what words can do unburdened.
The word "transgressive" surrounding this work is a mistake. This is just what words can do unburdened.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews