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Complicity
"In ‘Complicity’ Christopher Ropes guides the reader unflinchingly into those chambers of the heart we prefer to keep tightly sealed and out of mind. Raw in emotional power and haunting in tone, this tale will linger with you.” -Richard Gavin, author of SYLVAN DREAD
Three friends try to cope with the suicide of someone very dear to them, the unusual family of the suicide victim, and a blizzard. Guilt and blame are constant companions for all three of them. Something they encounter in the snow pushes them to the shattering realization of what they don’t and can never know.
Three friends try to cope with the suicide of someone very dear to them, the unusual family of the suicide victim, and a blizzard. Guilt and blame are constant companions for all three of them. Something they encounter in the snow pushes them to the shattering realization of what they don’t and can never know.
29 pages, Paperback
First published August 16, 2016
59 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 26, 2016
OK, so what do you do when your best friend goes out into his back yard and kills himself by shooting himself in the head? - Pause - Think about that for a moment. This is the scenario that sets up Christopher Ropes's new chap book "Complicity".
Now on the anniversary of that death, you, your girl friend, and your deceased friends girl friend are invited to the childhood home to have a holiday dinner with that friends parents. Stress mounts, incriminations fly and creep into the consciousness. Could you have prevented those sad events?
Just who was complicit in the death.
Don't read this if seeking an uplifting happy story. Read this if looking for some solid good writing that deals with an unthinkable situation.
In some of the afterword comments the author comments that if you are dealing with depression, seek help as it can be over come.
Powerful and well written.
Now on the anniversary of that death, you, your girl friend, and your deceased friends girl friend are invited to the childhood home to have a holiday dinner with that friends parents. Stress mounts, incriminations fly and creep into the consciousness. Could you have prevented those sad events?
Just who was complicit in the death.
Don't read this if seeking an uplifting happy story. Read this if looking for some solid good writing that deals with an unthinkable situation.
In some of the afterword comments the author comments that if you are dealing with depression, seek help as it can be over come.
Powerful and well written.
March 6, 2017
Devastating. The relationships work so naturally here, you feel like you know the characters personally. There is tragedy, and there is the unsettling aftermath, and there is the strange, liminal space where the mind makes its own meaning of it all. Guilt colors perception, sadness distorts reality, and narratives are manufactured to make the broken pieces fit. This story dwells in that in-between space. Constructed masterfully with beautifully written prose, this is a story I feel very comfortable calling a masterpiece.
February 17, 2017
Very good, very strange. A trio of friends dealing with the aftermath of another driend's suicide. This short book builds up a very powerful sense of dread. The weirdness is never fully explained, but that jut makes it sink in deeper. I enjoyed reading this.
October 1, 2016
I'll be thinking about this one for weeks. The central conspiracy remains unexplained and is all the more horrifying because one's imagination fills in the details. The characters are well-delineated, easy to believe in, and the narrative chugs crisply along with no tailspins or sidewise skids, meditating on the faces people wear for one another, the unfamiliarity of the people closest to you, and, perhaps, the shifting nature of reality.
Which is the monster?
Which is the monster?
September 22, 2016
A quietly powerful gut punch of a story. The narrative is at once moving and deeply weird. The prose and imagery are gorgeous. A must read. I can't wait to read more by Ropes.
September 7, 2016
A gripping story with a family coping with a suicide. Well written and highly recommended.
I read Ropes poetry collection so I was actually excited to see his dark depressing scribbles play out in a full length story. In which he nailed. Plus the ending I like....an unhappy one.
I read Ropes poetry collection so I was actually excited to see his dark depressing scribbles play out in a full length story. In which he nailed. Plus the ending I like....an unhappy one.
September 23, 2016
What can I add that others haven't said?
It's true this story is devastating. The sadness is palpable...and Ropes writes with an ever present darkness that crawls into your mind and settles there leaving you unsettled...his poetry is crushing his prose even more so. Every word he writes is soaked with personal pain and reflection taking all of it he presents us with ART. To compare him to other masters of dark like Hanns Heinz Ewers or early Clive Barker in his more reflective stories is not a stretch...and he's only just begun.
It's true this story is devastating. The sadness is palpable...and Ropes writes with an ever present darkness that crawls into your mind and settles there leaving you unsettled...his poetry is crushing his prose even more so. Every word he writes is soaked with personal pain and reflection taking all of it he presents us with ART. To compare him to other masters of dark like Hanns Heinz Ewers or early Clive Barker in his more reflective stories is not a stretch...and he's only just begun.
August 30, 2016
Review to follow
January 9, 2021
Pages 7 – 18
“Even the people we know the best are mysteries to us, I thought.”
An all-consuming, stylishly described first half to this story of five people of various ages (three house guests of the other two), trying to reconcile themselves, after some time, to an earlier suicide by a sixth one from among their chance grouping of participants of the past, and we sense the possible interconnections of supposed blame for that suicide, expressed now, it seems, with even more ‘venom’, as evidenced by some striking memorabilia, and the repercussions upon the relationships between the others since that event…
…all abruptly subsumed by an evocatively conjured, but half-expected, snowstorm, as the three drive off, relieved to have an excuse to leave early, but perhaps not early enough…
The people we know the best? or the people we know the most? Not necessarily the same thing — as the carload stops in the exponentially increasing snow to investigate a possible roadkill shape, but man or animal?
I look forward, with some suspense, to reading the second half, hopefully later today, and I promise no spoilers…
Later...
Pages 18 – 29
“For one single moment, my heart broke for that woman, the woman I loved so much and didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for…”
Is “didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for” correct, as is printed in this morphing text, or should it be “didn’t want that SHE felt she had anything to be sorry for”? A complicity of selflessness or selfishness seems important to this suddenly reality-convulsive reading experience that becomes a duty-by-dread that we readers of it are in conspiracy not to make clear exactly what happens in this its second half. It surely transcends both dreaming and waking as a composite ‘objective correlative’, a disarming strangeness before someone takes to arms to keep us quiet…?
Motivations are felt here to be disowned, and methods of transport uncertain, as are places where snow can sensibly settle. We were all destined to be successful in what we wanted to do in life (be it divorce lawyer, as it is here, or horror writer or whatever) given the backstory in which we and all our readers can connive and collude and complicate by complicit guilt, whatever the agonising collateral-damage to those we love.
That is one interpretative reading possible of the hauntingly delayed aftermath deployed by this work. It is not, of course, the correct interpretative reading of it because we are all disallowed, by its implicit subliminality, to publicly impart it, given the privilege of our having read it at all.
“Even the people we know the best are mysteries to us, I thought.”
An all-consuming, stylishly described first half to this story of five people of various ages (three house guests of the other two), trying to reconcile themselves, after some time, to an earlier suicide by a sixth one from among their chance grouping of participants of the past, and we sense the possible interconnections of supposed blame for that suicide, expressed now, it seems, with even more ‘venom’, as evidenced by some striking memorabilia, and the repercussions upon the relationships between the others since that event…
…all abruptly subsumed by an evocatively conjured, but half-expected, snowstorm, as the three drive off, relieved to have an excuse to leave early, but perhaps not early enough…
The people we know the best? or the people we know the most? Not necessarily the same thing — as the carload stops in the exponentially increasing snow to investigate a possible roadkill shape, but man or animal?
I look forward, with some suspense, to reading the second half, hopefully later today, and I promise no spoilers…
Later...
Pages 18 – 29
“For one single moment, my heart broke for that woman, the woman I loved so much and didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for…”
Is “didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for” correct, as is printed in this morphing text, or should it be “didn’t want that SHE felt she had anything to be sorry for”? A complicity of selflessness or selfishness seems important to this suddenly reality-convulsive reading experience that becomes a duty-by-dread that we readers of it are in conspiracy not to make clear exactly what happens in this its second half. It surely transcends both dreaming and waking as a composite ‘objective correlative’, a disarming strangeness before someone takes to arms to keep us quiet…?
Motivations are felt here to be disowned, and methods of transport uncertain, as are places where snow can sensibly settle. We were all destined to be successful in what we wanted to do in life (be it divorce lawyer, as it is here, or horror writer or whatever) given the backstory in which we and all our readers can connive and collude and complicate by complicit guilt, whatever the agonising collateral-damage to those we love.
That is one interpretative reading possible of the hauntingly delayed aftermath deployed by this work. It is not, of course, the correct interpretative reading of it because we are all disallowed, by its implicit subliminality, to publicly impart it, given the privilege of our having read it at all.
August 24, 2016
Review forthcoming.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews