Ruination

by Katie Jean Shinkle

Katie Jean Shinkle is our new master writer of the nightmare. In Ruination she has created a classic world of infestation and prophets and terrorist sisters. It's a world where girls are sent to eradication centers for sprouting flowers and mushrooms and forsythia bushes from their skin. The prose is tender and bold and sharp. If you were to carve the initials of this book on your knee, you would have to spell one word: amazing.

Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book and The Incantations of Daniel Johnston

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

94 pages, Paperback

Published July 31, 2018

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t understand the message the author was trying to communicate with this book. Is this about hiding parts of ourselves from the world? Reversal of gender roles? Feminism? Whatever the message, for me, Ruination came off as unbalanced with a bit of male bashing.

[Unai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me veo incapacitado para comentar algo sobre un texto poético de ciencia ficción apocalíptica feminista queer, en un idioma que no es el mio, mas allá de decir que es brutal.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The only thing I believe in is the Holy Spirit because I have seen it."

[Connie Mae · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of reviewing this gorgeous and prophetic book when it was first released, here are some of my impressions from 2018:

"Katie Jean Shinkle’s stirring novella, Ruination, presents the reader with an iconographical ecosystem of American sorrow. I consider it to be among the most necessary books of our time, for its channeling of contemporary psychic horrors and its candid treatment of potential societal fallout, as it documents the perennial violence stamped on the bodies of women and girls. Their bodies are distended, with dystopian speed, by vegetation and aggressive flowers. Young women exposed to this epidemic are quarantined or otherwise found dead, their sisters’ sorrow stopping short of muted panic within a town’s somnambulant timescape.
/
In the world Shinkle has created, as in our own, 'Everyday that there is nothing is a better day than the last.' We too feel that 'It is light outside' even when 'there is no sun' because in this contradictory quality is a global symptom we’ve come to understand. In this book it seems there is no sun and there are no sons, there are only daughters swimming and drowning in foliage, bisected by dogwood branches and then torn from the grey landscape. Deliverance from the violence of paternalism comes, ultimately, from a father clad in his deceased wife’s pantyhose, a father who says, 'We have to get out of here.'"

It is a truly excellent read!!

[Jaime Fountaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katie Jean Shinkle's RUINATION unfolds like a beautiful nightmare in constellations of tiny details that build to a whole world that lingers long after you've woken up.

[M Cody McPhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thoughts on Ruination by Katie Jean Shinkle:::::::

A nameless adolescent girl lives in a small town. Her and her three friends hang out together. They are synchronized swimmers. They tease and flirt with each other. The main character develops a crush on her friend Paula.

A mysterious superstorm is sweeping across the land. With it comes mass destruction and something strange.

The women of the town are sent off to fight in a war. The men are left to supervise and dominate.

A vagrant known as The Prophet gives sermons that the town flocks to. A cult begins to form.

The girls in the town begin to show signs of a strange mutation. Flowers, stalks, and roots begin growing out of their bodies. The homes in town suffer the same fate.

A government agency steps in to study and eradicate this phenomenon.

Queerness, transness, women's rights. These concepts are alien to some, despised by too many. It is misogyny and homophobia/transphobia that should be done away with. Bigotry and abuse need to become alien to humans. Forgotten with time. This book is short, beautiful and deeper than most longer novels. Find it and read it.

[Tariq Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not an easy read. I didn’t find the book quite as “hopeful” as the blurbs on the back cover imply but I thought it was a beautiful piece of writing.

Ruination is a really unique take on dystopian fantasy and prose. A harsh look at violence towards women and how misogyny is legislated and pervasive.

We see that these girls are the last source of growth and life on a dead planet. Despite that act and ability, despite it bringing hope, being essentially mothers of the new earth is a source of pain, fear, death, and another excuse for men’s violence.

I think the prose is beautiful, the writing is extremely evocative in terms of images and emotion. I expected a switch to stanzas at some point, but the stylistic choice was bold and a good one and allows the book to be read as a set of microstories or vignettes. Some of these poems are only a couple of sentences long but are incredibly powerful in their contexts.

[Meghan L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this lush, dystopian book and loved it when it first came out. It resonates even more now that we are in the midst of what feels like an actual dystopian nightmare. In RUINATION the world and the people in it are strikingly familiar, yet none of our underlying assumptions about what it means to live in the world--and, also, what it means to live in our own gendered bodies--apply. This effect isn't jarring, however; the world-building here is precise enough that it simply absorbs you page by page. It can be tricky, as a reader, to turn off the part of our brains that wants to focus on plot, and wants a book to tell us exactly what happened. Sometimes what happened isn't the point--what is happening, how it lives on the page, and how the delivery of the prose registers in your nervous system, is where it's at.

[Jessica Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is sensual and gorgeous! Katie Jean combines experimental methods (associative thinking, collage aesthetics, juxtaposition of materials) to evoke a sense of dystopian dread. The novel builds a complex web of interlocking violences without relying on conventional narrative methods. This can be a challenge, if you're looking for an easy moral. It delivers an experience instead. But, to my mind, that made the book all the more haunting and beautiful.

[Vincent James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruination hits all the right registers with spare and incisive gut-grip prose; a perfect counterpoint to the sprawl of the narrative’s theatre of horrors. Shinkle’s book, while offering a moving and satisfying ending, is over too soon; I’d gladly swing, wade, climb, and sway in the lush locus terribilis of this book until my daughters sprout wild grass and cactus flowers and we get the hell out of Dodge.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Annihilation, you'll like this too! It's an apocalyptic nightmare of plant-human symbiosis. Wait, that's not really the nightmare, it's the men who terrorize difference and prey on their own daughters!

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 1 out of 5]

Garbage. Worst 'chapbook' or whatever the hell it is since Well Dressed Wound. Authors who don't believe in anything should probably avoid publishing their spontaneous scrawls of defeatist prose.

[Jacob Lehman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extended prose poems of a dystopian world. Imaginative, with dark and rich descriptors, but more prose than poems.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will stay with me for weeks and months and years to come. One of the more original worlds I've entered.

[Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful, horrifying conversation/story about the female body, who feels entitled to it, and what happens when nature overtakes it told in vignettes. Read for class and loved it!

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

cut and cut and cut
until you're left with more than when you started

[Steven Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love when a book makes me feel like I'm in the landscape it takes place in, which makes me feel even more the characters' problems and joys, and those in-between things that aren't easily named but felt just as strongly. In this way, and many others, Katie Jean Shinkle's writing allowed me to be an active participant in the story, like I was involved in its creation. It really is a gift, from a gracious book and a gracious author. Ruination calls me to read it over and over.