Origami

by Merl Fluin

A bizarre earbud malfunction turns an office worker’s morning commute into a plunge through the fleshy folds of spacetime. Woozy dreams and heavy metal guitar riffs collide with a Victorian maths lesson to bend your brain between the sheets. Oi, oi, fly my pretties…

52 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Weird Writer, Feral Thinker, Gorgon In Furs

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I’m not exactly sure what happened here, but let’s just say there’s some brilliant cut-up technique involved. I certainly felt myself caught (cut?) up in the action. Our intrepid narrator gets shot in a bar and then all hell breaks loose—including both fire and flood—but most notably in the form of a large flaming sphere capable of folding in on itself. There’s quite a bit of math involved, which admittedly was never my strong suit. Certain passages put me in mind of an alchemically-tinged Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (there’s even a shaman serving as a kind of Ford Prefect in robes). Fluin’s humor is quick, dry, and well-placed. One can easily recognize that this whirlwind of prose shot forth from the same sharp pen as The Golden Cut, which if you haven’t read yet then you probably deserve to be engulfed by a giant fiery sphere with a saucy attitude.

[Rebecca Gransden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surreal novelette involving inter-, intra-, and extra-dimensional hijinks. Ostensibly located somewhere around London town, the story unfolds like a counter culture mathematician’s lost weekend. The novelette takes very little time to plunge headfirst into one absurdist event after another, many unfolding and overlapping in a dizzying way, emphasised all the more for the protagonist’s general wry acceptance of whatever comes up next. The backbone of the experience is a broad and embracing level of absurdist humour that abounds as reality ties itself in knots. Best to be read in one sitting and revel in the nonsense that exploration of the outskirts of existence can result in.