Warewolff!

by Gary J. Shipley

A lyric, sick-humoured and immoral morass of a novel told through reportage from the least-illuminated corners of the human condition, Warewolff! is a lexicon-in-pieces; a novel blasted into fragments.

Amalgamating nuclear warfare, Paris Vogue, and ‘lavish deformities’, it merges a bold experimentation with a literary sensibility and a pitch black, plague-bearing playfulness.

Taken as a whole, the fragments of the novel gradually congeal to form an image of a hidden, numinous ‘other’ that lies behind the facade of the text – too terrifying to comprehend but in its facets: a being that learns to talk by shaping the stories of its victims. Warewolff! is at once the summary of those encounters, their metamorphosis, and the corrupted, depraved imago that it forces them to be.

PRAISE FOR WAREWOLFF!

‘JG Ballard on crack’
Stewart Home, author of 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie

‘Beyond horror or the fictional… these convulsions and reassignments called up from dark time can be thought of as 21st century probabilities, those current realities of public dreaming
that we accept as our present conditions’
David Toop, author of Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds

Genres: Horror

252 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2017

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warewolff has been marketed as horror (or 'concept horror') and comes with framing narrative implying that its carnivalesque derangements of meat and sense are symptoms of some insidious alien influence. Yet Shipley's text quickly shrugs off this integument to enter a maze of pure ontological cruelty. A philosopher by training, Shipley, is an expert at disarticulating the logical grammar of the world - as if he wanted to feed analytic philosophers their own excrement forever. I applaud the construction of this sub-disciplinary hell and the epistemological rigor it enforces. Warewolff has no people, no worlds, only conflicted emulations dreaming the flesh they never had. It isn't about the horror. It is the horror.

[Max Restaino · Rating 5 out of 5]

The apocalyptic disintegration of language and comprehension. Incredible.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Warewolff! is published by Hexus Press, a small independent UK press which says on its very limited website that is is ”A small press dealing with experimental horror, publishers of Hexus Journal”. My thanks to Hexus for an ARC to read and review.

I have no point of reference for an “experimental horror” book and there cannot be very many of them out there. There is a warning of what is to come in the epigraphs which include a quote from Antonin Artaud saying "All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth." The other quote is from Finnegans Wake which, as most people know, is fairly incomprehensible, but it includes the Warewolff from which this book takes it title.

We have been warned, then, that the author is most likely attempting true language and that therefore it will be incomprehensible.

We begin with a Preface/Prodrome which sets out the central idea of the book:

This is an attempt at seeing. It’s an attempt to see something while having access only to its effects.

And this central idea seems to be that somewhere "out there" is a consciousness (the Warewolff) that cannot be seen but which makes itself known through interactions between humans, if you know what you are looking for (which the author does). So he has collected and organised excerpts that skirt around the edges of something but cannot describe that something itself:

I chose these transcriptions from a much wider archive of material, including but not restricted to the following sources: audio recordings, official documents, chatrooms, blogs, interviews, found footage, notebooks, emails, journal entries, and website comments. I chose only the excerpts in which it seemed to be speaking through them, those instances in which a jolting incongruity of voice was most clearly present. Out of nowhere there’d be a marked shift in tone and style, and the more I read the more of these interludes I found and the more I began to hear one thing’s voice, and from that voice a portrait of itself – of itself made up with other things.

To this reader, who has said on a few previous equations that plot is very much secondary to atmosphere when reading a book, this is a very promising start. To read a book with no real plot that attempts to paint a picture of something that cannot be seen but only observed by its effect sounds fascinating to me.

In fairness, it is actually fascinating, although it is very difficult to read. As the epigraph has warned us, true language is incomprehensible. This means that most of this book does not make sense in the traditional meaning of that word. Often, a sentence does not make sense. In the rare examples where a sentence makes sense, the paragraph it is in does not make sense. This is deliberate because the author is attempting to create an awareness or a mental image in the reader, but it means reading the book is about soaking in the words rather than attempting to understand them all.

And this is where the problem arises for me, because the words the author asks you to soak in are not pleasant. They conjure up a sort of dystopian near future where infrastructure has collapsed along with all moral standards. It is impossible to read this book without feeling sickened and offended at points. There is a lot of misogyny which is uncomfortable reading for someone like me (for many people, I imagine). A lot of the imagery is gross. Well, it is called "experimental horror".

So, at times I found myself wondering if I wanted to continue reading a book with such unpleasantness in it. Is "experimental horror" a genre I want to expose myself to. Fundamentally, the answer to that is "No", but I did push through to the end and it has to be said that the book achieves what it sets out to achieve. It paints a picture in words that make little or no sense on their own and creates an atmosphere that is undeniably full of dread.

When I finished the book I wrote a short status that said I didn’t know what to say but that I had disliked it. Now, on reflection, I would still say that I didn’t like the book and that several parts were very offensive. However, there is something about it that means I don’t want to just dismiss it as offensive and incomprehensible. I’ve flicked through it again now after a night’s sleep (surprisingly not disturbed by nightmares) and it makes more sense now than when I was reading it. It’s still offensive and I won’t be recommending it to my mum, or probably to anyone I know, but actually I’ve got more of a sense of what the author was aiming for and can appreciate the book more for that. Writing this has helped, I have to say.

After all that, I actually have no idea how to rate this book, so I am not going to try to do that. Maybe later.

[Jackie Law · Rating 3 out of 5]

Warewolff!, by Gary J Shipley, is a collection of prose poetry that is intentionally the antithesis of linguistic beauty. It takes a mash-up of recognisable deformities and inverts them, playing with what is considered distasteful and thereby mocking what is socially acceptable. Perceptions and behaviours are stretched beyond possibility but at its heart is the hypocrisy of what modern man will tolerate when he chooses to look away.

The pieces included are between half a page and three pages in length. Reading and trying to interpret them put me in mind of a walk through a high end art gallery. I was aware that there was more to each offering than I was appreciating but from time to time an image would resonate.

As an example, the following excerpt from Foot Glut put me in mind of how a lover attempts to own their beloved, yet in doing so causes change that is unlikely to be desired. They spoil what they loved by attempting to keep it only for themselves.

“I cut off his feet to keep him from leaving. It would take a month, perhaps two, but a new pair always grew back. This was the first of many taunts. I was receiving an education. I was being told that if I wanted to keep something I’d have to mutilate it, and keep mutilating it. That that’s just how things are kept, how lives are maintained. Eventually I cut off his head, and waited for that to grow back. But it didn’t happen. Instead a spider came and nested in the neck. Suspecting it of laying eggs, I killed it with a rolled up magazine.”

Throughout the collection the human body is deconstructed, reactions to what it contains masticated and regurgitated. Few baulk at the idea of taking in other’s saliva when kissing, sexual gratification occurs when a lover is willing to allow semen to enter an orifice, yet who would consider swallowing faeces? The imagery offered is grotesque but it raises questions.

Likewise, few wish to think about the animal parts eaten in processed food. What is done to bodies – human and animal – is twisted to extreme. Actions considered ordinary – sex, cosmetic surgery, transplants, eating, disease – are perverted and then presented in gory, stench filled detail. Cruelties that should be shocking yet are not so far from what is known to happen, kept at a distance where they may be ignored, are reimagined – starvation, rape, incest, cannibalism. The language used is not always easy to interpret and is often weird, intended to sicken.

The raw stream of consciousness with which each piece is narrated is explicit and disturbing. Direction is often unclear, language difficult to elucidate. It is a fantasy horror show that is grimly challenging, horrifically portrayed with a chilling detachment. What is conveyed is appalling, but also appallingly familiar.

Not a book intended to be read for enjoyment, I found myself less upset by it than by more prosaic offerings where men behave abhorrently yet are treated as typical lads having fun. There is no fun to be had in this book, but shocking behaviour is seen for what it is. Man may not do exactly what is detailed but somewhere, someone is doing something as dreadful.

[Ben Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book to make a mockery of the Goodreads star rating system, as it's a collection of prose poetry that overturns petty value judgements of 'story' and 'character' and rolls around in the mess on the floor. Warewolff! is experimental horror that's a disquieting read with flashes of sick humour shining through the darkness.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not proud of it, but I do feel improved now that everyone else feels worse. A hollow validation you might think, but it helps to know where I was when the rest of you were enjoying yourselves

Hexus Press is a small indepedent press, in their own words dealing with experimental horror and publishers of Hexus Journal, and thanks to them for the ARC of this book.

Their own description of Gary J. Shipley's Warewolff! is

A lyric, sick-humoured and immoral morass of a novel told through reportage from the least-illuminated corners of the human condition, Warewolff! is a lexicon-in-pieces. Amalgamating nuclear warfare, Paris Vogue, and ‘lavish deformities’, it merges bold experimentation with a literary sensibility and a pitch black, plague-bearing playfulness.

and elsewhere:

Fragmented, darkly humourous and genuinely evil in its scope, Warewolff! is a psychopathic, poetic dive into the furthest reaches of the human consciousness, and to the darkest facets of experience circa now.

War, genocide, the fashion industry, deformity, disease, pornography, the diets of celebrities, the bodies of the starving, and the capitalist ideal of desire come together to suggest a mode of being that's both sickening and seductive and wholly inescapable.

I haven't given the book a rating simply because this is sufficiently far from my normal reading fare that I don't have a benchmark against which to assess it, but it certainly lives up to, or perhaps down to, its billing and succeeds on its own terms.

Warewolff! consists of a collection of fragmented prose poems, typically a page or so in length,

One, THE PROXY WIFE, sets the benchmark for 'normality' in this text at a deliberately distorted place, when a man and his wife:sometimes fantasise that she just has the growths and deformities other people have. We picture her with mind-lice wrestling in the whites of her eyes, with small mammals protruding from her calves, with her mouth colonised by the trumpets of flesh-eating plants - household objects haunted with her brain, that sort of thing.

My favourite was perhaps SKIN CONDITION which reads in its entirety:

On the front cover of Paris Vogue, a dead horse with its face smashed in. (The last issue? A prank?) Tiffany Earrings worn one in each eye. Our doom regurgitated as a closing down sale. And on the sides of the buses still running, human organs with legs in the movie of their life. But the packaging on our favourite cereal is the same. And we find it tastes better that way. If the technology still existed on which we could play back our home movies, we'd find them all dubbed inexpertly into a neglected dialect of Mandarin. Nothing we said then was worth the effort it took to say it. We'd have done better to Dictaphone our farts. I'm tired of speaking opium to cokeheads. The Swedish woman on the street outside my building claim's she's of Biafran descent, and that her two girls are stricken with smallpox. The scolds them for eating their pustules. And we pretend not to know that they're really rice krispies.

Although a more representative piece is FLY GLAZE HORSE:

They retained shape of the horse, in thousands where it had been, where it had been one retaining its own shape with effort eaten free of eyes, four-legged a beast bent-backed ear-flapping at the things that now kept it together, with no architectural convulsions in the now dead pasture for the horse to be made, but its shadow thin as gruel, and them Ethiopian farm labourers horse fevered on pesticides like snails in the confusions that’d rotted out the minds of opaque western thinkers, their whittled madness a translation of some queerly haunted girl in the crooked process of straightening, but no here now and good job for shit-cake imitators of unreason of derangement of horse, its stickfly legs making at running from the bone made of fly, dropping hoof blood in tracks horsing satiric in cobwebbed animal heaven of half-dead spider coitus, with old necessities all horse idle illusions of broken horse decay, its nostrils flyblown tunnels to loose scrotal brains of zimbs neighing lipless riders thrown together in maggots, colour unknown, flank sweat of good horse images the fly made of still wing, we happy in horse, we dead in fly, we deadhorsehappy in the horseflyhorse, the needle mouths of our new horse drawing blood from the old being of itself unflyfleshed braying at bites and poisoned African plasma

One must also be warned that, again in the publisher's words, the text trangresses pretty much every boundary. If one comes away without being highly offended by something in this novel, then you get the impression the book wouldn't have achieved one of its aims, and for me it was the frequency of images of violence directed against women. FRILLED MONOLITH contains the line ''abortions are mandatory and so is rape", which I am admittedly quoting out of context, but did seem to be par for the course.

Many of the pieces, including that, have been previously published in various journals and are available on line, so I would recommend the interested reader to dip into a few to see if this is to your taste or not. Some representative pieces are:

INSTAGRAMMING LANA DEL REY’S BRAIN

POLLUTION INGREDIENTS, OF WHICH SOME ARE TERRITORY

BULLET IN FACE

WIFE CELL

THE FAMILY DIET

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up because of the association with the excellent Hexus Press. I tend to find this kind of surreal approach hit or miss, but I'm keen to read more of Shipley after this. Abstract, nightmarish bursts of text that are actually enjoyable to read, and while occasionally it felt like overload, it was pretty compelling.

[Hexus Press]

For those reviewers here wondering about experimental or abstract horror, I thought it might be worth directing you to this piece from Gary J Shipley from Lithub, where he chooses some of his favourite examples.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

“Warewolff!” is published by the UK small publisher Hexus Press

The novel takes its title from a quote from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake which serves as an Epigraph.

The novel starts with a Preface/Prodrome.

“I chose these transcriptions from a much wider archive of materials, including but not restricted to the following sources: audio recordings, official documents, chatrooms, blogs, interviews, found footage, notebooks, emails, journal entries and website comments. I chose only the excerpts in which it seemed to be speaking through them, those instances in which a jolting incongruity of voice was most clearly present. Out of nowhere there’d be a marked shift in tone and style, and the more I read the more of these interludes I found and the more I began to hear one thing’s voice

This introduces what I believe to be the central conceit of the novel, one that its publishers describe as a “lyric, sick-humoured and immoral morass of a novel told through reportage from the least-illuminated corners of the human condition”; that conceit being that there is some form of sick consciousness (the Warewolff!) lurking behind human interactions, a being that the author discovers by looking for strange excerpts which he searches for in various media, excerpts which show this sick-humoured, immoral consciousness.

As a reflection on the state of “below the line” commentary/opinions on internet and blog pages, this seems a not unreasonable view to me!

The remainder of the book is a series of these excerpts, arranged into “Layers" for example Layer 1: buildings”.

“A Cosmic Endorsement” – the last excerpt in Layer 2: Eyes contains a sentence which I think gets at the heart of the book:

How was it that something inherently peculiar as human life, a phenomenon that it seemed to me demanded anxiety and misery as a necessary constant, came ever to be regarded as ordinary, as something not to be endured but relished.

This novel seeks instead to focus in explicit and scatalogical detail on what it sees as the misery, horror, squalidness and violence of the human life.

A typical excerpt is:

I pathologize sunlight from a vantage point located inside thoughts of eyeballs other than mine ….. And why nobody ever speaks of sharks with loose bowels is not a hole I’ll bother to fill. Into the carcasses of dogs I cram candy for those who’ve never seen a piñata. Their eventual dementia will be a crisis not of what’s taken but what remains. And of what remains, my groin is a landlocked island of yellowing hors d’oeuvres. Before they died my family developed the clotted legs of bees. And odd pneumonia pollinated them. My wife one morning sneezed a lung across her cereal. The post mortems were conducted by a slew of insects each with a Christian name. And the contumacy of my teenage children went unmentioned at the funeral, which was well attended by people I didn’t know, who’d all botched their own gender reassignments before changing their minds ….

And this conveys much of the style of this novel; fractured sentences but with some vague direction (occasional excerpts are more in an incomprehensible stream of consciousness style – which presumably is Joyce-inspired); deliberately jarring mixed metaphors; occasional sick-humour (the piñata); the rare but accurate use of obscure vocabulary; above all a very deliberate attempt to (in the publisher’s words) “transgress pretty much every boundary” usually, it seems to me, in the style of extreme horror movies.

What is deliberately missing from this excerpt and my real objection to this book is what seemed to be a recurring theme of extreme, misogynistic imagery and vocabulary. Perhaps this is my boundary that I object to being transgressed and so part of the author’s deliberate provocation, but I found it particularly jarring in a book published by an author with, from what I can tell from reviews and citations, a very male dominated readership and following.

I’m not proud of it, but I do feel improved now that everyone else feels worse. A hollow validation you might think, but it helps to know where I was when the rest of you were enjoying yourselves

My thanks to Hexus Press for an ARC.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems to teach you that there are layers of truth, as buildings et al, emptiness and areas of our mind like a Thomas Mann or Jules Verne exploration of its bottom reaches, with all the bottom-fishing around, puking or not. And this book itself is the optimum layer of truth. Or the pessimum one, if optimisations as well as filters can work in either direction of flow. All of those who have read this book or will do so in the future: now the Gestalt flowing either way. COMORBIDITY, STUPEFACTION and APORIA. Beware the wolf, it’ll blow your house down. Make it a ghost.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.