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Wretch
"In Ansgar Allen’s Wretch, a naked prisoner in a cell dutifully records the seemingly ineluctable decay of ‘the Known City’ with the aid of a writing machine. Each account, however, is a reordering of the scattered testaments of souls disordered by expeditions into an ever encroaching ‘Outside’. The unreliability of its copyist is thus no postmodern trope but derives from the principled impossibility of the copy. Wretch thus builds its horror from the simplest metaphysical constituents, envelops the reader like slow mo Ligotti, but is yet more paradoxically disturbing for the glacial consistency of its prose."
— David Roden, author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human.
"If Samuel Beckett had rewritten Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth while watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker, you might get something like Wretch. A hypnotic expedition into the cells and territories of an ecological dystopia and the lives of those in its service. Terrifying, haunting, but also, in places, strikingly beautiful, like the flowers blooming in the radioactive landscapes of Diana Thater’s Chernobyl."— Emile Bojesen, author of Forms of Education and Reader in Education at the University of Winchester."A copyist, or rather the body of a copyist, is at work in a cell. He is nameless, as is everyone. There are no names in his world. Pieces of paper are pushed under his door, and he is busy at a machine. Both body and machine are, though, having trouble. Infernal reason is on the rise. What now? Stunning."
— John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Lancaster, and author, most recently, of Paris Bride.
"Pessoa once said: ‘[t]o still not have died is enough for life’s wretches, and to still have hope.’ One of these wretches produced the copy you hold in your hands, and while that might go some way toward explaining this book’s title and thematic, allow me to expand.
Ansgar Allen is an accomplished stylist engaged in a highly structured, critical form of fiction-as-medium (in the manner of Marcel Proust or Marcel Broodthaers, for instance), thus what he has ostensibly given us in Wretch is a stack of found copy (format trouvé) — produced by an entirely unreliable narrator — that bound together constitutes a sort-of-narrative straddling the landscape of reason and its Other; stratifying, accordingly, compulsively, infernal regions and impregnable fortresses.
Less a book than an ‘object-event’ (in the Foucauldian sense), Wretch is a meticulously constructed puzzle of reality and unreality, of psychological and . . . creeping biological horror, relayed by an abject Sisyphean copyist whose conscription in this (alien and alienating) loopy labour largely eludes us, but whose droning prose is at once maddeningly mundane and insanely compelling.
A textual aberration worthy of Schism Neuronics. If you enjoyed B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis, you’ll love this!"
— Edia Connole, Schism editorial board member and author, most recently, of ‘So, Black Is Myself,’ in Hebdige and Subculture in the Twenty-First Century: Through the Subcultural Lens.
"What at first feels like a bleak update of Beckett’s Molloy soon devolves into a terrifying take on Tarkovsky’s Stalker. An imprisoned, nameless narrator tasked with copying knowledge, to render ‘what was written’ into print, transcribes reports of a traveling party who wandered beyond the confines of ‘the known city.’ Wretch reflects an increasingly isolated, unthinkable world, one in which unknown regions encroach upon the comforts of our bleach-soaked jail cells. The very act of reading this book—an object so wonderfully and frighteningly about itself—risks exposure to decay and disintegration. You’ll never see the act of creation in quite the same way again."
— David Peak, author of The Spectacle of the Void.
— David Roden, author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human.
"If Samuel Beckett had rewritten Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth while watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker, you might get something like Wretch. A hypnotic expedition into the cells and territories of an ecological dystopia and the lives of those in its service. Terrifying, haunting, but also, in places, strikingly beautiful, like the flowers blooming in the radioactive landscapes of Diana Thater’s Chernobyl."— Emile Bojesen, author of Forms of Education and Reader in Education at the University of Winchester."A copyist, or rather the body of a copyist, is at work in a cell. He is nameless, as is everyone. There are no names in his world. Pieces of paper are pushed under his door, and he is busy at a machine. Both body and machine are, though, having trouble. Infernal reason is on the rise. What now? Stunning."
— John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Lancaster, and author, most recently, of Paris Bride.
"Pessoa once said: ‘[t]o still not have died is enough for life’s wretches, and to still have hope.’ One of these wretches produced the copy you hold in your hands, and while that might go some way toward explaining this book’s title and thematic, allow me to expand.
Ansgar Allen is an accomplished stylist engaged in a highly structured, critical form of fiction-as-medium (in the manner of Marcel Proust or Marcel Broodthaers, for instance), thus what he has ostensibly given us in Wretch is a stack of found copy (format trouvé) — produced by an entirely unreliable narrator — that bound together constitutes a sort-of-narrative straddling the landscape of reason and its Other; stratifying, accordingly, compulsively, infernal regions and impregnable fortresses.
Less a book than an ‘object-event’ (in the Foucauldian sense), Wretch is a meticulously constructed puzzle of reality and unreality, of psychological and . . . creeping biological horror, relayed by an abject Sisyphean copyist whose conscription in this (alien and alienating) loopy labour largely eludes us, but whose droning prose is at once maddeningly mundane and insanely compelling.
A textual aberration worthy of Schism Neuronics. If you enjoyed B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis, you’ll love this!"
— Edia Connole, Schism editorial board member and author, most recently, of ‘So, Black Is Myself,’ in Hebdige and Subculture in the Twenty-First Century: Through the Subcultural Lens.
"What at first feels like a bleak update of Beckett’s Molloy soon devolves into a terrifying take on Tarkovsky’s Stalker. An imprisoned, nameless narrator tasked with copying knowledge, to render ‘what was written’ into print, transcribes reports of a traveling party who wandered beyond the confines of ‘the known city.’ Wretch reflects an increasingly isolated, unthinkable world, one in which unknown regions encroach upon the comforts of our bleach-soaked jail cells. The very act of reading this book—an object so wonderfully and frighteningly about itself—risks exposure to decay and disintegration. You’ll never see the act of creation in quite the same way again."
— David Peak, author of The Spectacle of the Void.
162 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 15, 2020
4 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
About the author
Ansgar Allen
18 books38 followersAnsgar Allen is the author of works of fiction, theory-fiction and philosophy. He lives and works in Sheffield, in the UK.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 15, 2020
A man isolated in a barren cell is tasked with the upkeep of a machine. The machine’s function is to make copies. The man feeds the machine papers for it to replicate. The process is one of routine and ritual, importance applied to each stage. Every action undertaken by the man is measured by its relevance to the task he has been bestowed.
The book begins with the claustrophobic and oppressive confinement of the man’s cell. This is a bleak location, where the smallest details are noticed, the cell the extent of the man’s existence. Later on, the world outside of the man’s cell is revealed to be stricken with decay, with emptied buildings and wandering groups caught in their own ritualistic relationship with the rubble.
Allen maintains an economic style throughout, the language conveying the barest details of the characters and landscapes. This creates the feel of oblique reportage, where the inexplicably numbed citizens of this world show themselves by regimented surface action alone.
Sisyphean and Kafkaesque, I was most struck by the similarity to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. It’s hard to read without picturing this world in sepia. Most notable for being a very singular vision, rendered with consistency and focus.
The book begins with the claustrophobic and oppressive confinement of the man’s cell. This is a bleak location, where the smallest details are noticed, the cell the extent of the man’s existence. Later on, the world outside of the man’s cell is revealed to be stricken with decay, with emptied buildings and wandering groups caught in their own ritualistic relationship with the rubble.
Allen maintains an economic style throughout, the language conveying the barest details of the characters and landscapes. This creates the feel of oblique reportage, where the inexplicably numbed citizens of this world show themselves by regimented surface action alone.
Sisyphean and Kafkaesque, I was most struck by the similarity to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. It’s hard to read without picturing this world in sepia. Most notable for being a very singular vision, rendered with consistency and focus.
December 31, 2021
In the last year of two I have read more ‘weird’ fiction than before, especially if it shares a ‘horror’ tag, though, quite understandably, I do come across the odd book that really is off the wall.
Such as Allen’s Wretch. I guess it’s been read by only a few, but deserves a much wider audience.
A person exists in a dark cell with a typewriter of a sort, copying out page after page of what is passed under the door to him. He has broken has last machine, in a rage, but is determined not to damage this, and copy his pages to show he has an ordered mind. The Wretch copies, eats, expels waste down a central grid, watches through a narrow hole and listens to what seem to be guards, under the door.
Though Wretch exists in the cell, there is some knowledge of the City and outside world. But it is not at all clear, a type perhaps of dystopian fantasy. But the terror that permeates from the pages of the novel are that this need not be either a dystopia, or fantasy; it is rooted in reality.
It Wretch a man, woman or child, or even human? Is it a type of mental institution, kidnapping or prison?
It’s as if the author has eschewed any temptation to tread the accepted path, to fit snuggly into a genre, which most likely would have seen the book sell a lot more copies. For this he deserves much credit.
This short book is a great example of the power of the written word in being able to chill with the most simple of structures. It takes less than two hours to read, and I thoroughly recommend it.
Such as Allen’s Wretch. I guess it’s been read by only a few, but deserves a much wider audience.
A person exists in a dark cell with a typewriter of a sort, copying out page after page of what is passed under the door to him. He has broken has last machine, in a rage, but is determined not to damage this, and copy his pages to show he has an ordered mind. The Wretch copies, eats, expels waste down a central grid, watches through a narrow hole and listens to what seem to be guards, under the door.
Though Wretch exists in the cell, there is some knowledge of the City and outside world. But it is not at all clear, a type perhaps of dystopian fantasy. But the terror that permeates from the pages of the novel are that this need not be either a dystopia, or fantasy; it is rooted in reality.
It Wretch a man, woman or child, or even human? Is it a type of mental institution, kidnapping or prison?
It’s as if the author has eschewed any temptation to tread the accepted path, to fit snuggly into a genre, which most likely would have seen the book sell a lot more copies. For this he deserves much credit.
This short book is a great example of the power of the written word in being able to chill with the most simple of structures. It takes less than two hours to read, and I thoroughly recommend it.
November 20, 2023
This body, this paper, this fire. “I am indifferent to all else but my relationship with the machine, which I reaffirm, I confirm, by using it.” Ansgar Allen’s Wretch details the task of a naked prisoner to copy pieces of paper pushed under the door of his cell that document an unknowable Outside. Like the sick and bedridden cousin of Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, Allen’s copyist submits his body to the machine. His fingers are torn, the skin on his head peeling. An ink-stained topology of decay—the copy of a copy, deferral of all meaning. Nothing left but the logic of the machine and the execution it commands.
March 24, 2025
This book feels like it's about a brain that doesn't realize it's a brain. He spends his life locked in a cell (a skull) and never gets to experience the outside world, is forced to make methodical notes about the information that others bring to him about the world (the eyes and other senses sending it information to save in the memory banks). I get the feeling he's a mentally ill brain, too. He likes to save memories that didn't actually happen, which leads to god knows what confusion for the unknown body. Stupid brains should just do what we tell them to. This is how Outties get into fights with their Innies in Severance.
March 15, 2024
I blurbed this! Here is what I wrote:
"What at first feels like a bleak update of Beckett’s Molloy soon devolves into a terrifying take on Tarkovsky’s Stalker. An imprisoned, nameless narrator tasked with copying knowledge, to render ‘what was written’ into print, transcribes reports of a traveling party who wandered beyond the confines of ‘the known city.’ Wretch reflects an increasingly isolated, unthinkable world, one in which unknown regions encroach upon the comforts of our bleach-soaked jail cells. The very act of reading this book—an object so wonderfully and frighteningly about itself—risks exposure to decay and disintegration. You’ll never see the act of creation in quite the same way again."
"What at first feels like a bleak update of Beckett’s Molloy soon devolves into a terrifying take on Tarkovsky’s Stalker. An imprisoned, nameless narrator tasked with copying knowledge, to render ‘what was written’ into print, transcribes reports of a traveling party who wandered beyond the confines of ‘the known city.’ Wretch reflects an increasingly isolated, unthinkable world, one in which unknown regions encroach upon the comforts of our bleach-soaked jail cells. The very act of reading this book—an object so wonderfully and frighteningly about itself—risks exposure to decay and disintegration. You’ll never see the act of creation in quite the same way again."
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews