The Ironic Skeletons

by Colby Smith

D.W. Lambert works with fossils of an unusual character — so unusual they shouldn’t really exist. And, perhaps, they don’t. In The Ironic Skeletons, uncertainty conquers certainty, madness and science intertwine, and the sacred is indistinguishable from the profane.


About the Author
Colby Smith was born and raised in southern West Virginia and is currently based in Cleveland, Ohio. His fiction has been published in numerous anthologies associated with the Neo-Decadent art movement and his nonfiction has appeared in Vastarien, Spontaneous Poetics, and The Aither. His debut short story collection, The Universe as Performance Art, is forthcoming from Eibonvale Press.

122 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Damian Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The text of The Ironic Skeletons shifts in and out of unconventional modes of narration with a surprising deftness and easiness, all the while relating the travails of mental illness in a way that feels extremely real and describing paleontological arcana in a way that's compelling to the reader (like myself) that knows almost nothing about the subject. It's impossible not to be drawn in by the subtle hand of mastery apparent in every chapter of this novella. The story is interspersed with rhythmic laments, spurious footnotes, one-act plays, poetry, and serial postulates, all amidst an engaging and straightforward narrative written in flawless, easy prose. I'm left with little choice but to slam my fist down on the table and demand that the author publish more.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This breviloquent debut novel by Neo-Decadent writer Colby Smith concerns itself with the spiritual and mental disintegration of a clinically depressed female bisexual vertebrate paleontologist of Pittsburgh. In light of its paleontological milieu, its themes of cosmic nihilism, its subcultural fetishes and shout-outs, and its general downbeat attitude and extremely sour/bitter narration, one could forgive lazy and unimaginative book reviewers for comparisons to an Aunt Beast opuscule, but one of the big inspirations here seems to be a godless M. David Tibet, or a non-Euclidian Steve Albini. To say that the narrator is naval-gazing doesn't do justice to her existential angst: it's more as if she's performing joyless cunnilingus on an event horizon. Breaking up these death-obsessed and pessimistic contemplations are jargon-heavy digressions related to the fascinating field of fossilogy, where the narrator drops words and terms like 'the Permian-Triassic mass extinction,' 'oligocene lagomorphs,' and 'Wiwaxia,' amongst many others: the ping-pong effect thus created is like being lectured to by a Ross Geller who accidentally wandered into an Efilist convention. While I feel that the book's themes could have been developed further and at greater length, and the large number of quirky characters that pop up and just as quickly vanish into the aither (some of whom are actually more interesting than the narrator herself) seems strange for such a short novel, there's enough evocative similes and bizarre imagery to keep things interesting (I particularly enjoyed the reference to "The wolf ghost from my childhood licking my privates"), and there's also some curious editing/structuring going on here (the usage of footnotes seemed especially queer).

[George Wines · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ironic Skeletons is a rich, dense novella of about 20,000 words that could've easily been a life's-work of several hundred thousand words and volumes and volumes of interrelated novels. The subject matter is that ripe, and Smith's prose is that brilliant. He has this rather ingenious way of combining the banal and the mundane with the epic. You're lolling along just a bit and then BAM! he hits you with a line that floors you and elevates everything that came before it and will come after it. I like that he uses paleontology, a science, as a metaphor for what this story is really about, a person's descent into madness through mental illness that she can't overcome. Science is ever-evolving and self-correcting: you regularly discover something that shows you that all you thought you knew is only a little of what you'll ever know. Just when you think you've got it all figured out, you find that you pretty much know nothing. That's the experience of this character, that's the arc of this novel. Like I said in the first line of this review, this could've been a several hundred thousand word series of novels. I do think it ends a little too quickly and abruptly, but I think the journey until then is more than worth it, word by word, sentence by sentence. And we have to remember that Smith was 20 or 21 when he wrote this. His time for longer works will come and they should be anticipated with fervor.

[Arturo H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post-hardcore Ballardian-core meets three-digit IQ Jurassic Park. The scientist as a prose poet.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

More of this excellent stuff! Pour it in my empty cup, now.

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2022/1...

[Devon Overley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gripping story helping detail the daily issues of someone struggling with mental health issues.