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Screaming in Code
A collection of acclaimed author Thomas Wiloch's surreal flash fiction. Accompanied by haunting collages by the author.
58 pages, Paperback
First published August 6, 2006
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May 6, 2022
Screaming in Code by Thomas Wiloch
Thirty-five prose poems collected here from a master of the form. Sometimes these short pieces are referred to as microfiction or flash fiction or short-short stories, but whatever term you like, they are certainly unique. Below is a sample of nine from this collection. Thomas Wiloch also created montage art to accompany his writing. However, since none of his work is available on the web, I've included the above Max Ernst montage.
How to Read This Book
Individuals 12 and over, read 2 prose poems every 4 hours as needed. Do not exceed 8 prose poems in 24 hours or read for more than 10 days. Keep this and all reading material out of children's reach. And, as with any book, if you are pregnant, or nursing a baby, seek the advice of a literature professional before perusing.
In case of accidental overdose, take a warm TV show to induce vomiting.
The Game
My uncle is in the kitchen tying a length of rope into little nooses, while my mother broods in the library over her favorite lead pipe and my brother in the billiard room cleans his dirty fingernails with the keen blade of a butcher knife. Across the hall my sister sneaks into the conservatory with a revolver in her hand as my grandfather sits quietly on the ballroom floor, spinning his candlestick on the sleek wood surface again and again and again.
Me, I haven't been in the house for ages. Down here in the secret passageway I'm throwing dice by the dim glow of a flashlight beam, trying to roll my way off the board entirely.
I'm learning that, as in all the best games, you can't seem to leave this one alive.
Protected with Mirrors
To protect myself, I swung open my forehead and placed a mirror, facing out, of course! Then I did the same to my chest, peeling back the skin and placing a mirror over my heart. Finally I - very carefully - eased back the skin of my penis and placed my final mirror.
A sense of relief came over me once I had completed my task. Now, whenever my enemies pried into my thoughts, my feelings, and my passions, the mirrors would show them their own twisted faces - leering, ugly, and vicious. I was safe!
After so many restless nights, I suddenly found that I could sleep again.
Father's Hand
The boy was not sure what to do with his dead father's hand. So he dipped the index finger in blood and wrote a word across the sky. The word was so large that everyone could read it. But the word was so mysterious that no one could understand it.
The boy nodded in satisfaction. "There you go, pop."
Windows and Mirrors
My life has been a series of windows and mirrors. I'm either looking out at other people or looking introspectively in at myself. But such is life. It is always ourselves and the others, the interior and the exterior. Only rarely do we find that "other" within ourselves, the window inside the mirror. Even now, as you read my words, I seem to have somehow snuck inside of your mind and taken over your interior voice. But it's just a trick. You're still safely alone.
Crutches
I can't tell you how we came to be broken, me and the others, yet here we are, propped up on crutches. It's hard to balance on the damned things. Sometimes I lean too far over and must adjust one of my crutches quickly to keep from falling. And getting up and down stairs can be a real, as they say, "challenge." But at least I am not alone. The cars are stumbling by on their crutches, the houses have crutches propped under their eaves, the skyscrapers hang like drunks against their trembling crutches, the whole continent, propped up along the coastline by thousands of crutches to keep from falling into the sea. . . .
Empty Buses
I must have fallen asleep, for just a moment, on the bus ride to work that morning. When I opened my eyes I found that I was alone. The seats were all empty. Even the driver was gone. But the bus still rolled along as usual, up one street and down another, making the appointed rounds. I thought this strange but the streets were filled with empty buses like this one chugging along as usual among the driverless cars, the riderless bicycles, past the endless rows of abandoned buildings with "For Sale" signs in all the windows. . . .
And about it all, the soft blue of a birdless sky.
The Suicide Religion
Finally I joined the religion for suicides. On holy days we genuflect before our most sacred of relics - the knife, the revolver, the noose, and the vial of poison. We pilgrimage to the shrines of our people in Jonestown and Wacco. We tattoo the names of our favorite saints - Sylvia Plath, Adolf Hitler, Ernest Hemingway - on the backs of each other's hands.
Ours is not a noisy religion. We do not proselytize. But once a year we are required to go door to door and show our neighbors the scars on our wrists and wistfully smile.
Let other religions speak of the afterlife with all of its vague pleasures and awful punishments. We stand at the portal between this world and the next, offering a silver key in our trembling hands. "Go ahead," we whisper softly. "Go ahead and unlock that awesome door."
That Winter
At night, the snow would pile into soft, gleaming drifts in the corners of the rooms. Each morning we would wake to find the dresser, the chair, the chest of drawers all draped in snow. Stepping out of bed barefoot, we would find a cold carpet of white in which our footsteps followed us. Our breath was a foggy mist, the mirrors were frosted, the stairs were icy and treacherous. It was a hard winter that year. Even the words we said to each other hung frozen in midair, unheard and unhearable.
American prose poet Thomas Wiloch, 1953-2008
July 25, 2015
A collection of surreal and absurd prose poems: contain a delicious mixture of sombre philosophical aphorisms, deliciously chilling horror, and surreal dream like vignettes - all dripping in a bleak sardonic Ligottian humour... Actually some are more cosy than that, but its always an strange kind of cosy. There's some really great stuff here, including: Tiny White Skulls, Memories of a Glass Jar, Windows and Mirrors, Floating, The Dream Reading, Loneliness is a Simple Melody, Mansion of the Black Butterfly, and the brutal satire on the banal nihilism of modern art, The Performers, which is up there with Ligotti's The Frolic in terms of chill factor! It's really an excellent collection with an excellent graphic design running through it, which is only slightly marred by its POD printing. I'd love to read more of Wiloch but it seems his previous publications are as rare as hens teeth, so I'll have to content myself with this until such time as someone republishes his older stuff.
June 14, 2017
(fractional rating: 4.25 stars)
Few authors seem to make a career of writing largely, if not exclusively, prose-poems, but those who do appear to have an almost fanatical devotion to this controversial literary sub-form. Russell Edson was the foremost North American proponent, along with less prominent and prolific practitioners such as Greg Boyd and Duane Ackerson, but hardly any reason stands for Thomas Wiloch to likewise stand in anyone's shade. Like Edson, Wiloch's work maintains a brilliant distinctiveness though still dimly echoing certain aspects of cross-continental predecessors; if much of Edson's output extends the outrageously absurdist sensibilities of the Stalin-oppressed writer, Daniil Kharms, then the majority of Wiloch's works, though still wonderfully absurd most of the time, displays a more obviously somber shade reminiscent of Kafka and, even moreso, Bruno Schulz.
Beyond the convenience of comparisons, Wiloch's always darkly-hued prose-poems displays a considerable range across their own corner of the emotional and intellectual spectrum. He displays a sharply sardonic wit in such works as "Tell Me I'm Wrong" and "The Suicide Religion"; the former being a homicidal justification based on quantum physics, while the latter suggests the folly of traditional religions' imperatives of "tarrying and carrying on" when, according to their assumptions, the afterlife should be more desirable than this present existence.
Typical of many prose-poem writers, Wiloch has an acute sense of proportion, particularly in the manipulation of it to create uncanny scenes. Whether it's the oxymoronical cosmic perspective of "The Man Who Lived in a Box", the melancholic grandeur of "Floating", or the surprising sentience of "The Locomotive Museum", the use of defamiliarization is often as cerebral as it is emotional in its effects. Such pieces are remarkably evocative and rich in their keenly-focused brevity, and are, at the very least, equal to what I consider to be Edson's own masterpieces ("The Canoeing", "Movements", "An Old Man's High Note", etc.).
Sometimes, Wiloch enters what could be argued as being the territory of flash fiction; "Mansion of the Black Butterfly", "The Performers", and "The Father, Son and Holy Spirit" all break the one-page span, though still concisely-written. But extreme brevity being the natural inclination of both this author and the prose-poem itself, the even more compressed pieces glisten with the seductive luster of nothing less than a black diamond.
