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Mangled Hands
Book by Stanton, Johnny
320 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 1985
3 people are currently reading
292 people want to read
About the author
Johnny Stanton
7 books8 followers"Johnny Stanton was born in 1943 in Manhattan, the son of Irish immigrants from Galway. He was an altar boy and Eagle Scout who attended Catholic schools & eventually graduated from Columbia University, where he fell in with many poets and writers of the New York School, including Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Paul Auster. He published many of them, some for the first time, in his Siamese Banana Press, which started as a newspaper in 1972 and ended as a performance gang in 1978. He is the author of many short stories and the novel Mangled Hands, neglected by critics yet highly acclaimed by the readers who discover it. He has lived in the East Village for 30 years with his wife, the poet Elinor Nauen, a cat (currently Lefty), and a lot of art." - from The Collidescope
Johnny Stanton, New York City, November 1997, talking about Siamese Banana:
'First it was a NEWSPAPER,
Then it was a PRESS,
Then it was a GANG.
I worked at a neighborhood youth center and one day our fearless director barked at me, “Jumping butterballs, you’re supposed to be a writer, why don’t you start a center newspaper.”
“You betcha,” I meowed. This idea for a newspaper collected a bunch of oddball kids: Fat John, Ginzo, Pokey, Caggie, Lilley, et al. The painter Joe Brainard had suggested the newspaper’s name in another context: The SIAMESE BANANA from Vol. XXVII of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The paper’s motto became: If the Facts Don’t Fit, Change Them. After that it was easy to start up an artsy-literary press. The philosophy was simple: Writers and Artists, you have nothing to lose, so unite in the SB Press. The technology was easy: electronic stencils. Meanwhile, back in the ’hood, wiseguy newspaper kids got infected by literary bugs. But these kids were from the TV dope fiend generation. They wanted to form a gang. “How about a name?” “Exterminator Angels?” “No way!” “Military Gangsters from the Super Id?” “Fuck off, Mr. Stanton.” “Please, you guys, just call me Stanton.” “Okay Stanton, how about the SBG?” “Right on! The SBG. I’m a member.” We tore up and down every house we performed in. Kicked ass and then some. Ahead of our time and underneath it.'
From the blog of Douglas Messerli, dated June 2019: "I'm almost speechless here. The indescribable fiction writer Johnny Stanton. I read just a few sections of his lost book, Mangled Hands in a magazine, and with great audacity called him up to ask if the book was ever completed. Yes, it's under my bed, he responded. Please send it to me, and I published it. One of the most significant of American fictions of the 20th century, I still believe. He wrote a second book, and we typeset it, sending him the proofs, but he pulled it from publication; to this day I don't quite know why. He's a true genius. And I loved his company; we went for Chinese in D.C. with Elinor Nauen and he showed up to several of our NYC parties. Johnny where are you? I miss you so much. Mangled Hands is a classic of American fiction in case you didn't know."
Johnny Stanton, New York City, November 1997, talking about Siamese Banana:
'First it was a NEWSPAPER,
Then it was a PRESS,
Then it was a GANG.
I worked at a neighborhood youth center and one day our fearless director barked at me, “Jumping butterballs, you’re supposed to be a writer, why don’t you start a center newspaper.”
“You betcha,” I meowed. This idea for a newspaper collected a bunch of oddball kids: Fat John, Ginzo, Pokey, Caggie, Lilley, et al. The painter Joe Brainard had suggested the newspaper’s name in another context: The SIAMESE BANANA from Vol. XXVII of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The paper’s motto became: If the Facts Don’t Fit, Change Them. After that it was easy to start up an artsy-literary press. The philosophy was simple: Writers and Artists, you have nothing to lose, so unite in the SB Press. The technology was easy: electronic stencils. Meanwhile, back in the ’hood, wiseguy newspaper kids got infected by literary bugs. But these kids were from the TV dope fiend generation. They wanted to form a gang. “How about a name?” “Exterminator Angels?” “No way!” “Military Gangsters from the Super Id?” “Fuck off, Mr. Stanton.” “Please, you guys, just call me Stanton.” “Okay Stanton, how about the SBG?” “Right on! The SBG. I’m a member.” We tore up and down every house we performed in. Kicked ass and then some. Ahead of our time and underneath it.'
From the blog of Douglas Messerli, dated June 2019: "I'm almost speechless here. The indescribable fiction writer Johnny Stanton. I read just a few sections of his lost book, Mangled Hands in a magazine, and with great audacity called him up to ask if the book was ever completed. Yes, it's under my bed, he responded. Please send it to me, and I published it. One of the most significant of American fictions of the 20th century, I still believe. He wrote a second book, and we typeset it, sending him the proofs, but he pulled it from publication; to this day I don't quite know why. He's a true genius. And I loved his company; we went for Chinese in D.C. with Elinor Nauen and he showed up to several of our NYC parties. Johnny where are you? I miss you so much. Mangled Hands is a classic of American fiction in case you didn't know."
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 17, 2020
“Ancient stories of black darkness and terrible falls plugged the holes in my body...”
Mangled Hands is a fantasy wound in book form, written without thumbs and employing an amalgamation of mangled manuscripts, from Conan the Barbarian to the work of James Joyce, yet it reads as seamlessly as a dream, in which the dreamer never questions the oneiric logic, the lesional loggia, and one becomes a passive observer, an eager believer in this shared phantasmagoria of gored phantasms. As “words dripped from his wounds,” all that we see or seem is indeed a dream.
The plot follows the plight of Tarcisius Tandihetsi, an adolescent Native American of the Huron tribe who is returning home with a French trading party via the Great River. In addition to having a traditional, biological father, he has a Father in a priest referred to as Blackrobe, for like most of the boy’s kith and kin, he has converted to Christianity, a belief system that possesses as much power in this world as the mythologies of the tribes. In the middle of the river, the party sees the ill omen of a diabolical beaver removing its skin and it’s not long until they are captured by their archenemies, the Poison Snake People. They’re hairless except for fur on the soles of their feet and their palms and, supernaturally, they live in Tardis-like kettles and have the ability of ecdysis.
This tribe is led by a Judas or even Luciferian figure formerly of the Huron, Snake Tooth, an impossible apostate who had been “born during a festival of bad dreams, therefore everyone feared him. When he was three years old he was already building gigantic torture fires….” During their journey as captives heading for the village of the Poison Snake People, they encounter other tribes and creatures, such as the naked stone giants: “Each of these monsters was as tall as a tree. The lower half of their bodies was large and heavy, their legs were as thick and solid as deep-veined stones. Their upper bodies were light and airy like tree branches growing out of their heads. Each branch was a long arm with many hands and fingers. Their heads were the middle part of their bodies, joining together the upper and lower halves…. […]Their hairy manhoods were pointing straight out from just below their stomachs, but it was also just below their chins, which jutted out and down, so it looked like they had bushy beards and were about to smoke long tobacco pipes. Their skin color was a mixture of rock gray and tree brown.” Oh, and they can breathe fire out of their ‘pipes.’
Although the Poison Snake People join forces with the Killer Yellow Dogs and the Antler Face People, there is a looming enemy that is a threat to all, the mysterious invisible animals of oracular origin: “‘…as the Giant Snake in the earth dies, bits of its flesh fall off, and each little bit becomes an invisible animal.’” These sharp-toothed demons slowly become desensitized to their acrophobia and begin to climb like apparitional acrobats onto the terrestrial plane.
The Poison Snake People and their captives do eventually reach the village where Tarcisius Tandihetsi barely survives gory torture and transmogrification, though at times he is almost treated as one of them and even gets to observe and participate in some wholly strange games, such as Whip Lash and Snake Eyes. To play the latter exophthalmic game, “The Snake warriors knelt behind separate bundles of red and green feathers as tall as mounds of snow. There were no teams flying back and forth…every player depended on their own eyes, which seemed to be shaking inside their heads. Each warrior in his turned popped out his eyes as far as he could. […] The Snake eyes would float ever so slowly to the wet ground, and while they were still in the air, the warrior from a kneeling position with a quick flick of the wrist tried to stick as many feathers as possible into his two or three eyes. They could also throw out as many dead eyes of eaten captives as they had saved…”
Indeed, there is animating cannibalism, bodies are dismembered and remembered, genitals are molested and mutilated, and amid the Poison Snake People’s brutality, anatomy is its own necromancy, for—peace pipe war pipe—Mangled Hands is a hashish feather fever dream on the muscled back of a galloping night mare. Of course, the most symbolic maiming occurs in the form of Blackrobe’s mangled hands, which echoes those of the historical missionary Isaac Jogues who interacted with the Huron as well as the Iroquois and other tribes, and the final echo is that of Christ’s mangled hands after iron nails were ran in through his palms.
Is this first-person account of a beautiful and brutal paracosm true? All we know is the declarative sentence repeated almost mantra-like at the end of each chapter: "I, Tarcisius Tandihetsi, say so."
Soft-spoken and compressed with wonderful mythological and philosophical implications, this realization of hallucination reminded me of Ben Okri's The Famished Road, except Stanton’s novel is about a Huron boy in the 16th century rather than a Nigerian boy in the 20th. Uncannily enough, the works of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola are also evoked without intention.
Prose-wise, there is no wordplay here as such, for the words-phrases-sentences were mostly played with behind the 'seens,' fondled and nobbled to make a mosaic that sayeth surreality reigns supreme, featuring a quincunx of juxtapositions and a medley of replicating muses: feathers, slime, hair, teeth, smoke, blood, etc.
In somewhat Lynchian fashion, characters sometimes speak in semi-non sequiturs and mystical mumbo jumbo which is a product of eavesdropping upon a mythopoeic and confabulating confab. I was even at times reminded of the sparse and potent poetry of Barton Smock, such as when a character articulates this in relation to the looming threat: “If it's a word, it's not an animal. And if it's an animal, its voice won't reflect light, so you can escape from its language.”
I found it difficult to escape from the mesmurmurizing language Stanton has crafted in this, his only novel, begun in the late 60s or thereabouts and finally published, thank the gods, by Sun & Moon Press in 1985, and of course such a masterpiece was ignored by the ever-unreliable literary community. But if you breathe life into this invisible book, it will surely breathe life into you.
I, George Salis, say so.
Mangled Hands is a fantasy wound in book form, written without thumbs and employing an amalgamation of mangled manuscripts, from Conan the Barbarian to the work of James Joyce, yet it reads as seamlessly as a dream, in which the dreamer never questions the oneiric logic, the lesional loggia, and one becomes a passive observer, an eager believer in this shared phantasmagoria of gored phantasms. As “words dripped from his wounds,” all that we see or seem is indeed a dream.
The plot follows the plight of Tarcisius Tandihetsi, an adolescent Native American of the Huron tribe who is returning home with a French trading party via the Great River. In addition to having a traditional, biological father, he has a Father in a priest referred to as Blackrobe, for like most of the boy’s kith and kin, he has converted to Christianity, a belief system that possesses as much power in this world as the mythologies of the tribes. In the middle of the river, the party sees the ill omen of a diabolical beaver removing its skin and it’s not long until they are captured by their archenemies, the Poison Snake People. They’re hairless except for fur on the soles of their feet and their palms and, supernaturally, they live in Tardis-like kettles and have the ability of ecdysis.
This tribe is led by a Judas or even Luciferian figure formerly of the Huron, Snake Tooth, an impossible apostate who had been “born during a festival of bad dreams, therefore everyone feared him. When he was three years old he was already building gigantic torture fires….” During their journey as captives heading for the village of the Poison Snake People, they encounter other tribes and creatures, such as the naked stone giants: “Each of these monsters was as tall as a tree. The lower half of their bodies was large and heavy, their legs were as thick and solid as deep-veined stones. Their upper bodies were light and airy like tree branches growing out of their heads. Each branch was a long arm with many hands and fingers. Their heads were the middle part of their bodies, joining together the upper and lower halves…. […]Their hairy manhoods were pointing straight out from just below their stomachs, but it was also just below their chins, which jutted out and down, so it looked like they had bushy beards and were about to smoke long tobacco pipes. Their skin color was a mixture of rock gray and tree brown.” Oh, and they can breathe fire out of their ‘pipes.’
Although the Poison Snake People join forces with the Killer Yellow Dogs and the Antler Face People, there is a looming enemy that is a threat to all, the mysterious invisible animals of oracular origin: “‘…as the Giant Snake in the earth dies, bits of its flesh fall off, and each little bit becomes an invisible animal.’” These sharp-toothed demons slowly become desensitized to their acrophobia and begin to climb like apparitional acrobats onto the terrestrial plane.
The Poison Snake People and their captives do eventually reach the village where Tarcisius Tandihetsi barely survives gory torture and transmogrification, though at times he is almost treated as one of them and even gets to observe and participate in some wholly strange games, such as Whip Lash and Snake Eyes. To play the latter exophthalmic game, “The Snake warriors knelt behind separate bundles of red and green feathers as tall as mounds of snow. There were no teams flying back and forth…every player depended on their own eyes, which seemed to be shaking inside their heads. Each warrior in his turned popped out his eyes as far as he could. […] The Snake eyes would float ever so slowly to the wet ground, and while they were still in the air, the warrior from a kneeling position with a quick flick of the wrist tried to stick as many feathers as possible into his two or three eyes. They could also throw out as many dead eyes of eaten captives as they had saved…”
Indeed, there is animating cannibalism, bodies are dismembered and remembered, genitals are molested and mutilated, and amid the Poison Snake People’s brutality, anatomy is its own necromancy, for—peace pipe war pipe—Mangled Hands is a hashish feather fever dream on the muscled back of a galloping night mare. Of course, the most symbolic maiming occurs in the form of Blackrobe’s mangled hands, which echoes those of the historical missionary Isaac Jogues who interacted with the Huron as well as the Iroquois and other tribes, and the final echo is that of Christ’s mangled hands after iron nails were ran in through his palms.
Is this first-person account of a beautiful and brutal paracosm true? All we know is the declarative sentence repeated almost mantra-like at the end of each chapter: "I, Tarcisius Tandihetsi, say so."
Soft-spoken and compressed with wonderful mythological and philosophical implications, this realization of hallucination reminded me of Ben Okri's The Famished Road, except Stanton’s novel is about a Huron boy in the 16th century rather than a Nigerian boy in the 20th. Uncannily enough, the works of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola are also evoked without intention.
Prose-wise, there is no wordplay here as such, for the words-phrases-sentences were mostly played with behind the 'seens,' fondled and nobbled to make a mosaic that sayeth surreality reigns supreme, featuring a quincunx of juxtapositions and a medley of replicating muses: feathers, slime, hair, teeth, smoke, blood, etc.
In somewhat Lynchian fashion, characters sometimes speak in semi-non sequiturs and mystical mumbo jumbo which is a product of eavesdropping upon a mythopoeic and confabulating confab. I was even at times reminded of the sparse and potent poetry of Barton Smock, such as when a character articulates this in relation to the looming threat: “If it's a word, it's not an animal. And if it's an animal, its voice won't reflect light, so you can escape from its language.”
I found it difficult to escape from the mesmurmurizing language Stanton has crafted in this, his only novel, begun in the late 60s or thereabouts and finally published, thank the gods, by Sun & Moon Press in 1985, and of course such a masterpiece was ignored by the ever-unreliable literary community. But if you breathe life into this invisible book, it will surely breathe life into you.
I, George Salis, say so.
April 25, 2020
A Huron and French trading party is returning along the Great River when they are attacked and captured by warriors of the Poison Snake People. Most of the party, including the Huron village chief Eustace, are later killed and eaten by the Snake warriors. The book’s narrator Tarcisius Tandihetsi, an adolescent Huron boy and son of Eustace, and his ‘other father’ Blackrobe, a French priest, survive, only to then live through a torrent of inconceivable torture over many months spent as Snake slaves. The titular (and talismanic) mangled hands belong to Blackrobe, who over time reveals himself to be a powerful figure capable of magic equal to or greater than that of the Snake People.
Each chapter of the book begins with a summary of the events to follow. Rather than spoil the plot, these skeletal narrative structures stabilize the reading experience, which can easily go off the rails into narrow twisting corridors of surreal violence subject only to the logic of dreams. I have to admit there were times when I didn’t think I would make it through the periods of constant torture and hunger, which go on for many chapters. But perseverance pays off as the narrative comes to turn in many fascinating directions.
In superficial terms the plot is very simple: Tarcisius and Blackrobe are captive slaves trying to survive and hopefully escape from the clutches of the Snake People. But the novel is much more than that. It is sewn through with mythic imagery and thatched with dreamworld fabric. Among the most intriguing elements to me are the role of Blackrobe, his relationship with Tarcisius, and Stanton’s overall approach to the Jesuit influence in Huron culture. By casting the priest Blackrobe as a benevolent wizard of sorts, friend and protector to the Huron people, he seems to be subverting the narrative of Catholic interference in Native American culture. But as it turns out, this actually appears to have been Stanton's embellished retelling of the Jesuits' own vision of their Huron missionaries as living martyrs. (The review of Reverend Boyton's book is rather humorous to read once you've read Stanton's version of the story.)
In the novel, the Huron village from which Tarcisius originates has been converted to the Christian faith by Blackrobe—the villagers having received the ‘Saving Waters’ from him in baptism. The chief antagonist in the book, Snake Tooth, is a Huron apostate who after leaving the village eventually joins the Snake People and becomes their greatest and most powerful chief. His hatred of Blackrobe is strong, and yet later on he must occasionally join forces with Blackrobe and rely on his magic to defeat a common enemy to all area tribes: the invisible animals. It is this type of complex, shifting and blurring dynamic between characters, seen in many examples throughout the book, that helps to drive the story forward, even as waves of repetitive chaos almost continuously threaten to drown it.
This was a singular reading experience. The events depicted often felt like they were happening to me as I read, due in part to the relentless pacing and visceral detail. It was like riding the wild rapids of a frothing river in a tiny canoe. There was no time to look around, no opportunity for any action other than surrender to forward motion. As Tarcisius observes at one point during his captivity:
Each chapter of the book begins with a summary of the events to follow. Rather than spoil the plot, these skeletal narrative structures stabilize the reading experience, which can easily go off the rails into narrow twisting corridors of surreal violence subject only to the logic of dreams. I have to admit there were times when I didn’t think I would make it through the periods of constant torture and hunger, which go on for many chapters. But perseverance pays off as the narrative comes to turn in many fascinating directions.
In superficial terms the plot is very simple: Tarcisius and Blackrobe are captive slaves trying to survive and hopefully escape from the clutches of the Snake People. But the novel is much more than that. It is sewn through with mythic imagery and thatched with dreamworld fabric. Among the most intriguing elements to me are the role of Blackrobe, his relationship with Tarcisius, and Stanton’s overall approach to the Jesuit influence in Huron culture. By casting the priest Blackrobe as a benevolent wizard of sorts, friend and protector to the Huron people, he seems to be subverting the narrative of Catholic interference in Native American culture. But as it turns out, this actually appears to have been Stanton's embellished retelling of the Jesuits' own vision of their Huron missionaries as living martyrs. (The review of Reverend Boyton's book is rather humorous to read once you've read Stanton's version of the story.)
In the novel, the Huron village from which Tarcisius originates has been converted to the Christian faith by Blackrobe—the villagers having received the ‘Saving Waters’ from him in baptism. The chief antagonist in the book, Snake Tooth, is a Huron apostate who after leaving the village eventually joins the Snake People and becomes their greatest and most powerful chief. His hatred of Blackrobe is strong, and yet later on he must occasionally join forces with Blackrobe and rely on his magic to defeat a common enemy to all area tribes: the invisible animals. It is this type of complex, shifting and blurring dynamic between characters, seen in many examples throughout the book, that helps to drive the story forward, even as waves of repetitive chaos almost continuously threaten to drown it.
This was a singular reading experience. The events depicted often felt like they were happening to me as I read, due in part to the relentless pacing and visceral detail. It was like riding the wild rapids of a frothing river in a tiny canoe. There was no time to look around, no opportunity for any action other than surrender to forward motion. As Tarcisius observes at one point during his captivity:
I knew I would not die although I also knew that I had been cut up and rebuilt too many times.
Read
September 28, 2018"...stands between Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy and GGM's One Hundred Years of Solitude in style and spirit." --backcover blurb
To which I'll add ;; solidly in the tradition (wake) of Finnegans Wake. A dream language. A dream language you'll find flowing in Vollmann's Seven Dreams, more precisely in Fathers & Crows. And I won't hesitate to say, even more than what you'll find in even Tutuola's incredible fictions. Read this in this time of dire circumstances. We need to learn to dream again, to speak the language of dreams.
To which I'll add ;; solidly in the tradition (wake) of Finnegans Wake. A dream language. A dream language you'll find flowing in Vollmann's Seven Dreams, more precisely in Fathers & Crows. And I won't hesitate to say, even more than what you'll find in even Tutuola's incredible fictions. Read this in this time of dire circumstances. We need to learn to dream again, to speak the language of dreams.
May 23, 2020
Easily one of the strangest - and most compelling - books I've come across. The only thing remotely similar that I've read was Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
April 21, 2021
Hmmm. I loved it for 100 pages, and then I didn't. Perhaps I'm not a fan of the cut-up style? But what frustrated me about Mangled Hands was that it was so novel and evocative, but it also seems so void of anything else. You read one page of the book and you've read them all--again, I've not read much of the cut-ups before, but overall, I loved everything about it at the start, but when it became clear that nothing in the book was going to expand or evolve or change, I became bored with it.
The book's aesthetic is an act of stasis, then, where Johnny Stanton is working against the page to keep the sentences coming. Re-combining "slimy green feathers" and weird hair every which way can only be so visually stunning for so long. Unfortunately, I failed to really find much else going on in Stanton's text that explores character, theme, or narrative arc. Even if there's a macguffin, it would have given something to this book to cling to as I read about how Tarcisius pulled a muskrat from his body for the 50th time.
I appreciate what the press is doing keeping things like this alive and into more hands, but this one just missed the mark for me.
The book's aesthetic is an act of stasis, then, where Johnny Stanton is working against the page to keep the sentences coming. Re-combining "slimy green feathers" and weird hair every which way can only be so visually stunning for so long. Unfortunately, I failed to really find much else going on in Stanton's text that explores character, theme, or narrative arc. Even if there's a macguffin, it would have given something to this book to cling to as I read about how Tarcisius pulled a muskrat from his body for the 50th time.
I appreciate what the press is doing keeping things like this alive and into more hands, but this one just missed the mark for me.
April 3, 2022
My word this was unusual and totally unique. My rating on this could have gone either way but once I tuned into Stanton's narrative he had me hooked.
I'm still not entirely sure what I just read but if you want to read a most singular story then this is most definitely worth a look.
Warning: Not for the fainthearted
The interview at the back of the book gives some great background information and you even get to meet Stanton's wife Elinor Nauen who is herself a writer
I'm still not entirely sure what I just read but if you want to read a most singular story then this is most definitely worth a look.
Warning: Not for the fainthearted
The interview at the back of the book gives some great background information and you even get to meet Stanton's wife Elinor Nauen who is herself a writer
October 14, 2011
I have never read anything like this, and bet big bucks you haven't either. The closest approximation to this would be At Swims Two Birds by Flann O'Brien
The story begins clearly enough, with an expedition down the river by the converted Christian Huron who are accompanied by Blackrobe, a priest. They are assailed by beavers then captured by the Poison Snake People. There the plausibility teeters on the brink of madness. You're encountered with
Time was lengthened with water, beaver pelts, and tobacco...
...my mind was torturing my stomach like an invisible enemy...
I heard Blackrobe whispering in his secret language...it was like tiny footprints scattered along a dirt trail.
Sometimes when sunlight broke through the clouds, visions of Snake babies appeared in the sky and shook like tortoise shells. They reached won into the inner spirit of every Snake woman and always came up with a favorite meal.
The story goes thus: The Huron are captured by the Poison Snake People and brought to a camp to be tortured and killed. Then the remaining Huron (namely Tarcisius) and the Poison Snake People are beseiged by a much more immediate threat, the invisible animals.
The sentences are crisp and well structured grammatically, but are full of word combinations that make a strange picture in your mind. First I'm thinking that Stanton is writing the perspective of the non-European Huron, but then it gets to the point where I think the story's turned into a demented cartoon. Bodyparts become detachable, and deadly tortures are inflicted but nobody really dies.
Then I wonder if it's a symbolic allegory, or just perverse fun on Stanton's part. So I abandoned all conventional osmosis of the information laid out and created my own interpretation.
The Huron, the Poison Snake People, the Frenchmen, and the Blackrobe are actually denizens of a dimension so disturbing we perceive the imagery in terms we best understand. At one point the Blackrobe enters a birch bark chapel with strange circles on the wall and exits the world in a hole in the sky. This might indicate the Blackrobes are travelers not from that world as well, though a voyage to France is inferred. The invisible animals are manifestations of a neighboring dimension slowly gaining strength by sheer numbers and slimy feathers. So in this world the impossible happens as readily as it snows in a kettle in which there is a river the size of a walnut.
As mad it may seem to the conventional reader, this is a strange and wonderful novel that any purveyors of strange fiction should not miss.
He, Tarcisius Tandihesti, says so.
The story begins clearly enough, with an expedition down the river by the converted Christian Huron who are accompanied by Blackrobe, a priest. They are assailed by beavers then captured by the Poison Snake People. There the plausibility teeters on the brink of madness. You're encountered with
Time was lengthened with water, beaver pelts, and tobacco...
...my mind was torturing my stomach like an invisible enemy...
I heard Blackrobe whispering in his secret language...it was like tiny footprints scattered along a dirt trail.
Sometimes when sunlight broke through the clouds, visions of Snake babies appeared in the sky and shook like tortoise shells. They reached won into the inner spirit of every Snake woman and always came up with a favorite meal.
The story goes thus: The Huron are captured by the Poison Snake People and brought to a camp to be tortured and killed. Then the remaining Huron (namely Tarcisius) and the Poison Snake People are beseiged by a much more immediate threat, the invisible animals.
The sentences are crisp and well structured grammatically, but are full of word combinations that make a strange picture in your mind. First I'm thinking that Stanton is writing the perspective of the non-European Huron, but then it gets to the point where I think the story's turned into a demented cartoon. Bodyparts become detachable, and deadly tortures are inflicted but nobody really dies.
Then I wonder if it's a symbolic allegory, or just perverse fun on Stanton's part. So I abandoned all conventional osmosis of the information laid out and created my own interpretation.
The Huron, the Poison Snake People, the Frenchmen, and the Blackrobe are actually denizens of a dimension so disturbing we perceive the imagery in terms we best understand. At one point the Blackrobe enters a birch bark chapel with strange circles on the wall and exits the world in a hole in the sky. This might indicate the Blackrobes are travelers not from that world as well, though a voyage to France is inferred. The invisible animals are manifestations of a neighboring dimension slowly gaining strength by sheer numbers and slimy feathers. So in this world the impossible happens as readily as it snows in a kettle in which there is a river the size of a walnut.
As mad it may seem to the conventional reader, this is a strange and wonderful novel that any purveyors of strange fiction should not miss.
He, Tarcisius Tandihesti, says so.
May 12, 2009
This perhaps the strangest, most visceral and mind-warping thing I’ve ever read. Forget the slipshod dyspepsia of Naked Lunch–if you’ve read that (rather, were somehow able to complete it) you get a taste of what the insane style in which William S. Burroughs wrote was trying to accomplish that Johnny Stanton somehow perfected. With a laser-sharp focus, and every sentence carrying with it a leaden gravity profuse with mysterious intonations, he brings you into the world of an adolescent Huron Indian, Tarcisius Tandihetsi, who, while traveling with his two fathers (his father,Eustace, and a French priest, Blackrobe) and others in his tribe, are kidnapped by the Poison Snake People and the Killer Yellow Dogs (the tribe’s greatest enemies) and made to endure great torture for days on end.
The story follows the travels of Tarcisius into enemy territory, while he and his fathers, although sustaining ridiculous amounts of punishment that would have killed anybody ten times over, somehow survive time after time to see even greater punishment and danger. As its voice, magic and spirituality impregnate nearly every event or description.
You’ll love this book because it’s creepy and crazy and the most original thing you’ll ever read. While reading this you’ll think at least two to three times per page: “Where the hell does this guy come up with this stuff?” Seriously. If you open the book to any page and pick out a sentence it is likely to be something that would make you scratch your head and wonder …you just wonder. I’m going to do it now–totally random sentence: ”Antler Face was furiously digging his antlers into the ground and at the same time kicking the air.” (Mangled Hands, Johnny Stanton, pg. 162) See? Or: ”Finally Curly Head put my nose between his slimy legs, and the nails on his tail cut my face.” (Mangled Hands, Johnny Stanton, pg.66) There are also certain words you’ll never think of the same way after this novel, such as feathers, manhood, slime, hair, invisible, just to name a few.
If you like crazy lit even remotely I say check this out now. You’re brain will hate you for it, but your mind will expand like Tarcisius’s manhood.
For additional words and links, see: http://bravenewworks.com/?p=41
The story follows the travels of Tarcisius into enemy territory, while he and his fathers, although sustaining ridiculous amounts of punishment that would have killed anybody ten times over, somehow survive time after time to see even greater punishment and danger. As its voice, magic and spirituality impregnate nearly every event or description.
You’ll love this book because it’s creepy and crazy and the most original thing you’ll ever read. While reading this you’ll think at least two to three times per page: “Where the hell does this guy come up with this stuff?” Seriously. If you open the book to any page and pick out a sentence it is likely to be something that would make you scratch your head and wonder …you just wonder. I’m going to do it now–totally random sentence: ”Antler Face was furiously digging his antlers into the ground and at the same time kicking the air.” (Mangled Hands, Johnny Stanton, pg. 162) See? Or: ”Finally Curly Head put my nose between his slimy legs, and the nails on his tail cut my face.” (Mangled Hands, Johnny Stanton, pg.66) There are also certain words you’ll never think of the same way after this novel, such as feathers, manhood, slime, hair, invisible, just to name a few.
If you like crazy lit even remotely I say check this out now. You’re brain will hate you for it, but your mind will expand like Tarcisius’s manhood.
For additional words and links, see: http://bravenewworks.com/?p=41
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August 19, 2012Everyone who has marked this as to read, get on and read it. It is a subliminal life changing book, you can't explain why, there's just something going on. I read it maybe 25 years ago and it has stayed with me.
March 19, 2021
Quite a barrage of outrageous invention. While I appreciate the sustained stream of shiny text objects, I wish there was more variety in the settings and pacing. Impressive, but hard for me to warm up to.
September 8, 2012
A cut-up book a la W.S. Burroughs. It is narrated by a young man of the Huron tribe who is escorted down the Great River by one of his two fathers. One of his fathers is his Huron father and if I remember correctly this father is never actually present in the book but is only referenced in past tense. The other father, the one who escorts him, is a priest. A "Blackrobe" and as they drift along they encounter the Poison Snake People, Antler Face, invisible animals and other curiosities. You figure it out.
Some fairly repetitive material here with text that seems to constantly fold in on itself. Certain phrases weave themselves in and out of the chapters, popping up more and more frequently as the book progresses- if you can call it that. The writing actually emits the feel of a some kind of a doomed word-spiral or word vortex and I felt a few times that I might be engulfed by these words. I imagined that if this book were instead a series of books of say- 10 volumes, that the last volume would consist of chapters and chapters of just one word. Repeated over and over and over. I don't know what word that would be. Probably 'beaver' or 'manhood' or 'snake' or something. Very bizarre and affecting.
One word review: Disorienting
Some fairly repetitive material here with text that seems to constantly fold in on itself. Certain phrases weave themselves in and out of the chapters, popping up more and more frequently as the book progresses- if you can call it that. The writing actually emits the feel of a some kind of a doomed word-spiral or word vortex and I felt a few times that I might be engulfed by these words. I imagined that if this book were instead a series of books of say- 10 volumes, that the last volume would consist of chapters and chapters of just one word. Repeated over and over and over. I don't know what word that would be. Probably 'beaver' or 'manhood' or 'snake' or something. Very bizarre and affecting.
One word review: Disorienting
May 23, 2022
Every review on here says that this book is unlike anything you've ever read; and that is almost certainly true. It's a wild-ass fever dream that manages to build a compelling and magical mythology. As an aside, the interview George Salis does with Stanton and his wife in the appendix is a delight.
September 7, 2021
Probably the weirdest book I have ever read but it always tends to be weird in a good way no matter how outrageous it gets
February 16, 2025
I went into this novel excited to experience something truly unique and mind-bending. And while it did indeed live up to those expectations, I came out of it with mixed feelings. On the one *mangled* hand, this book has a hallucinogenic, dreamlike quality and logic that is unlike anything else I've ever read. At the same time, though, those very same attributes work against themselves, relegating the story -in this reader's opinion- to "meh" territory. My feelings towards this book oscillated between intrigue and frustration. At its best, it captivates the imagination, feeling like a lost legend of Native American folklore recalled through a nightmare. At its worst, the story dissolves into aimless bursts of images and phrases (i.e.: slimy green feathers, my rising manhood, snakeskin satchels, torture kettles, etc.) repeated ad nauseum. After several pages of this sort, the reading experience became one of tedium, and I had to push myself to see it through to the end. Because it contains so much monotonous, illogical noise sprinkled throughout, it quickly lost its charm and felt... well, silly...
Even so, there is something peculiar about this novel that makes it stand out in my mind. I do not regret purchasing or reading this, and it has a welcome home on my shelves. A deeply flawed work, to be sure, but also one that walks on its own path, exploring uncharted territory that I've never experienced in any other piece of literary fiction. While it falls short of greatness, it succeeds in crafting something remarkably leftfield. If your taste gravitates towards the experimental and mystifying, consider giving this a go.
Even so, there is something peculiar about this novel that makes it stand out in my mind. I do not regret purchasing or reading this, and it has a welcome home on my shelves. A deeply flawed work, to be sure, but also one that walks on its own path, exploring uncharted territory that I've never experienced in any other piece of literary fiction. While it falls short of greatness, it succeeds in crafting something remarkably leftfield. If your taste gravitates towards the experimental and mystifying, consider giving this a go.
August 14, 2024
What an amazing thing.
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