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Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls: Stories
In this heart-twisting collection of short stories, Daniel Scott Tysdal delves deep into the human experience. From the middle-aged man involved in a suicide cult to the young woman trying to write a poem for a friend who has recently died, to the daughter of a man who loses everything on a theme park, these stories are filled with beautifully drawn and often profoundly flawed characters. Throughout the collection, Tysdal looks unflinchingly at the darkness of society, at suicide, at internet trolls, at violence, but the powerful empathy of his writing brings significance to even the most tragic moments. These stories have intricate and unexpected plots, filmic descriptions and crisp writing, but what will stay with the reader is the way Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls breaks the reader's heart and then puts it back together again filled with compassion for these lost souls.
- GenresShort Stories
186 pages, Paperback
First published November 9, 2021
2 people are currently reading
1288 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Scott Tysdal
12 books22 followersDaniel Scott Tysdal is a Canadian poet whose work approaches the lyric mode with an experimental spirit. In June 2007, Tysdal received the ReLit Award for Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 9, 2021
WAVE FORMS AND DOOM SCROLLS by Daniel Scott Tysdal is a great short story collection! I’m on a roll with short story collections this year! This book features ten stories and my fave was The Poem. It takes you on a journey with a poet and it made me laugh! Of course I loved the Canadian setting in that story too. I also really enjoyed the unique writing in Wave Form which includes pictures. As is usually the case with short story collections there were a couple stories that weren’t my fave but overall I really liked this book! Definitely recommend if you’re a short story lover like me!
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Thank you to Wolsak & Wynn for my advance reading copy!
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Thank you to Wolsak & Wynn for my advance reading copy!
October 5, 2021
Disclaimer: I proofread this book
But boy, did I enjoy it! Introspective, soul-searching, while bringing up poignant themes about media and our place in society. Each of the stories and poems brings both the brunt force of a hammer and the delicate precision of the chisel to the heart. Few books will stay with my soul, quite like this one.
But boy, did I enjoy it! Introspective, soul-searching, while bringing up poignant themes about media and our place in society. Each of the stories and poems brings both the brunt force of a hammer and the delicate precision of the chisel to the heart. Few books will stay with my soul, quite like this one.
October 9, 2021
These stories are fine. They're ambitious and they make great use of the English language. They just annoyed me for reasons that are probably going to be inconsequential to you, but since criticism is a form of self-expression for me I'll explain where I come from. God, I'm becoming a literary snob.
So, I kind of liked most stories in Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls except maybe 1 Dog, 1 Knife, which indulges in many literary pet peeves of mine including character bonding over sloppy eating. Stephen King does that a lot too and it gets on my nerves every time. It's not humanizing or whatever. No one likes a sloppy eater. Anyway, the reason why I couldn't fully buy into most of these stories is that they mostly all have a hook into real-life events that it doesn't have any insightful comment on. Whether it's 4Chan, war in the Middle East, Luka Rocco Magnotta or freakin' Adolf Hitler, the characters of these stories seem to try and find a greater meaning to shared trauma that isn't there instead of having their own weird, idiosynratic takes on it. That's what makes us... you know human and interesting.
That said, I'll give credit where credit is due. I thought Wave Form was beautiful and clever and used shared culture in order to illustrate something different and enlighten the reader. The Poem, Year Zero and Fort Mac is Booming all had their moments too, featuring characters who eventually depart from reality while trying to make sense of it. They were ideologically similar, but had their confronting themes. Mark this one as not-quite-for-me. It was competent and thorough, but not QUIIITE personal?
So, I kind of liked most stories in Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls except maybe 1 Dog, 1 Knife, which indulges in many literary pet peeves of mine including character bonding over sloppy eating. Stephen King does that a lot too and it gets on my nerves every time. It's not humanizing or whatever. No one likes a sloppy eater. Anyway, the reason why I couldn't fully buy into most of these stories is that they mostly all have a hook into real-life events that it doesn't have any insightful comment on. Whether it's 4Chan, war in the Middle East, Luka Rocco Magnotta or freakin' Adolf Hitler, the characters of these stories seem to try and find a greater meaning to shared trauma that isn't there instead of having their own weird, idiosynratic takes on it. That's what makes us... you know human and interesting.
That said, I'll give credit where credit is due. I thought Wave Form was beautiful and clever and used shared culture in order to illustrate something different and enlighten the reader. The Poem, Year Zero and Fort Mac is Booming all had their moments too, featuring characters who eventually depart from reality while trying to make sense of it. They were ideologically similar, but had their confronting themes. Mark this one as not-quite-for-me. It was competent and thorough, but not QUIIITE personal?
June 17, 2022
This collection shows us the world as though through the lens of social media, which is how many of us perceive events these days. The author has a keen sense of how the voyeuristic tendencies of the social media/reality TV age play out on human emotions and lives. This is that rare collection that transforms and elevates the genre. I highly recommend it for both entertainment value and for artistic form and style.
December 7, 2021
This short story collection was not for me. It irritated me in so many ways.