And if I have any other very minor criticisms, beyond the occasional omission of a letter or word, it would have to be with the graphic design of the book itself. Sometimes, the images themselves are just simplistic reductions of what Wiloch has already vividly described in his works, so that the visual element frequently seems redundant. The front cover itself being a notable exception--its juxtaposition of Hellenic sculptures with a starry expanse suggesting the human search for harmony amidst universal indifference--the majority of the collages appear, at least to me, as a distraction from the more substantial content; perhaps, Wiloch's talent was more verbally than visually-inclined.
During and, even moreso, after reading, all I could think of was whoever is in legal possession of Wiloch' s literary legacy must see to publishing a definitive volume of collected works. With both Russell Edson and Thomas Wiloch now gone--and no apparent emergence yet of a sufficiently brilliant successor to continue the tradition of the prose-poem--such a publication would seem a necessity to preserving and perpetuating obscure American literary culture, or, at least, the oeuvre of a writer whose way of creating and thinking was as brilliantly distinctive and wondrously strange as the sub-form in which he primarily worked.
Few authors seem to make a career of writing largely, if not exclusively, prose-poems, but those who do appear to have an almost fanatical devotion to this controversial literary sub-form. Russell Edson was the foremost North American proponent, along with less prominent and prolific practitioners such as Greg Boyd and Duane Ackerson, but hardly any reason stands for Thomas Wiloch to likewise stand in anyone's shade. Like Edson, Wiloch's work maintains a brilliant distinctiveness though still dimly echoing certain aspects of cross-continental predecessors; if much of Edson's output extends the outrageously absurdist sensibilities of the Stalin-oppressed writer, Daniil Kharms, then the majority of Wiloch's works, though still wonderfully absurd most of the time, displays a more obviously somber shade reminiscent of Kafka and, even moreso, Bruno Schulz.
Beyond the convenience of comparisons, Wiloch's always darkly-hued prose-poems displays a considerable range across their own corner of the emotional and intellectual spectrum. He displays a sharply sardonic wit in such works as "Tell Me I'm Wrong" and "The Suicide Religion"; the former being a homicidal justification based on quantum physics, while the latter suggests the folly of traditional religions' imperatives of "tarrying and carrying on" when, according to their assumptions, the afterlife should be more desirable than this present existence.
Typical of many prose-poem writers, Wiloch has an acute sense of proportion, particularly in the manipulation of it to create uncanny scenes. Whether it's the oxymoronical cosmic perspective of "The Man Who Lived in a Box", the melancholic grandeur of "Floating", or the surprising sentience of "The Locomotive Museum", the use of defamiliarization is often as cerebral as it is emotional in its effects. Such pieces are remarkably evocative and rich in their keenly-focused brevity, and are, at the very least, equal to what I consider to be Edson's own masterpieces ("The Canoeing", "Movements", "An Old Man's High Note", etc.).
Sometimes, Wiloch enters what could be argued as being the territory of flash fiction; "Mansion of the Black Butterfly", "The Performers", and "The Father, Son and Holy Spirit" all break the one-page span, though still concisely-written. But extreme brevity being the natural inclination of both this author and the prose-poem itself, the even more compressed pieces glisten with the seductive luster of nothing less than a black diamond.
And if I have any other very minor criticisms, beyond the occasional omission of a letter or word, it would have to be with the graphic design of the book itself. Sometimes, the images themselves are just simplistic reductions of what Wiloch has already vividly described in his works, so that the visual element frequently seems redundant. The front cover itself being a notable exception--its juxtaposition of Hellenic sculptures with a starry expanse suggesting the human search for harmony amidst universal indifference--the majority of the collages appear, at least to me, as a distraction from the more substantial content; perhaps, Wiloch's talent was more verbally than visually-inclined.
During and, even moreso, after reading, all I could think of was whoever is in legal possession of Wiloch' s literary legacy must see to publishing a definitive volume of collected works. With both Russell Edson and Thomas Wiloch now gone--and no apparent emergence yet of a sufficiently brilliant successor to continue the tradition of the prose-poem--such a publication would seem a necessity to preserving and perpetuating obscure American literary culture, or, at least, the oeuvre of a writer whose way of creating and thinking was as brilliantly distinctive and wondrously strange as the sub-form in which he primarily worked.
August 16, 2021
An incredible collection, easily purchased via Lulu. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews