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Terminal Park
“Shipley's Terminal Park pounds fiction into entirely new shapes. Disintegrating and blissful. Highly Recommend.”
—Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything
“Gary J. Shipley's writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy.”
—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
“The world is a void and there are no more prophets left to serve. There is still vision, however, and Shipley's is one we might all surrender to.”
—Travis Jeppesen, author of The Suiciders
“Shipley's writing is important because it's a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature, to force us to breathe something, to drown in something, to bloody our hands. It's an unforgettable experience.”
—3:AM Magazine
—Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything
“Gary J. Shipley's writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy.”
—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
“The world is a void and there are no more prophets left to serve. There is still vision, however, and Shipley's is one we might all surrender to.”
—Travis Jeppesen, author of The Suiciders
“Shipley's writing is important because it's a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature, to force us to breathe something, to drown in something, to bloody our hands. It's an unforgettable experience.”
—3:AM Magazine
208 pages, Paperback
First published September 28, 2020
81 people are currently reading
2621 people want to read
About the author
Gary J. Shipley
47 books179 followersLibrarian 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.
Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 92 reviews
May 9, 2023
⛧⛧⛧⛧
“𝐀𝐧 𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐩𝐬𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐨 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐚𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫. 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐬, 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝. 𝐈𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐬 𝐮𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐰𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲.”
The crimson curtains are closing, and the lights are dimmed as ash and blood color an overpopulated world that no longer indulges in the luxury of life because it is deaf to its call. As the system collapses, the gardens wither, and the flies devour everything that was once able to breathe. Although geographic locations like Mumbai and Central Park are mentioned, don't get confused about where you are at.
You are in hell.
Hiding in a luxury apartment building, numb to the horrors around him, Kaal observes the seal of expiration upon the flesh of humanity from his balcony and on his screen.
𝗧𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 is like nothing I've ever read before. It is art within a story within a nightmare. Strange, beautiful, nihilistic, mind bending and gruesome, it pushes boundaries and takes you on an exhausting journey through godless labyrinths so desolate, abysmal, and dark, and it doesn't stop, not even between chapters. It raises questions of values, environmental threats, and the absurdity of life.
𝘎𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘑. 𝘚𝘩𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘺'𝘴 dense, thought-provoking, philosophical vision might not be for everyone. It requires you to step outside the box of everything you knew before about horror and philosophical fiction.
If you choose to step into 𝘚𝘩𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘺'𝘴 dark park, you might want to prepare some ibuprofen and an ice cold bottle of water nearby, you are going to need both after you're done chanting "wtf" in between prose.
“𝐀𝐧 𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐩𝐬𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐨 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐚𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫. 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐬, 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝. 𝐈𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐬 𝐮𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐰𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲.”
The crimson curtains are closing, and the lights are dimmed as ash and blood color an overpopulated world that no longer indulges in the luxury of life because it is deaf to its call. As the system collapses, the gardens wither, and the flies devour everything that was once able to breathe. Although geographic locations like Mumbai and Central Park are mentioned, don't get confused about where you are at.
You are in hell.
Hiding in a luxury apartment building, numb to the horrors around him, Kaal observes the seal of expiration upon the flesh of humanity from his balcony and on his screen.
𝗧𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 is like nothing I've ever read before. It is art within a story within a nightmare. Strange, beautiful, nihilistic, mind bending and gruesome, it pushes boundaries and takes you on an exhausting journey through godless labyrinths so desolate, abysmal, and dark, and it doesn't stop, not even between chapters. It raises questions of values, environmental threats, and the absurdity of life.
𝘎𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘑. 𝘚𝘩𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘺'𝘴 dense, thought-provoking, philosophical vision might not be for everyone. It requires you to step outside the box of everything you knew before about horror and philosophical fiction.
If you choose to step into 𝘚𝘩𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘺'𝘴 dark park, you might want to prepare some ibuprofen and an ice cold bottle of water nearby, you are going to need both after you're done chanting "wtf" in between prose.
September 26, 2023
Fiends, let me ask you this: Have you ever, while attempting to configure a lexical spit wad utilizing the feeble bandwidth of your motor neurons to animate those opposable digits synonymous with a lack of grace (i.e. thumbs) so that they might “beat the devil” (i.e. attack in the frenzied manner of Bob Ross) out of the semantic conflagration raging in your mind, and, like a blanket, produce - without recourse to either wolf dung, saltpeter, or sulfur - dense clouds of smoke which poorly adumbrate the vivid images which comprise the ‘thing’ you seek to represent semantically, (i.e. texting a friend), had this happen? In the process of compressing these pictures and sentiments in all their rebarbative likeness into phonetic tokens to be sucked through the optic nerves of the recipient, and spat like a Travis loogie into Judecca (i.e. the final layer of the ninth circle of hell as depicted by one Dante Alighieri, much to the chagrin of persons therein fell upon by the soul-sucking gob of Beelzebub (i.e. Satan) (i.e. Judas Iscariot) and manducated like a wretched vegetable, eternal-wise.) where it is beset, on all sides, by dendritic creatures of highly idiosyncratic branchings (i.e. associative networks formed from shared and non-shared environments) which are powerless but to inflict hungry predations upon this conceptual gruel in the manner of salivating, pattern-starved beasts. Gorging their action potentials with differential weightings (i.e. neural codes) which antagonize the higher operations of the brain to send input back into the visual cortex, arousing and intensifying the mind’s eye, which serves to transduce this information into the image of Travis. (?)
To which you thumb dance incredulously across de-materialized keys, “Who in the holy fuck is Travis?” To which the helpless viewer of Travis replies, “I don’t know, man. Who is Travis?” To which you reply, with growing irritation, “Who *IS* Travis?, to which your friend replies, with commensurate pique, “I haven’t known a Travis since grade school.”, causing you to grit your teeth and expel, “Stop talking about Travis, I hate Travis.” To which he concedes, though without a shred of amiability, “Yea, fuck Travis.”, causing you, with much vitriol, to shout, “Don’t you talk about Travis like that!” And it is then that you realize how non-fungible the ‘thing’ is that you were trying to transplant. How a single fracture point (in this instance, auto-correct’s dumb, mechanical hatred for the word Gravid and its subsequent attempts to produce a logical alternative (i.e. Travis) has introduced a copying error from which the original data may not be recovered. Undeterred, your friend continues, “You know how I told you about having intense auditory hallucinations when I’m on the cusp of sleep? Well, they’re usually, like, the sound of construction equipment or indistinct murmuring. But last night I heard the voice of an old man say, “I am casting my most powerful Tuna Spells.” To which you reply, “Ah. Ummm..” And they’re like, “So when I lay down and try to sleep again, I hear the voice. The old man. And he says, “I can perform conjurations beyond your wildest imagination.” And then “I Wear My Sunglasses At Night” starts blasting so loud that it jump scares me awake.” To which you, in exasperation say, “This has nothing to do with Travis.” And, thoughtfully, your friend says, “I think there’s a wizard in my head and his name is Travis. I can see him over a crystal ball with tuna fish swimming in it.”
Fret not, for what I can tell you of Shipley’s superb writing is that the ‘thing’ conjured is too big to suffer these transformational insults. Like a leviathan shrugging off the slings and arrows of peasants. The feeling conjured is monstrous and empty and all but impervious to the idiosyncrasies of your perception, to your mind’s attempts to auto-correct this hateful look at the essential absurdity of life’s brute teleology to something more palatable. This is horror with philosophical and literary pretensions. Succeeding on both fronts due to the author’s background as a hardened soldier in the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language, (i.e. Wittgenstein’s conception of Philosophy) (i.e. a Philosopher) (though many, including myself, might reasonably suggest that the bulk of continental philosophy seeks only to befuddle through obscurantist jibber jabber that, upon examination by anyone not of the clergy, does not even make a vague attempt to comport with the reality we inhabit, and thus we must condemn them as impediments to clear thinking and traitors to wisdom - which dovetails nicely with the confession that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on in much of this book) and a VIQ (i.e. Verbal Intelligence Quotient) high enough to exceed the weight of an overfed bull mastiff. Or, in other words, it’s the kind of writing that will attract one star and five star ratings in equal measure, with claims of pretentiousness and brilliance both landing solidly. And, if you’re like me, (i.e. an angsty, anti-authoritarian sass-mouth who doesn’t appreciate being told how to write, think, eat a Reese’s, or drink your own piss), you might also get your hackles up by 1-star reviews wherein grammarian prescriptivist and stylistic hall-porters flog anyone who doesn’t use spartan prose (not that this is the case here, with negative reviews centering around the perceived aimlessness of the narrative, but I am pathologically peripheral to all things relevant, as you well know), which is a bit like insisting that all visual artists be limited to sketching, and that any detail beyond this is extraneous, (which, I can’t help but note would spell the end of all my reviews, with those currently mucking about in the wilds vanishing like the first blush of innocence), to which I would reply, “You may not appreciate the fact that this artist discharged the ink of a dozen micron pens into the intricate hatching beneath this man’s cumbersome, oversized testes, but dozens of us do. DOZENS OF US!”
Where was I?
Picture this: A philosopher, possessing the emotional affect of Pepe the Frog (i.e. an Internet meme consisting of a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body.), vindicates the familiar Manson lyric (i.e. We’re on the other side, the screen is us, and we’re TV.) By watching daily snuff and horrific video diaries while an apocalypse of fissioning flesh (i.e. No separate tastes, no individual colors or shapes, just the beige gruel of things about to collapse. Just the amassment of the same. Just the meltdown of all humanity’s rich variance into a tiresome slop.) turns the entire globe into a putrid wad of organic chewing gum. From atop a tower in Mumbai, Kaal, between witnessing carnage on a scope and scale that renders all attempts to consummate feelings associated with the Kübler-Ross model (i.e. denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) rather quaint, as humanity continues to multiply at a geometric rate due to the mysterious phenomena of “splitting”, wherein a copy of an individual writhes sweatily out of the asshole of the original like Ace Ventura caught in emergency egress from the sweltering interior of a Rhinoid decoy, Kaal, in Ligottian fashion, waxes aphoristically about humanity’s malignant uselessness, (i.e. It had forgotten how the universe ignores it, and how the knowledge of that must be sublimated by ideals, by notions of progress, by aspirations of transcendence. All it had now was the continuing massacre and the vague sense that there existed a more human way to suffer.), while several meta-narrative threads coil around this central conceit to produce a labyrinthine work of enigmatic dimensions, told in a chaotic fashion without chapter breaks, transitioning between Kaal, a video art piece (where the book delves heavily into film-theory), and the outside world in all its enduring vileness. This book is by turns, a giant fucking bummer, a catalyst for revelatory insights, a frustrating quagmire of disparate narratives and philosophic gibberish, and a truly unique piece of horror fiction.
To which you thumb dance incredulously across de-materialized keys, “Who in the holy fuck is Travis?” To which the helpless viewer of Travis replies, “I don’t know, man. Who is Travis?” To which you reply, with growing irritation, “Who *IS* Travis?, to which your friend replies, with commensurate pique, “I haven’t known a Travis since grade school.”, causing you to grit your teeth and expel, “Stop talking about Travis, I hate Travis.” To which he concedes, though without a shred of amiability, “Yea, fuck Travis.”, causing you, with much vitriol, to shout, “Don’t you talk about Travis like that!” And it is then that you realize how non-fungible the ‘thing’ is that you were trying to transplant. How a single fracture point (in this instance, auto-correct’s dumb, mechanical hatred for the word Gravid and its subsequent attempts to produce a logical alternative (i.e. Travis) has introduced a copying error from which the original data may not be recovered. Undeterred, your friend continues, “You know how I told you about having intense auditory hallucinations when I’m on the cusp of sleep? Well, they’re usually, like, the sound of construction equipment or indistinct murmuring. But last night I heard the voice of an old man say, “I am casting my most powerful Tuna Spells.” To which you reply, “Ah. Ummm..” And they’re like, “So when I lay down and try to sleep again, I hear the voice. The old man. And he says, “I can perform conjurations beyond your wildest imagination.” And then “I Wear My Sunglasses At Night” starts blasting so loud that it jump scares me awake.” To which you, in exasperation say, “This has nothing to do with Travis.” And, thoughtfully, your friend says, “I think there’s a wizard in my head and his name is Travis. I can see him over a crystal ball with tuna fish swimming in it.”
Fret not, for what I can tell you of Shipley’s superb writing is that the ‘thing’ conjured is too big to suffer these transformational insults. Like a leviathan shrugging off the slings and arrows of peasants. The feeling conjured is monstrous and empty and all but impervious to the idiosyncrasies of your perception, to your mind’s attempts to auto-correct this hateful look at the essential absurdity of life’s brute teleology to something more palatable. This is horror with philosophical and literary pretensions. Succeeding on both fronts due to the author’s background as a hardened soldier in the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language, (i.e. Wittgenstein’s conception of Philosophy) (i.e. a Philosopher) (though many, including myself, might reasonably suggest that the bulk of continental philosophy seeks only to befuddle through obscurantist jibber jabber that, upon examination by anyone not of the clergy, does not even make a vague attempt to comport with the reality we inhabit, and thus we must condemn them as impediments to clear thinking and traitors to wisdom - which dovetails nicely with the confession that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on in much of this book) and a VIQ (i.e. Verbal Intelligence Quotient) high enough to exceed the weight of an overfed bull mastiff. Or, in other words, it’s the kind of writing that will attract one star and five star ratings in equal measure, with claims of pretentiousness and brilliance both landing solidly. And, if you’re like me, (i.e. an angsty, anti-authoritarian sass-mouth who doesn’t appreciate being told how to write, think, eat a Reese’s, or drink your own piss), you might also get your hackles up by 1-star reviews wherein grammarian prescriptivist and stylistic hall-porters flog anyone who doesn’t use spartan prose (not that this is the case here, with negative reviews centering around the perceived aimlessness of the narrative, but I am pathologically peripheral to all things relevant, as you well know), which is a bit like insisting that all visual artists be limited to sketching, and that any detail beyond this is extraneous, (which, I can’t help but note would spell the end of all my reviews, with those currently mucking about in the wilds vanishing like the first blush of innocence), to which I would reply, “You may not appreciate the fact that this artist discharged the ink of a dozen micron pens into the intricate hatching beneath this man’s cumbersome, oversized testes, but dozens of us do. DOZENS OF US!”
Where was I?
Picture this: A philosopher, possessing the emotional affect of Pepe the Frog (i.e. an Internet meme consisting of a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body.), vindicates the familiar Manson lyric (i.e. We’re on the other side, the screen is us, and we’re TV.) By watching daily snuff and horrific video diaries while an apocalypse of fissioning flesh (i.e. No separate tastes, no individual colors or shapes, just the beige gruel of things about to collapse. Just the amassment of the same. Just the meltdown of all humanity’s rich variance into a tiresome slop.) turns the entire globe into a putrid wad of organic chewing gum. From atop a tower in Mumbai, Kaal, between witnessing carnage on a scope and scale that renders all attempts to consummate feelings associated with the Kübler-Ross model (i.e. denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) rather quaint, as humanity continues to multiply at a geometric rate due to the mysterious phenomena of “splitting”, wherein a copy of an individual writhes sweatily out of the asshole of the original like Ace Ventura caught in emergency egress from the sweltering interior of a Rhinoid decoy, Kaal, in Ligottian fashion, waxes aphoristically about humanity’s malignant uselessness, (i.e. It had forgotten how the universe ignores it, and how the knowledge of that must be sublimated by ideals, by notions of progress, by aspirations of transcendence. All it had now was the continuing massacre and the vague sense that there existed a more human way to suffer.), while several meta-narrative threads coil around this central conceit to produce a labyrinthine work of enigmatic dimensions, told in a chaotic fashion without chapter breaks, transitioning between Kaal, a video art piece (where the book delves heavily into film-theory), and the outside world in all its enduring vileness. This book is by turns, a giant fucking bummer, a catalyst for revelatory insights, a frustrating quagmire of disparate narratives and philosophic gibberish, and a truly unique piece of horror fiction.
October 25, 2020
A stunning and bleak vision of apocalypse, from an author who already has a number of engrossing world-end visions under his belt. Disturbingly prophetic, Shipley captures the delirium of self-isolation--particularly, the obsessive watching of others through screens, while the bodies outside pile high enough to eclipse the skyscrapers and oceans. Terminal Park implies that the alien invasion will not come from the skies, but instead emerge from our own bodies, turned stagnant (and thus ripe for viscous bloom) by modern processes and rituals.
December 20, 2024
In Terminal Park, Gary J. Shipley takes overpopulation as a starting point to an even greater abomination—the ‘fissioning’ of the human form, whereby humans spontaneously ‘split’ into multiples of themselves. Shipley’s vision is informed in part by Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’ where we reject the repressed part of ourselves perceived as Other—casting it out as something that then exists separate and disturbing in the liminal space around us. In Shipley’s nightmarish world, ‘splitting’ is an extreme physical manifestation of abjection—the repulsive within is actually ourselves—resulting in a human population literally drowning in copies of itself.
There are parallel storylines operating here. As he waits out the rising tide of writhing, self-cannibalizing humanity from the heights of his illegally obtained tower apartment in Mumbai, Shipley’s protagonist Kaal begins watching a video filmed by a guerilla artist (NB) who has squatted in Cornelia Parker’s (irl) art installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) on top of the Met in NYC. In the course of his obsessive filming of his surroundings, NB observes a number of disturbing violent acts in the city below. This leads to a gradated series of startling realizations and revelations on the parts of both NB and Kaal, whose experiences begin twinning in an alarming way.
I wasn’t quite sure what a truly post-Ballardian apocalyptic novel would look like, but I think this must be one. As a start, imagine High-Rise but even bleaker and stripped of Ballard’s concessions to literary convention. Shipley understands there is no point to dressing up a horrorscape of these monstrous proportions with potential love interests and the banality of irrelevant expository details. Instead he bolsters his apocalypse with a philosophical underpinning that accentuates rather than distracts from the devastation, even as the novel attempts to explicate and enter into dialogue with what is happening and with certain cultural totems (the film Psycho, in particular) possibly pointing toward its inevitability. With eyes open wide enough you will see the searing possibilities ahead.
There are parallel storylines operating here. As he waits out the rising tide of writhing, self-cannibalizing humanity from the heights of his illegally obtained tower apartment in Mumbai, Shipley’s protagonist Kaal begins watching a video filmed by a guerilla artist (NB) who has squatted in Cornelia Parker’s (irl) art installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) on top of the Met in NYC. In the course of his obsessive filming of his surroundings, NB observes a number of disturbing violent acts in the city below. This leads to a gradated series of startling realizations and revelations on the parts of both NB and Kaal, whose experiences begin twinning in an alarming way.
I wasn’t quite sure what a truly post-Ballardian apocalyptic novel would look like, but I think this must be one. As a start, imagine High-Rise but even bleaker and stripped of Ballard’s concessions to literary convention. Shipley understands there is no point to dressing up a horrorscape of these monstrous proportions with potential love interests and the banality of irrelevant expository details. Instead he bolsters his apocalypse with a philosophical underpinning that accentuates rather than distracts from the devastation, even as the novel attempts to explicate and enter into dialogue with what is happening and with certain cultural totems (the film Psycho, in particular) possibly pointing toward its inevitability. With eyes open wide enough you will see the searing possibilities ahead.
Humans ran and ran until there wasn’t room to run, till the gasses of the dead pinched at their lungs, till the planet was an open grave, and its topographies precluded anything but staggering or crawling.
February 8, 2022
An apocalypse of mindless proliferation. A runaway feedback loop of copycats. The impossibility of originality in a world of replicas. Searching for the real from a vantage point within the inauthentic.
A recording of an event based on a film based on another film inspired by a painting. Difference in sameness. Sameness in difference. The assertion of individual identity in peril as the rising tide of human carnage threatens your position of higher ground.
A recording of an event based on a film based on another film inspired by a painting. Difference in sameness. Sameness in difference. The assertion of individual identity in peril as the rising tide of human carnage threatens your position of higher ground.
November 29, 2020
the day-ruiner of the year, a uniquely upsetting look down the barrel of the end of the world.
December 30, 2021
Kinda like if DeLillo, Markson, and Ligotti had a baby, and then that baby started stabbing people.
Read
May 16, 2023The first book I’ve picked up in about a week and it’s giving me a migraine 😂 if you enjoyed Nod by Adrian Barnes, or similarly densely written stories, I think you’ll like this?
There are too many words that I had to google. And, even words that I do know, but that are strung together in a way that is incomprehensible for a pea brained individual such as myself.
There are too many words that I had to google. And, even words that I do know, but that are strung together in a way that is incomprehensible for a pea brained individual such as myself.
March 24, 2023
Laugh out loud miserablism of the highest order. High enough even to breach the tower-drowned surface of compacted bodies, though possibly not.
June 25, 2021
Terminal Park is the shadow double of the apocalypse. It's an uncanny eschaton. The nightmare silently accelerates. The screams subside before they even begin. The flies are already eating us all. No time to fester.
The story has its own double within. It mirrors itself and rips itself from its own narrative, echoing and shifting within a decline that has already occurred. A film within a novel, both staring back at each other as you watch on perversely.
Its twists come with langour, only fragments of the ever-mutating beast. It deserves repeat readings and is terse enough to allow this. It is the still-warm foetus of Horror, covered in flies — the first breath of a pregnant corpse. Read it and ascend into darkness.
The story has its own double within. It mirrors itself and rips itself from its own narrative, echoing and shifting within a decline that has already occurred. A film within a novel, both staring back at each other as you watch on perversely.
Its twists come with langour, only fragments of the ever-mutating beast. It deserves repeat readings and is terse enough to allow this. It is the still-warm foetus of Horror, covered in flies — the first breath of a pregnant corpse. Read it and ascend into darkness.
April 6, 2024
One of the most interesting works of experimental fiction, let alone horror, that I’ve read recently. The concept itself is incredibly novel (humanity biologically amassing, othering and disintegrating itself through rampant regeneration/creation) but when paired alongside the essayistic bits reading art itself as a continuous self-swallowing cycle, the book becomes something else entirely. Really one that’s going to be burned into my mind for awhile
August 15, 2023
For the first fifty pages or so I was wondering whether this was simply a send-up of J G Ballard’s writing (the dense and introspective prose style of The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area or High-Rise for instance) and maybe it is.
As in Ballard’s novels, too, there’s a catastrophe in progress here, but not a drought or flood, not the world crystallising. This is biological, genetic: human beings have begun fissioning the way bacteria do, dividing in two, then into four, then eight… Even buildings are being submerged and the Earth is well on its way to being coated with people. From his eyrie, temporarily safe at the top of a residential skyscraper in Mumbai, Kaal watches all this and waits for the rising tide of human bodies, both living and dead, to reach his terrace on the 117th floor.
Hmm. The author didn’t do nearly enough with such a promising idea though (unless you’re obsessed with Hitchcock’s Psycho and are a fan of self-indulgent art-theory). I’m beginning to suspect I might have a stronger stomach too (or thicker skin) than many other reviewers here, because I didn’t find this in any way horrifying (not even the flies), just increasingly tedious.
As in Ballard’s novels, too, there’s a catastrophe in progress here, but not a drought or flood, not the world crystallising. This is biological, genetic: human beings have begun fissioning the way bacteria do, dividing in two, then into four, then eight… Even buildings are being submerged and the Earth is well on its way to being coated with people. From his eyrie, temporarily safe at the top of a residential skyscraper in Mumbai, Kaal watches all this and waits for the rising tide of human bodies, both living and dead, to reach his terrace on the 117th floor.
Hmm. The author didn’t do nearly enough with such a promising idea though (unless you’re obsessed with Hitchcock’s Psycho and are a fan of self-indulgent art-theory). I’m beginning to suspect I might have a stronger stomach too (or thicker skin) than many other reviewers here, because I didn’t find this in any way horrifying (not even the flies), just increasingly tedious.
June 9, 2021
Full Review
Terminal Park is a very odd work. Even as a fan of experimental fiction, it took me some effort to wrap my head around it. It’s a fascinating mixture of horror, apocalypse, and theory-fiction. It’s hard to recommend it, as it fills a very specific niche. However, if you’re seeking a challenging work and you have an interest in contemporary art, semiotics, and horror films and literature, this is the perfect book for you.
Terminal Park is a very odd work. Even as a fan of experimental fiction, it took me some effort to wrap my head around it. It’s a fascinating mixture of horror, apocalypse, and theory-fiction. It’s hard to recommend it, as it fills a very specific niche. However, if you’re seeking a challenging work and you have an interest in contemporary art, semiotics, and horror films and literature, this is the perfect book for you.
December 15, 2020
Watch an apocalypse until it consumes you. Fans of weird bummer literature should check this out.
September 8, 2024
A must-read for slime enthusiasts. If you hate books with plot, that will also help your mileage.
July 27, 2021
"What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come — sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
(Mark, 7 20-23)
Regardless of the differences between our religious, philosophical, ethical and cultural convictions, and despite the Kondratieff waves of our moral evolution, we have always been arrogant enough to believe the end of the world (a fact whose inevitability Lucy the Australopithecus was already aware of) will come from without. Wether it is caused by one universal catastrophe or by an apocalyptic chain of events, we are incapable of imagining destruction as coming from within, as something engendered by mankind and brought about by its own nature.
We identify the threat (or rather the certainty) of the end with an external enemy, unable as we are to even imagine it as an parasite born of our own matter and essence; an alien growth feeding off our existence.
We are wrong.
Such a parasite does exist: its name is overpopulation.
It's death by multiplication rather than subtraction; it's the Malthusian warning we contemptuously shrugged off, the system collapsing in a chorus of sinister creaks we pretend not to hear. It's too many human beings who, no matter how dreadful their existence may be, keep multiplying beyond the planet's capacity to sustain them. Finally, it's our refusal to even consider the horrendous implication a truly effective solution would entail.
When life itself is the disease, the only cure is death. In G. J. Shipley's vision of Deleuzian Armageddon, this is no longer just an educated guess.
Deleuze, indeed - his ghost haunting all of Shipley's œuvre. A scholarly academic himself, the young British author is heavily influenced by the themes of reality strata, plane of immanence, inner multiplicities and schizophrenia (seen both as a prison and a way out), and this book is no exception.
In this most visionary work of philosophical fiction, the unstoppable growth of the world's population is not merely due to the auto-cannibalism of a species that lives too long and breeds too much: it's an as yet unseen kind of proliferation instead, in which man's schizoid nature makes the bodies spawn replicas of themselves, excreted through sphincters, wounds and abscesses and multiplying in their turn, their numbers increasing too much and too fast for institutionalised mass-murder to make the slightest difference. Billions of bodies and corpses are now covering the Earth like a rotten magma, layer upon layer of putrefaction in which the world is now entombed.
It is through the eyes of a philosophy professor marooned in a penthouse on top of a Mumbai skyscraper that we witness the horrors of mankind choking itself to death.
Here are two manifestations of the same bipolar disorder: Mumbai as the epitome of a schism that is both physical and spiritual - what with its 18 million inhabitants hovering between transcendence and mundanity, Hinduism and capitalism, national identity and colonial past; and the (mixed-race) protagonist as an emotionally autistic hybrid, all capacity for feeling withered away, his life reduced to watching vlogs documenting the self-extinction of the human race. When a subplot revolving around Cornelia Parker's 2016 piece "PsychoBarn" intrudes into the narration, the author gives further proof of his taste for insoluble enigmas. The reader finds himself lost in a maze of metaphors à la Buñuel never to be fully unravelled, the elements of which - Hitchcock's "Psycho", notions of art, physics and metaphysics - become inextricably entangled with the main events.
As for the ending, do not expect the author to answer any of your questions: if anything, he aims at shattering the few certainties you may dare having.
"Terminal Park" is not a conventional novel. It sure is more accessible than most of Shipley's other work, but it's a daunting, exhausting read nonetheless, courtesy of an author you either love or hate.
There's no actual storytelling nor chronology, the text consisting in a series of vignettes forming a fragmented landscape of the most atmospheric writing. Such images depict a planet turned into an open-air dump of physiological waste, where life bears in itself its own lethal pathology. People devouring all space and breathable air; people torn apart by the splitting of their bodies; people killing or being killed by the duplicates sprouting from their flesh; people by the billions, trillions, quadrillions living, dying and melting into human compost; the world covered in flies. And the narrator's (author's) unimpassioned musing all throughout the book, which alternates descriptive sequences with reflections, quotes (J. Kristeva in primis) and memories of urban architecture of a world that no longer is.
In fact the city - as it was, as it still is though buried under the universal decay - is more than a conveniently exotic setting. Its uniquely oriental overlapping of temples, skyscrapers, quays, archeological sites, glamorous districts and degraded slums embodies the meaninglessness of mankind's bastardised concept of progress, stuck between the elusive glory of the past and the delusive grandeur of the present.
Even though a few notions of Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophy do come in handy while reading Shipley (not to mention a great deal of patience in looking up all the architectural, artistic, historical, theological and pop-cultural references) one senses it's all about the writing and its uniqueness. Shipley's beautiful prose can make the words shine like water lilies floating on a bog. The insoluble riddles, the "celebration of enigma in itself" (in his own words) and the disturbing themes he's obsessively concerned with are just part of the mysterious charm of his work. There's so much more beneath the surface, but it takes guts to dig it up.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3VAxwim...
(Mark, 7 20-23)
Regardless of the differences between our religious, philosophical, ethical and cultural convictions, and despite the Kondratieff waves of our moral evolution, we have always been arrogant enough to believe the end of the world (a fact whose inevitability Lucy the Australopithecus was already aware of) will come from without. Wether it is caused by one universal catastrophe or by an apocalyptic chain of events, we are incapable of imagining destruction as coming from within, as something engendered by mankind and brought about by its own nature.
We identify the threat (or rather the certainty) of the end with an external enemy, unable as we are to even imagine it as an parasite born of our own matter and essence; an alien growth feeding off our existence.
We are wrong.
Such a parasite does exist: its name is overpopulation.
It's death by multiplication rather than subtraction; it's the Malthusian warning we contemptuously shrugged off, the system collapsing in a chorus of sinister creaks we pretend not to hear. It's too many human beings who, no matter how dreadful their existence may be, keep multiplying beyond the planet's capacity to sustain them. Finally, it's our refusal to even consider the horrendous implication a truly effective solution would entail.
When life itself is the disease, the only cure is death. In G. J. Shipley's vision of Deleuzian Armageddon, this is no longer just an educated guess.
Deleuze, indeed - his ghost haunting all of Shipley's œuvre. A scholarly academic himself, the young British author is heavily influenced by the themes of reality strata, plane of immanence, inner multiplicities and schizophrenia (seen both as a prison and a way out), and this book is no exception.
In this most visionary work of philosophical fiction, the unstoppable growth of the world's population is not merely due to the auto-cannibalism of a species that lives too long and breeds too much: it's an as yet unseen kind of proliferation instead, in which man's schizoid nature makes the bodies spawn replicas of themselves, excreted through sphincters, wounds and abscesses and multiplying in their turn, their numbers increasing too much and too fast for institutionalised mass-murder to make the slightest difference. Billions of bodies and corpses are now covering the Earth like a rotten magma, layer upon layer of putrefaction in which the world is now entombed.
It is through the eyes of a philosophy professor marooned in a penthouse on top of a Mumbai skyscraper that we witness the horrors of mankind choking itself to death.
Here are two manifestations of the same bipolar disorder: Mumbai as the epitome of a schism that is both physical and spiritual - what with its 18 million inhabitants hovering between transcendence and mundanity, Hinduism and capitalism, national identity and colonial past; and the (mixed-race) protagonist as an emotionally autistic hybrid, all capacity for feeling withered away, his life reduced to watching vlogs documenting the self-extinction of the human race. When a subplot revolving around Cornelia Parker's 2016 piece "PsychoBarn" intrudes into the narration, the author gives further proof of his taste for insoluble enigmas. The reader finds himself lost in a maze of metaphors à la Buñuel never to be fully unravelled, the elements of which - Hitchcock's "Psycho", notions of art, physics and metaphysics - become inextricably entangled with the main events.
As for the ending, do not expect the author to answer any of your questions: if anything, he aims at shattering the few certainties you may dare having.
"Terminal Park" is not a conventional novel. It sure is more accessible than most of Shipley's other work, but it's a daunting, exhausting read nonetheless, courtesy of an author you either love or hate.
There's no actual storytelling nor chronology, the text consisting in a series of vignettes forming a fragmented landscape of the most atmospheric writing. Such images depict a planet turned into an open-air dump of physiological waste, where life bears in itself its own lethal pathology. People devouring all space and breathable air; people torn apart by the splitting of their bodies; people killing or being killed by the duplicates sprouting from their flesh; people by the billions, trillions, quadrillions living, dying and melting into human compost; the world covered in flies. And the narrator's (author's) unimpassioned musing all throughout the book, which alternates descriptive sequences with reflections, quotes (J. Kristeva in primis) and memories of urban architecture of a world that no longer is.
In fact the city - as it was, as it still is though buried under the universal decay - is more than a conveniently exotic setting. Its uniquely oriental overlapping of temples, skyscrapers, quays, archeological sites, glamorous districts and degraded slums embodies the meaninglessness of mankind's bastardised concept of progress, stuck between the elusive glory of the past and the delusive grandeur of the present.
Even though a few notions of Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophy do come in handy while reading Shipley (not to mention a great deal of patience in looking up all the architectural, artistic, historical, theological and pop-cultural references) one senses it's all about the writing and its uniqueness. Shipley's beautiful prose can make the words shine like water lilies floating on a bog. The insoluble riddles, the "celebration of enigma in itself" (in his own words) and the disturbing themes he's obsessively concerned with are just part of the mysterious charm of his work. There's so much more beneath the surface, but it takes guts to dig it up.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3VAxwim...
December 13, 2023
this seems like it might be a response to ballard's disaster novels, but i never read any of those so that is a bit of a guess. there is some great unpleasant imagery in here(the passage on the first page or so where he talks about thousands of people sluicing from cargo planes keeps recurring in my head), although i found the pivot to a bunch of stuff about alfred hitchcock's psycho a little out of left field even though he tied it all up in the end. didn't like this as much as dreams of amputation but it's still pretty good.
May 25, 2021
Excellent concept that never goes anywhere
The most singularly pretentious way I have ever seen a unique concept squandered. Very little happens for 99% other than art school wankery over a meta-meta-narrative about Psycho and then you get a wacky Deus Ex Machina on the last two pages.
If you want film critique and heavy handed symbolism dressed up as sci-fi/horror, this is your jam I guess. Otherwise, don't bother.
The most singularly pretentious way I have ever seen a unique concept squandered. Very little happens for 99% other than art school wankery over a meta-meta-narrative about Psycho and then you get a wacky Deus Ex Machina on the last two pages.
If you want film critique and heavy handed symbolism dressed up as sci-fi/horror, this is your jam I guess. Otherwise, don't bother.
July 5, 2022
Terminal Park stages the failure of systems of value and restraint that will be inadequate in the face of human desperation, cultures that will at best evaporate during the struggle to live on an over-populated, ruined earth. In the book they fall almost immediately.
Strongly recommended, if you can stomach it. I wrote about the book here: https://www.full-stop.net/2021/01/18/...
Strongly recommended, if you can stomach it. I wrote about the book here: https://www.full-stop.net/2021/01/18/...
April 19, 2022
A thin terse hammer of a book. State of the art horror. Whittled from completely unconventional nightmares. Gives off a humming buzzing vibe. Sickening in the most unconventional of ways. A ruptured new world enthralled to an unimaginable apocalypse. Shipley completely broke the horror genre with this. It would be five stars except there's a really experimental and fascinating B story that both elevates it into the realm of high cosmic art and keeps me from giving it a perfect score. Make of it what you will. Regardless, you will not read another horror book like this.
September 7, 2022
How do you write about the meaning behind a book whose core subject is essentially the end of meaning? How do you encapsulate a book that struggles to contain itself? That churns, and roils, and seeps off of every page until its typeface is practically crawling up your arms and invading your orifices like the sentient swarms of saprophytic flies that darken its apocalyptic skies? How do you do it? And what, exactly, is the point in trying? Indeed, it feels like there is more to say about Gary J. Shipley’s isotropic nightmare Terminal Park than any single write-up could possibly contain, and yet the gnawing suspicion remains that the book itself would urge you not to bother. That there’s nothing you can say about it—and more than that even, nothing it can say about itself—that hasn’t already been said a billion times over and counting (always “and counting”). That humanity is on its way out. That whatever meaning you’re searching for will not save you.
The basic setup for Terminal Park is the experience of one man—Kaal—living alone near the top of a luxury high-rise in Mumbai (a keen, fleeting vantage point, obtained through some combination of foresight and incalculable good luck) and quietly observing the evolutionary collapse of his species. What’s happening outside the tower isn’t an extinction-level event exactly. Extinction, in point of fact, would be an inarguably kinder state of affairs. Rather, Shipley imagines a future where humans have begun spontaneously splitting in two—or “fissioning” as it’s called in its earliest days, when society is still functional enough to assign names to phenomena—reproducing, over and over again, a la amoebae or bacteria, at an increasingly alarming and literally unsustainable rate. In short order, we learn that the Earth’s resources are all but decimated, that what’s left of the government has taken to firebombing dense pockets of population, obliterating people by the tens of thousands on a daily basis in hopes of beating back the tide of infestation, and that even such unthinkable measures as these barely move the needle. By the time we drop in on Kaal’s deluxe fallout shelter in the sky, the surface of the Earth has actually gained a new layer of human flesh—a gnashing, wailing, writhing, chewing, half-conscious, half-decomposed outer film of arms and legs and mouths and guts, teeming ever upwards—ever closer to Kaal’s glass-frame terrace—in the name of survival.
And survival is truly the name of the game under the rules of this Hellscape scenario. When I said earlier that Terminal Park was a book about the end of meaning, I was speaking somewhat physiologically, as in it Shipley imagines a state of existence where humans have lost touch with all but the most primal, biological needs; where everything to which we ascribe importance, everything in which we lose ourselves to distraction, everything that we tell ourselves matters, has been subsumed by the animal need to consume liquid, and organic matter, and oxygen; just in order to keep living for as long as our synapses will fire. If you think The Purge or The Walking Dead are as bad as life on Earth can get, then you’ve got another thing coming. Terminal Park is beyond kill or be killed; beyond eat or be eaten. It is only kill; only eat; kill, eat, repeat, ad infinitum.
As if that weren’t horrorcore enough, at the other end of the existential plain Kaal has begun a binge-watch for the ages—a video art project called 195 Days in the PsychoBarn, in which a man calling himself NB (short for Nikolas Berg) has embedded himself inside a separate art installation (a real-life piece by the artist Cornelia Parker) atop the roof of the Met (a 2/3 scale recreation of the house used in Hitchcock’s Psycho, a structure which was itself inspired by an Edward Hopper painting), and proceeds to film himself living there in secret for, you guessed it, 195 days. Conceived as a separate-but-parallel project with another artist (a woman, similarly delineated MC—short for Maeva Christensen), NB’s occupation has been planned down to the last detail—up to and including the volume of bodily waste he will produce and thus have to discreetly dispose of every day—but the longer he spends documenting his work (which takes place entirely inside another work) (which is itself a replica of yet another work) (which was originally based on yet another work), the further removed he begins to feel from his own artistic agency, and even the validity of such a concept. Doubling abounds, as near-identical reenactments of Psycho‘s most iconic stabbing begin appearing nightly in the park stories below NB’s clandestine perch. But if he’s the only one who ever sees these kabuki murder shows, then are they even really there? And if they are, in turn, being performed for his benefit, then is his presence in the PsychoBarn truly unknown? Is he in fact just a pawn? A living facet of MC’s work? Which is itself dependent on Parker’s? Is his work, as such, in fact theirs too, by dint of plagiarism, or conquest, or osmosis? Does any artist retain control of anything—own anything they’ve created—once it leaves their head and becomes part of the real world?
If there is any single plot point in Terminal Park that could reasonably be considered spoilable, it revolves around NB’s psychological unraveling in the latter half of 195 Days, so I’ll refrain from divulging too much more about his story here. The main thing is that, for Kaal, getting lost in the massive, 24/7 video project of another isolated person living in a time when humanity still found value in things like art and commerce and politics and morality, provides no real comfort. Just as the hordes of dismembered living and regurgitated dead will keep piling up outside until they crest his terrace window, and the top of his building, and presumably keep stacking until they reach air too thin to breathe, the minutia of interpretation and explication and theory and criticism and layer upon layer upon layer of real and possible meaning inherent in Psycho, and the countlessly repeated and referenced and homaged and pastiched works of art throughout human history also carries on without end. It’s no exaggeration to say that Terminal Park contains the bones of a fascinating Graduate Thesis on Hitchcock’s masterpiece, but it proceeds to spread them out and study them so closely as to render the idea of a functional skeleton all but moot. Its questions only lead to more questions, while outside the bodies only lead to more bodies. Perhaps the most heartbreaking observation Shipley makes in the entire book is that it is humanity’s very ability to remember life before the fissioning apocalypse began that prevents them from just giving up and letting go. It’s the hope for a return to the past—a return to meaning—that keeps them mercilessly cannibalizing the future.
So, in the end, it’s fun to think about what all Terminal Park means, at least in part because it’s worked incredibly hard to tell you that it doesn’t mean anything. Or that it means everything. Or that those two things are one-in-the-same. Is it an environmentalist fable about humans’ devastation of the planet? Absolutely (an oblique subplot about aliens having set the fissioning effect into motion as a way of turning Earth into a viable fuel source only drives this particular reading home). Is it a macro-satire of the overinformation age and the doomscrolling cacophony of social media? You betcha (a bit where NB describes listening to museum-goers make the same banally erudite observations while visiting the PsychoBarn day after day can’t help but bring to mind the infinite cove of IMHOs we stare into every day of our oh-so-modern lives). Is it meaningful that Kaal translates literally to mean “time” or “era” and can also refer more generally to the Hindu god of death, establishing his character as a kind of nexus between eternity and oblivion? Probably! What about the fact that, in addition to corresponding to Norman Bates and Marion Crane (the two main characters in Psycho), the initials N and B represent the abecedarian outward expansion (forward and backward, respectively) from the letters M and C, suggesting that the latter and his art (and his attendant psychic meltdown) are little more than an orchestrated outgrowth of the former and hers—a real-time reincarnation of the perverse, mother/son doppelgänger feedback loop depicted in the film? Maybe! I thought it, and I wrote it down here, so sure. Why not?
Or rather—and this is pretty clearly where I’ve landed with this sensational, mind-expanding-to-head-exploding work—is Terminal Park an invitation to examine our own priorities, desires, and ethics as it radically centers its protagonist, and us along with him, directly between the infinite without, and the infinite within? A pinhole of daylight, hollowed out between twin crushing expanses of endless night? A quiet spot to sit and think? I couldn’t help but notice that the title itself, Terminal Park, never appears within the narrative proper, and as such I found myself coming to read it (rightly or not) as perhaps Shipley’s own meaning for this text: a literal park at the terminus of existence; a sandbox for ideas; a jungle gym of competing theories, all interconnected, but all leading to the same place (nowhere); a playground from which to safely interrogate both the infinite, and the infinite impossibility of that same interrogation. For as grim as Terminal Park is—and it is quite grim—it also still manages to be bizarrely funny, and surprisingly moving, amidst all the entrails and viscera. That the PsychoBarn installation was real, and thus that the book itself is heavily dependent on the existence of yet another work of art, was a fascinating discovery I didn’t make until after I’d almost finished this article. It truly is a bottomless trip—a cannonball into the void. But whether that void is a terrace window slowly filling up with our abject fellow man, or a video screen staring back at us from our own doomed, nauseatingly repetitive history, the void is, and has always been a mirror, above all things. And try as we might, we cannot look away.
The basic setup for Terminal Park is the experience of one man—Kaal—living alone near the top of a luxury high-rise in Mumbai (a keen, fleeting vantage point, obtained through some combination of foresight and incalculable good luck) and quietly observing the evolutionary collapse of his species. What’s happening outside the tower isn’t an extinction-level event exactly. Extinction, in point of fact, would be an inarguably kinder state of affairs. Rather, Shipley imagines a future where humans have begun spontaneously splitting in two—or “fissioning” as it’s called in its earliest days, when society is still functional enough to assign names to phenomena—reproducing, over and over again, a la amoebae or bacteria, at an increasingly alarming and literally unsustainable rate. In short order, we learn that the Earth’s resources are all but decimated, that what’s left of the government has taken to firebombing dense pockets of population, obliterating people by the tens of thousands on a daily basis in hopes of beating back the tide of infestation, and that even such unthinkable measures as these barely move the needle. By the time we drop in on Kaal’s deluxe fallout shelter in the sky, the surface of the Earth has actually gained a new layer of human flesh—a gnashing, wailing, writhing, chewing, half-conscious, half-decomposed outer film of arms and legs and mouths and guts, teeming ever upwards—ever closer to Kaal’s glass-frame terrace—in the name of survival.
And survival is truly the name of the game under the rules of this Hellscape scenario. When I said earlier that Terminal Park was a book about the end of meaning, I was speaking somewhat physiologically, as in it Shipley imagines a state of existence where humans have lost touch with all but the most primal, biological needs; where everything to which we ascribe importance, everything in which we lose ourselves to distraction, everything that we tell ourselves matters, has been subsumed by the animal need to consume liquid, and organic matter, and oxygen; just in order to keep living for as long as our synapses will fire. If you think The Purge or The Walking Dead are as bad as life on Earth can get, then you’ve got another thing coming. Terminal Park is beyond kill or be killed; beyond eat or be eaten. It is only kill; only eat; kill, eat, repeat, ad infinitum.
As if that weren’t horrorcore enough, at the other end of the existential plain Kaal has begun a binge-watch for the ages—a video art project called 195 Days in the PsychoBarn, in which a man calling himself NB (short for Nikolas Berg) has embedded himself inside a separate art installation (a real-life piece by the artist Cornelia Parker) atop the roof of the Met (a 2/3 scale recreation of the house used in Hitchcock’s Psycho, a structure which was itself inspired by an Edward Hopper painting), and proceeds to film himself living there in secret for, you guessed it, 195 days. Conceived as a separate-but-parallel project with another artist (a woman, similarly delineated MC—short for Maeva Christensen), NB’s occupation has been planned down to the last detail—up to and including the volume of bodily waste he will produce and thus have to discreetly dispose of every day—but the longer he spends documenting his work (which takes place entirely inside another work) (which is itself a replica of yet another work) (which was originally based on yet another work), the further removed he begins to feel from his own artistic agency, and even the validity of such a concept. Doubling abounds, as near-identical reenactments of Psycho‘s most iconic stabbing begin appearing nightly in the park stories below NB’s clandestine perch. But if he’s the only one who ever sees these kabuki murder shows, then are they even really there? And if they are, in turn, being performed for his benefit, then is his presence in the PsychoBarn truly unknown? Is he in fact just a pawn? A living facet of MC’s work? Which is itself dependent on Parker’s? Is his work, as such, in fact theirs too, by dint of plagiarism, or conquest, or osmosis? Does any artist retain control of anything—own anything they’ve created—once it leaves their head and becomes part of the real world?
If there is any single plot point in Terminal Park that could reasonably be considered spoilable, it revolves around NB’s psychological unraveling in the latter half of 195 Days, so I’ll refrain from divulging too much more about his story here. The main thing is that, for Kaal, getting lost in the massive, 24/7 video project of another isolated person living in a time when humanity still found value in things like art and commerce and politics and morality, provides no real comfort. Just as the hordes of dismembered living and regurgitated dead will keep piling up outside until they crest his terrace window, and the top of his building, and presumably keep stacking until they reach air too thin to breathe, the minutia of interpretation and explication and theory and criticism and layer upon layer upon layer of real and possible meaning inherent in Psycho, and the countlessly repeated and referenced and homaged and pastiched works of art throughout human history also carries on without end. It’s no exaggeration to say that Terminal Park contains the bones of a fascinating Graduate Thesis on Hitchcock’s masterpiece, but it proceeds to spread them out and study them so closely as to render the idea of a functional skeleton all but moot. Its questions only lead to more questions, while outside the bodies only lead to more bodies. Perhaps the most heartbreaking observation Shipley makes in the entire book is that it is humanity’s very ability to remember life before the fissioning apocalypse began that prevents them from just giving up and letting go. It’s the hope for a return to the past—a return to meaning—that keeps them mercilessly cannibalizing the future.
So, in the end, it’s fun to think about what all Terminal Park means, at least in part because it’s worked incredibly hard to tell you that it doesn’t mean anything. Or that it means everything. Or that those two things are one-in-the-same. Is it an environmentalist fable about humans’ devastation of the planet? Absolutely (an oblique subplot about aliens having set the fissioning effect into motion as a way of turning Earth into a viable fuel source only drives this particular reading home). Is it a macro-satire of the overinformation age and the doomscrolling cacophony of social media? You betcha (a bit where NB describes listening to museum-goers make the same banally erudite observations while visiting the PsychoBarn day after day can’t help but bring to mind the infinite cove of IMHOs we stare into every day of our oh-so-modern lives). Is it meaningful that Kaal translates literally to mean “time” or “era” and can also refer more generally to the Hindu god of death, establishing his character as a kind of nexus between eternity and oblivion? Probably! What about the fact that, in addition to corresponding to Norman Bates and Marion Crane (the two main characters in Psycho), the initials N and B represent the abecedarian outward expansion (forward and backward, respectively) from the letters M and C, suggesting that the latter and his art (and his attendant psychic meltdown) are little more than an orchestrated outgrowth of the former and hers—a real-time reincarnation of the perverse, mother/son doppelgänger feedback loop depicted in the film? Maybe! I thought it, and I wrote it down here, so sure. Why not?
Or rather—and this is pretty clearly where I’ve landed with this sensational, mind-expanding-to-head-exploding work—is Terminal Park an invitation to examine our own priorities, desires, and ethics as it radically centers its protagonist, and us along with him, directly between the infinite without, and the infinite within? A pinhole of daylight, hollowed out between twin crushing expanses of endless night? A quiet spot to sit and think? I couldn’t help but notice that the title itself, Terminal Park, never appears within the narrative proper, and as such I found myself coming to read it (rightly or not) as perhaps Shipley’s own meaning for this text: a literal park at the terminus of existence; a sandbox for ideas; a jungle gym of competing theories, all interconnected, but all leading to the same place (nowhere); a playground from which to safely interrogate both the infinite, and the infinite impossibility of that same interrogation. For as grim as Terminal Park is—and it is quite grim—it also still manages to be bizarrely funny, and surprisingly moving, amidst all the entrails and viscera. That the PsychoBarn installation was real, and thus that the book itself is heavily dependent on the existence of yet another work of art, was a fascinating discovery I didn’t make until after I’d almost finished this article. It truly is a bottomless trip—a cannonball into the void. But whether that void is a terrace window slowly filling up with our abject fellow man, or a video screen staring back at us from our own doomed, nauseatingly repetitive history, the void is, and has always been a mirror, above all things. And try as we might, we cannot look away.
January 16, 2023
Dennis Cooper (of The Marbled Swarm infamy) blurbed this book, if that means anything to you. Suffice it to say I was unsurprised to discover that Terminal Park is a glut of putrefaction--putrefaction that is nevertheless often beautifully and vividly described. Take for instance this (slightly edited) passage:
"Beneath the humans he could see, swarming over each other...lay an ever-thickening underlay of corpses turning liquiform. As the dead bodies piled up they became totemic, and increasingly the single and sacred object representing all human majesty and drama, the coagulated altar to and of mankind's eternal sacrifice. The dead's metonymy as a symbol of life. And what remained but the humans that survived in spite of that survival, those abominable in their not yet being dead..."
For the first third of this book I was on board. It's been a minute since I read Baudrillard or Kristeva, but ok sure, I can see how these theorists' ideas could be extrapolated out to form the base of Shipley's overpopulated dystopian "reality." I was even on board for some exegeses on the role of "doubling" in Hitchcock's Psycho, and how that theme has been explored by artists inspired by Hitchcock, like Gus van Sant and Cornelia Parker...But dang, reader! Even for a nerd like me this book was a tedious slog!
(To Shipley’s credit, I had to look up a LOT of new words. Dude’s vocabulary and dexterity with language is very much banging, even if his pacing kept me yawning).
"Beneath the humans he could see, swarming over each other...lay an ever-thickening underlay of corpses turning liquiform. As the dead bodies piled up they became totemic, and increasingly the single and sacred object representing all human majesty and drama, the coagulated altar to and of mankind's eternal sacrifice. The dead's metonymy as a symbol of life. And what remained but the humans that survived in spite of that survival, those abominable in their not yet being dead..."
For the first third of this book I was on board. It's been a minute since I read Baudrillard or Kristeva, but ok sure, I can see how these theorists' ideas could be extrapolated out to form the base of Shipley's overpopulated dystopian "reality." I was even on board for some exegeses on the role of "doubling" in Hitchcock's Psycho, and how that theme has been explored by artists inspired by Hitchcock, like Gus van Sant and Cornelia Parker...But dang, reader! Even for a nerd like me this book was a tedious slog!
(To Shipley’s credit, I had to look up a LOT of new words. Dude’s vocabulary and dexterity with language is very much banging, even if his pacing kept me yawning).
November 5, 2022
Terrifying.
January 14, 2024
Brilliant. Amazing read. Blistering and provocative, with slices of pure hell in the description of a world no longer recognizable.
But oh my God - so pretentious. Precious, even - which is a bit of disservice to the whole damn plot. How many 10 cent words can one use to describe rising layers of human goo? Well buckle up because Shipley is going to use all of them.
This is sort of like spending an evening with a hipster high on LSD who just finished grad school but who also just lost his mom. It’s interesting, gag-inducing, and gosh darn it, just so tragic. And beyond imaginative. But for the love of all things holy, this author gets in his own way a lot. Like oh ok… I’ll read a few pages of unnecessarily meandering and overwrought philosophy in between the substance of the book. I’ll respect the author that much. But my dude… we get it. Nothing means anything. Copies for the sake of copies is a horror with no beginning and no end. The absence of life is just as bad or maybe preferable to an abundance of it. Boom.
Some books are written for the audience, and some books are written for the author. This one? This was Shipley for Shipley. Sort of a “See how smart and deep I am? And oh yeah - women eat their own tits! Even sex and sexual identifiers mean nothing! Horrifying, right? RIGHT?” There are few reasons to expound this much for the consumption of others, and that seems deeply personal so I won’t suppose. I wasn’t horrified as much by the plot than I was by how teetering the author seemed to be in the midst of writing it. Almost like “This seems to be a YOU problem, dude.” Clowns with unlaced shoes don’t trip themselves up this much.
It also occurs to me that lots of people who love this book love it for the sake of what it is - like any criticism is simply plebs not “getting it” or being erudite enough. And again, in the face of the plot, why bother?
I’m not saying the philosophy isn’t good, or even sound. It is. There was just so much of it, and repetitive, which is admittedly part of the point of the whole book but also so, so boring. Once a single phrase conveys the point, why keep going other than for your own sense of “Look what I can do!” Ok kiddo. Neat. Now finish your peas. Time for bed.
I’d have loved a condensed version with all the twists and turns and WTF and the heavy-handed food for thought (ha) narrative left out.
We may get too quickly to the end where a building that he mentions ad nauseam, that looks like a spaceship (gasp!) actually IS and takes off into the sky!
No offense to Shipley though. I wouldn’t have known how to end this book either.
But oh my God - so pretentious. Precious, even - which is a bit of disservice to the whole damn plot. How many 10 cent words can one use to describe rising layers of human goo? Well buckle up because Shipley is going to use all of them.
This is sort of like spending an evening with a hipster high on LSD who just finished grad school but who also just lost his mom. It’s interesting, gag-inducing, and gosh darn it, just so tragic. And beyond imaginative. But for the love of all things holy, this author gets in his own way a lot. Like oh ok… I’ll read a few pages of unnecessarily meandering and overwrought philosophy in between the substance of the book. I’ll respect the author that much. But my dude… we get it. Nothing means anything. Copies for the sake of copies is a horror with no beginning and no end. The absence of life is just as bad or maybe preferable to an abundance of it. Boom.
Some books are written for the audience, and some books are written for the author. This one? This was Shipley for Shipley. Sort of a “See how smart and deep I am? And oh yeah - women eat their own tits! Even sex and sexual identifiers mean nothing! Horrifying, right? RIGHT?” There are few reasons to expound this much for the consumption of others, and that seems deeply personal so I won’t suppose. I wasn’t horrified as much by the plot than I was by how teetering the author seemed to be in the midst of writing it. Almost like “This seems to be a YOU problem, dude.” Clowns with unlaced shoes don’t trip themselves up this much.
It also occurs to me that lots of people who love this book love it for the sake of what it is - like any criticism is simply plebs not “getting it” or being erudite enough. And again, in the face of the plot, why bother?
I’m not saying the philosophy isn’t good, or even sound. It is. There was just so much of it, and repetitive, which is admittedly part of the point of the whole book but also so, so boring. Once a single phrase conveys the point, why keep going other than for your own sense of “Look what I can do!” Ok kiddo. Neat. Now finish your peas. Time for bed.
I’d have loved a condensed version with all the twists and turns and WTF and the heavy-handed food for thought (ha) narrative left out.
We may get too quickly to the end where a building that he mentions ad nauseam, that looks like a spaceship (gasp!) actually IS and takes off into the sky!
No offense to Shipley though. I wouldn’t have known how to end this book either.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 20, 2021
This book surprised and blew me away like few others have in some time. Some scenes I think I'll never forget, the imagery conjured takes some real skill and imagination. The interlinking Psycho (film) plot does get a little confusing (having never seen it) but it ends so well and the writing throughout is simply beautiful. It's very dark and nihilistic in places, but as befits the unique storyline. I cannot recommend it higher.
August 14, 2021
The wildest of post-apocalyptic/body/techno-horror rides.
April 2, 2021
Me big dum dum have to look up words and crunch the academic math to digest this bleak as fuck week-long stay at the hell nightmare hotel. By the end I felt like I was spiralling into something but I don’t know what and I’m too afraid and too dumb to figure it out.
November 5, 2020
Some seriously nutritive food for thought.
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December 7, 2023Supremely upsetting novel - took about two years of picking it up and putting it down again to finish. Shipley's control over prose and form is commendable but this is so pitch black it can be hard to make it out with your sanity intact. Characterisation and narrative fall away to bleak disintegration by way of a fabulist apocalypse.
October 11, 2021
Nihilistic images of the apocalypse constructed through stomach-churning prose passages and complicated multi-leveled stories.
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