It is not hyperbole to state that the ten short stories are all over the place. For example, one is about a teenaged fantasist whose intentions are misinterpreted; one consists of waveforms of cinematic scenes; one is about a Holocaust amusement park; and another is an homage to the humanities building at a university.
In one of the stories “The Poem” there’s an editor who pans a poem by commenting, “’it’s like the main point is to make you feel stupid. . . . If you’ve got something to say, just say it!’” This is the way I felt much of the time. The author seems to want to impress the reader. There are allusions to obscure films like “Varda’s The Gleaners and I” and “Ergüven’s Mustang” and “Tarkovsky’s The Mirror” and "Kiarostami’s Close-Up.” Although it's probably just a layout issue, at the beginning of "Doom Scrolls" a character from Shakespeare’s As You Like It seems to be given a bastardized version of a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream though it is identified as coming from Macbeth? I guess it’s been too long since I earned my degrees in literature!
When I taught creative writing, I would encourage students not to use trite similes and metaphors, but this author seems to go out of his way to be “creative.” The results are sometimes bizarre: “Those emails were the equivalent of trying to quench a baby Gargantua’s thirst for the milk of seventeen thousand, nine hundred and thirteen cows with a SlimFast 3-2-1 Plan Low Carb Diet Ready-to-Drink Shake” and “This feeling sickened the stomach of every cell in me from head to toe.” Similes are piled on similes: “Each time he said it, his eyes widened, as though he had been struck by the name of the thief in a heist flick, by the missing variable of a formula he’d wrestled for years, by the weight of missing years certain amnesiacs must feel while peeling page by page through piles of old photo albums and old diaries and old correspondence from strangers whose status as acquaintance or true friend remains as indeterminate and indefinable as your own reflected face would be if you spent a lifetime staring at the sun.”
Why do so many of the characters feel sensations in the same way: “This smouldering travelled through his hand, up his arm to his shoulder, rising from his neck into his ears, which pulsed with sound, as though a winged-thing’s egg laid there long ago had finally hatched” and “The depth of her skin grew palpable along her arms and neck and back. The sensation made her feel like she was filling with a colony of summer-heated ants” and “she would be overcome by the buzzing up and down her arms of a hive of candle-bearing bees” and “I could feel this body birthing beneath my skin, maturing rapidly from the baby-sized ball of sickness in my gut to a full-fledged nervous system-distending force with a voice” and “Her mother’s strike spreads an electric shiver along the sixteen-year-old girl’s spine and arms, from her shoulders to the hands she clenches to shake it away, a rage-rich burn tightening in her heart and stomach as though the two rulers of her insides are doing battle or trying to fuse into a new, unsustainable organ.”
Lists go on and on: “artists of every ilk – creative non-fiction activists, sober novelists, splatterers of house paints on massive canvases, Hollywood producers with major pull, cynical minimalist poets, guerrilla graffitist, post-country but pre-robotronic steel guitarists, YouTube creators, the composer of mainstream operatic opuses, and on and on and on.” One character goes to the storage room of his apartment building, and for no reason, we are given a description of various storage cages: “Some were empty except for a few weeping cans of interior paints with names like “Roman Ruins,” “Lemon Tart” and “Samba.” Another cage contained nothing but a framed velvet canvas that tackily preserved the wide eyes, pointy breasts and almond skin of a local’s take on a tourist’s vision of a resort-pocked nation’s “fairer sex.” Another was packed with the ghosts of recreations past – golf clubs, tennis racquets, croquet mallets, snorkel gear – while another confined “the replaced” – the replaced microwave, the replaced mini-fridge, the replaced speakers and amp.”
Some passages just don’t make sense: “By the length of its lines, its steady patience in ink, the affable interaction of its infinite internal shapes with the ‘will be,’ ‘was’ and ‘is’ of our saintly, sailing selves, the Poem expressed the manacle-smacking desire to free stuff from its silence, its impermanence, its pseudo-salves and mock healings, all the et ceteras of the sources of impossible vision. It wanted to be the 12-step program to beauty, the thief who snuck truth into the pockets of the masses mobbed by the miserly vitality of ignorance and the inane. The Poem wanted to un-break us. It wanted to be the crazy cowboy who rode us in reverse and made us wild.” Perhaps I’m just not intelligent enough to decipher the meaning.
A pet peeve is an author unnecessarily inserting him/herself into stories. In this collection, the author appears in “Year Zero” and “Dear Adolf” and is undoubtedly the narrator in “Wave Forms.” He teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough and so ends this collection with “Humanity’s Wing” which focuses on the humanities building at that university, and it’s not difficult to determine which professor represents him.
As I said at the beginning, these stories left me unimpressed and uninspired. Perhaps they’re just too esoteric for me.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
It is not hyperbole to state that the ten short stories are all over the place. For example, one is about a teenaged fantasist whose intentions are misinterpreted; one consists of waveforms of cinematic scenes; one is about a Holocaust amusement park; and another is an homage to the humanities building at a university.
In one of the stories “The Poem” there’s an editor who pans a poem by commenting, “’it’s like the main point is to make you feel stupid. . . . If you’ve got something to say, just say it!’” This is the way I felt much of the time. The author seems to want to impress the reader. There are allusions to obscure films like “Varda’s The Gleaners and I” and “Ergüven’s Mustang” and “Tarkovsky’s The Mirror” and "Kiarostami’s Close-Up.” Although it's probably just a layout issue, at the beginning of "Doom Scrolls" a character from Shakespeare’s As You Like It seems to be given a bastardized version of a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream though it is identified as coming from Macbeth? I guess it’s been too long since I earned my degrees in literature!
When I taught creative writing, I would encourage students not to use trite similes and metaphors, but this author seems to go out of his way to be “creative.” The results are sometimes bizarre: “Those emails were the equivalent of trying to quench a baby Gargantua’s thirst for the milk of seventeen thousand, nine hundred and thirteen cows with a SlimFast 3-2-1 Plan Low Carb Diet Ready-to-Drink Shake” and “This feeling sickened the stomach of every cell in me from head to toe.” Similes are piled on similes: “Each time he said it, his eyes widened, as though he had been struck by the name of the thief in a heist flick, by the missing variable of a formula he’d wrestled for years, by the weight of missing years certain amnesiacs must feel while peeling page by page through piles of old photo albums and old diaries and old correspondence from strangers whose status as acquaintance or true friend remains as indeterminate and indefinable as your own reflected face would be if you spent a lifetime staring at the sun.”
Why do so many of the characters feel sensations in the same way: “This smouldering travelled through his hand, up his arm to his shoulder, rising from his neck into his ears, which pulsed with sound, as though a winged-thing’s egg laid there long ago had finally hatched” and “The depth of her skin grew palpable along her arms and neck and back. The sensation made her feel like she was filling with a colony of summer-heated ants” and “she would be overcome by the buzzing up and down her arms of a hive of candle-bearing bees” and “I could feel this body birthing beneath my skin, maturing rapidly from the baby-sized ball of sickness in my gut to a full-fledged nervous system-distending force with a voice” and “Her mother’s strike spreads an electric shiver along the sixteen-year-old girl’s spine and arms, from her shoulders to the hands she clenches to shake it away, a rage-rich burn tightening in her heart and stomach as though the two rulers of her insides are doing battle or trying to fuse into a new, unsustainable organ.”
Lists go on and on: “artists of every ilk – creative non-fiction activists, sober novelists, splatterers of house paints on massive canvases, Hollywood producers with major pull, cynical minimalist poets, guerrilla graffitist, post-country but pre-robotronic steel guitarists, YouTube creators, the composer of mainstream operatic opuses, and on and on and on.” One character goes to the storage room of his apartment building, and for no reason, we are given a description of various storage cages: “Some were empty except for a few weeping cans of interior paints with names like “Roman Ruins,” “Lemon Tart” and “Samba.” Another cage contained nothing but a framed velvet canvas that tackily preserved the wide eyes, pointy breasts and almond skin of a local’s take on a tourist’s vision of a resort-pocked nation’s “fairer sex.” Another was packed with the ghosts of recreations past – golf clubs, tennis racquets, croquet mallets, snorkel gear – while another confined “the replaced” – the replaced microwave, the replaced mini-fridge, the replaced speakers and amp.”
Some passages just don’t make sense: “By the length of its lines, its steady patience in ink, the affable interaction of its infinite internal shapes with the ‘will be,’ ‘was’ and ‘is’ of our saintly, sailing selves, the Poem expressed the manacle-smacking desire to free stuff from its silence, its impermanence, its pseudo-salves and mock healings, all the et ceteras of the sources of impossible vision. It wanted to be the 12-step program to beauty, the thief who snuck truth into the pockets of the masses mobbed by the miserly vitality of ignorance and the inane. The Poem wanted to un-break us. It wanted to be the crazy cowboy who rode us in reverse and made us wild.” Perhaps I’m just not intelligent enough to decipher the meaning.
A pet peeve is an author unnecessarily inserting him/herself into stories. In this collection, the author appears in “Year Zero” and “Dear Adolf” and is undoubtedly the narrator in “Wave Forms.” He teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough and so ends this collection with “Humanity’s Wing” which focuses on the humanities building at that university, and it’s not difficult to determine which professor represents him.
As I said at the beginning, these stories left me unimpressed and uninspired. Perhaps they’re just too esoteric for me.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
September 25, 2021
I was just delighted to read an ARC of this book. Darkly satirical in the best possible way, it completely appealed to my dark sense of humour. These fabulous and twisted short stories put on a clinic and if we were to liken the collection to Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, these would be fireball bonbons that you can't resist guzzling in short order. Every one of these stories would make a great Coen Brothers movie. I loved the brilliant tension, the shocking incisiveness and the way each story holds a mirror to the sociology of now.
February 3, 2022
I have just finished reading Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls by Daniel Scott Tysdal. It is a book of short stories that was highly entertaining, a compilation that defies genres and captures the reader's attention and imagination simultaneously exploring difficult topics in a relatable style.
May 6, 2022
3.5 ⭐️ favourite stories: the poem & year zero
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews