Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future

by Barton Justin

The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away. Hidden Valleys starts from the perception that the human world is an eerie place, particularly in relation to its stories and dreams. It also starts from events that took place in North Yorkshire, in 1978. A work of philosophy, an account of experiences, and a biography of a year, it is simultaneously a challenging cultural analysis, drawing on novels, songs and films. It argues for lucidity over reason, becomings over conventional gender and familialism, groups over state politics, and for an escape to wider realities in place of the delusions of religion. Most centrally it breaks open a view of a futural dimension that coexists with the present, and which intrinsically involves a heightened awareness and evaluation of the planet, of women, and of the abstract. Inseparably it is also a detective investigation into the causes of the eerie human predicament. The book reaches the planetary by starting from a singular place, it reaches reality by starting from dreams, and it reaches the future by finding a doorway in the past.

214 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2015

Reviews

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a bit of a diversion toward the back half of the book in which Barton recounts taking C₁₂H₁₆N₂ and watching as cartoon alien creatures slowly peel back the layers of his hallucinated environment in order to "return" him to his quotidian pre-DMT setting (a living room in a house in North London). After forging through 198 pages of this clotted, typo-blighted prose, a less charitable reader would perhaps be left to wonder if the book itself hadn't been edited by one of Barton's psychedelic phantoms. At the very least, whomever was in charge of seeing to the text may well have been in the grips of some terrible drug frenzy; the punctuation alone—be on the lookout for the rare double-barreled commma,,* which somehow manages to detract from the creeping horror of the way in which the em-dash and en-dash are used interchangeably, and often at opposite ends of the same clause—is enough to suggest that all the metatextual chatter re Carlos Castaneda may have inspired the copy editor to supplement his or her deadline coffee with a whole bunch of peyote†.

*!
†or something equally syntax-frying

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got about a third of the way through then gave up. It's not terrible, but I'm just not a fan of rambling, dry, narratives interspersed with awful teenage poetry which loosely serves as a framing for conversations about modernism. This is not me saying I don't like personal narrative in discourse, this is just dreary (think Alain de Botton without the saccharine edge).