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The Universe as Performance Art
154 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2024
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October 10, 2024
THE UNIVERSE AS PERFORMANCE ART is the debut collection of short stories by Colby Smith, the writer of THE IRONIC SKELETONS, and posits itself as "an indispensable contribution to the Neo-Decadent international art movement canon" (to quote from the publisher's description of the book in question).
The stories assembled here, though broadly falling (as one might expect) under the stylistic umbrella of Neo-Decadence, also move into some further ranges of literary genres. "A Fable of Salmon" certainly has some Body Horror elements, depicting an orgy that perhaps only a David Cronenberg might find arousing (probably not the author's intended comparison, but when one makes references to "the new flesh," one must expect such a Pavlovian response). Certainly there are some horror aspects as well in "Romulus Craved His Mother's Milk" (a story that didn't entirely work for me, but which ultimately landed thanks to a killer final sentence; on a similar note, see also the collection's final story, "Poets Die"). "The Revelation," one of the better shorter pieces, reads like a kaiju/tokusatsu disaster narrative, only one in which the monsters have been replaced by malevolent weather systems and celestial bodies (all identified with such lofty names as "the Great Smog," "the Thirteenth Sun," and so forth). There are also some science fiction efforts, like "Pheromone Literature" and "Amaterasu Overthrown" (the latter being the better of the two, in my opinion). There are even some humorous pieces, like the very funny "Baron Munchausen's Suicide."
A few of the stories in this collection have previously appeared in other publications, mainly Neo-Decadent anthologies: the best of this lot would be "Hellenic Dropout," which made its debut in 2022's NEO-DECADENCE EVANGELION. Set in Bucharest (that city haunted by the specter of Vlad Tepes, Communism, and the Ceaușescu regime), it revolves around a cast of tattooed freaks, suicidal porn stars, drug dealers, pretentious art posers and pimps, a group of people so decadent and dissolute that, had this story been set a few decades earlier, one could picture Lou Reed making a concept album about it in the 1970s. I was lucky enough to read another of the book's stories, "Aphorisms in Concrete," a number of years ago, back when it was in a more embryonic state: this extended final version is far superior, queer art that doesn't suck.
I think, however, that my favorite story in this collection would be "The Bombed Zoo," which starts off as a mediation on the debt that musical instruments, particularly pianos, owe to slain elephants, before becoming something else entirely, a holocaust of blood and destruction with some fine apocalyptic imagery. I'm not even entirely sure what this story was trying to be, but it's so interestingly written, that I didn't care.
One thing that also interested me about the writing style was the anthropomorphized behavior being performed by nonhuman agents. Hence why we have a blanket that "...looked like the crumpled body of a tuberculosis victim," "water that performs cunnilingus on the continent," "palm trees that swooned in the breeze like a heart," concrete becoming "hot as if it were deeply aroused," and so on.
Potential alternate title for the collection, extracted from the story "Somnii Draconis": FAILED SKETCHES IN THE INFINITE TAPESTRY OF CREATION.
The stories assembled here, though broadly falling (as one might expect) under the stylistic umbrella of Neo-Decadence, also move into some further ranges of literary genres. "A Fable of Salmon" certainly has some Body Horror elements, depicting an orgy that perhaps only a David Cronenberg might find arousing (probably not the author's intended comparison, but when one makes references to "the new flesh," one must expect such a Pavlovian response). Certainly there are some horror aspects as well in "Romulus Craved His Mother's Milk" (a story that didn't entirely work for me, but which ultimately landed thanks to a killer final sentence; on a similar note, see also the collection's final story, "Poets Die"). "The Revelation," one of the better shorter pieces, reads like a kaiju/tokusatsu disaster narrative, only one in which the monsters have been replaced by malevolent weather systems and celestial bodies (all identified with such lofty names as "the Great Smog," "the Thirteenth Sun," and so forth). There are also some science fiction efforts, like "Pheromone Literature" and "Amaterasu Overthrown" (the latter being the better of the two, in my opinion). There are even some humorous pieces, like the very funny "Baron Munchausen's Suicide."
A few of the stories in this collection have previously appeared in other publications, mainly Neo-Decadent anthologies: the best of this lot would be "Hellenic Dropout," which made its debut in 2022's NEO-DECADENCE EVANGELION. Set in Bucharest (that city haunted by the specter of Vlad Tepes, Communism, and the Ceaușescu regime), it revolves around a cast of tattooed freaks, suicidal porn stars, drug dealers, pretentious art posers and pimps, a group of people so decadent and dissolute that, had this story been set a few decades earlier, one could picture Lou Reed making a concept album about it in the 1970s. I was lucky enough to read another of the book's stories, "Aphorisms in Concrete," a number of years ago, back when it was in a more embryonic state: this extended final version is far superior, queer art that doesn't suck.
I think, however, that my favorite story in this collection would be "The Bombed Zoo," which starts off as a mediation on the debt that musical instruments, particularly pianos, owe to slain elephants, before becoming something else entirely, a holocaust of blood and destruction with some fine apocalyptic imagery. I'm not even entirely sure what this story was trying to be, but it's so interestingly written, that I didn't care.
One thing that also interested me about the writing style was the anthropomorphized behavior being performed by nonhuman agents. Hence why we have a blanket that "...looked like the crumpled body of a tuberculosis victim," "water that performs cunnilingus on the continent," "palm trees that swooned in the breeze like a heart," concrete becoming "hot as if it were deeply aroused," and so on.
Potential alternate title for the collection, extracted from the story "Somnii Draconis": FAILED SKETCHES IN THE INFINITE TAPESTRY OF CREATION.
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