What do you think?
The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood
At last Concealed no more
From here, where Equity of hope
Guides our actions
—Beatitudes Do harm no longer.
In the beginning...
Victor Loingsech is adrift after being laid off from his job. He sets off for Ireland to wallow in stout, but returns deeply changed. A dark compulsion is overcoming him, and when a terrible accident forces his hand, Victor steps into the abyss.
The present lays the foundation for the future...
Erlyst Rae Atropos, a far from saintly southern belle, is swept up into the arms of a powerful billionaire and whisked away to New York City. When Erlyst's husband dies suddenly, his vast nefarious empire falls under her control. With scepter in hand, she forces psychopaths and war criminals into a high-stakes game of revenge.
The future, bent by greed, submits to Nature's wrath...
Il Diluvio is an impossible storm that sits high above Los Angeles and pummels it with unending rain. The once mighty jewel of the Pacific Coast is destroyed by crippling floods and explodes in civil war. A mad Mayor rises to power, conquering the city and setting his sights on the entire Union. The Federal Government is permanently hobbled, but a brilliant politician asks a question that changes the What if the US was its own show, broadcast to voyeurs from pole to pole?
From here, where Equity of hope
Guides our actions
—Beatitudes Do harm no longer.
In the beginning...
Victor Loingsech is adrift after being laid off from his job. He sets off for Ireland to wallow in stout, but returns deeply changed. A dark compulsion is overcoming him, and when a terrible accident forces his hand, Victor steps into the abyss.
The present lays the foundation for the future...
Erlyst Rae Atropos, a far from saintly southern belle, is swept up into the arms of a powerful billionaire and whisked away to New York City. When Erlyst's husband dies suddenly, his vast nefarious empire falls under her control. With scepter in hand, she forces psychopaths and war criminals into a high-stakes game of revenge.
The future, bent by greed, submits to Nature's wrath...
Il Diluvio is an impossible storm that sits high above Los Angeles and pummels it with unending rain. The once mighty jewel of the Pacific Coast is destroyed by crippling floods and explodes in civil war. A mad Mayor rises to power, conquering the city and setting his sights on the entire Union. The Federal Government is permanently hobbled, but a brilliant politician asks a question that changes the What if the US was its own show, broadcast to voyeurs from pole to pole?
Kindle Edition
Published August 25, 2021
About the author
William M. Brandon III
8 books15 followersWilliam is a dad and a partner. He sees coercive relationships as the root of oppression.
His novels, 'Eternity: The Long and Short of It', 'The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood', 'Welcome to Spring Street', and 'SILENCE & Selene', as well as his short story 'The Atheist and the Rapture Button' are all available from Spaceboy Books (readspaceboy.com).
William’s synaptic meanderings have also appeared on his website (agentofdiscord.com) and: in technical form on WIRED.com and THALO.com, in review form at StatORec.com ('An Ongoing Confession') and TheRumpus.com ('The Last Book I Loved: Let the Great World Spin'), in short story form in Rain Crow Magazine ('Athens Diptych' – Issue #2), and in an anthology supporting the non-profit Mines Advisory Group ('The Atlantic').
From 2013 – 2021 William served as the Managing Editor for Black Hill Press and 1888. During his tenure he edited and curated 'The Cost of Paper' (The Cost of Paper: Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV), and edited '29 to 31' by Kevin Staniec, 'The Pit and No Other Stories' by Jordan Rothacker, 'Foster' by Scott Amstadt, and 'A Little Evil' by B. Tanner Fogle.
His novels, 'Eternity: The Long and Short of It', 'The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood', 'Welcome to Spring Street', and 'SILENCE & Selene', as well as his short story 'The Atheist and the Rapture Button' are all available from Spaceboy Books (readspaceboy.com).
William’s synaptic meanderings have also appeared on his website (agentofdiscord.com) and: in technical form on WIRED.com and THALO.com, in review form at StatORec.com ('An Ongoing Confession') and TheRumpus.com ('The Last Book I Loved: Let the Great World Spin'), in short story form in Rain Crow Magazine ('Athens Diptych' – Issue #2), and in an anthology supporting the non-profit Mines Advisory Group ('The Atlantic').
From 2013 – 2021 William served as the Managing Editor for Black Hill Press and 1888. During his tenure he edited and curated 'The Cost of Paper' (The Cost of Paper: Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV), and edited '29 to 31' by Kevin Staniec, 'The Pit and No Other Stories' by Jordan Rothacker, 'Foster' by Scott Amstadt, and 'A Little Evil' by B. Tanner Fogle.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 19, 2022
Happy(anxious) to be the first review for Brandon’s novel.
There’s more to be said than I could ever formulate on here to be completely honest.
The book spans numerous timeframes (past/present/not-so-distant future), explores multiple locations, but mainly sticks to three narratives going back and forth over and over. But not in a super disorienting way.
Brandon was nice enough to have what he calls a “Lexicon” with acronyms that are used throughout, “Iconography” with numerous maps/timelines, and “Canon” which gives us the story. You’re going to need some bookmarks to reference throughout your journey.
The Exile I believe is the character Victor, but I’m still trying to price everything together in my head.
The Matriarch is Erlyst, who might be my favorite character in the novel.
The Flood is Il Diluvio, an unending rain. Also appears to be a very big book that is being written.
The book is extremely political which is outside my realm of general interest, BUT appears to be relevant and not too far off from where we are heading. The entire country is being recorded for the entire worlds entertainment. I feel like we are already there to be honest.
Funny to have read this during Bloomsday, as the character gives us journal entries of his escape from reality in Dublin. Lots of drinking. Even reads Dubliners.
I will have to read this again to pinpoint everything more accurately, but it’s been an honor to read.
You can pick this up at Spaceboy Books.
There’s more to be said than I could ever formulate on here to be completely honest.
The book spans numerous timeframes (past/present/not-so-distant future), explores multiple locations, but mainly sticks to three narratives going back and forth over and over. But not in a super disorienting way.
Brandon was nice enough to have what he calls a “Lexicon” with acronyms that are used throughout, “Iconography” with numerous maps/timelines, and “Canon” which gives us the story. You’re going to need some bookmarks to reference throughout your journey.
The Exile I believe is the character Victor, but I’m still trying to price everything together in my head.
The Matriarch is Erlyst, who might be my favorite character in the novel.
The Flood is Il Diluvio, an unending rain. Also appears to be a very big book that is being written.
The book is extremely political which is outside my realm of general interest, BUT appears to be relevant and not too far off from where we are heading. The entire country is being recorded for the entire worlds entertainment. I feel like we are already there to be honest.
Funny to have read this during Bloomsday, as the character gives us journal entries of his escape from reality in Dublin. Lots of drinking. Even reads Dubliners.
I will have to read this again to pinpoint everything more accurately, but it’s been an honor to read.
You can pick this up at Spaceboy Books.
October 11, 2022
When we take a moment to reflect, from a position of literary critical theory, upon some of the many potential outcomes, as they relate to art, culture, society, experience, the individual, the collective, or history, to the complex question of what is the function of fiction, we could potentially hypothesize upon these themes indefinitely, but there are some initially satisfying assertions that immediately come to mind to serve as a general foundation for the idea, such as David Foster Wallace proposing that, “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” or when Alfred North Whitehead proclaimed that, “It is in literature that the concreate outlook of humanity receives its expression,” or additionally when Ray Bradbury very creatively attested that, “The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down.”
Author Willian M. Brandon writes with a towering, brilliantly luminous urgency, creativity, and energy which not only demands our attention as readers, but his colossal achievement in The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood also demands that we use his extraordinary vision to help us build the wings that we will need as we jump, descending through a complexly woven, daring, revolutionary novel, skillfully assembled by the careful guide of an author whose mastery of craft dazzles the reader from beginning to end, into a new possible world that should deeply disturb those that have become complacent or too comfortable to reengage with the management of their willful participation in the world to become once again inspired by the spirit of resistance to create actual measurable change so that we may evade the divisive, classist hierarchies of unchecked governing politically driven corporate oligarchical power, and oppression that we face now at the height of our most dominant contemporary power structures, to one day imagine a new concreate outlook upon the world that not only liberates the individual from these nefarious institutions, but it dares to inspire in us a new more inclusive, sustainable vision of our future.
Brandon in many ways is not only a terrifically gifted contemporary author, wildly skilled as measured relative to his experimentation with structure, plot, complexity, scale, character, style, and theme, but it should be noted that when being evaluated in the grander historical position within our larger generational conversation concerning the function of the novel in our time, Brandon is a revolutionary, a provocateur, an agent of resistance, and a visionary exploring, in his book, the potentially irreversible dystopian perils that accompany the trajectories of acceleration and annihilation which are the true prevailing undercurrents, even if sometimes obscured by the spectacles of our obsessions with entertainment and consumption, of late Western capitalism that he, in this case, performing as a high order literary technician, through the use of exquisite, provocative prose, footnotes, iconography, apocrypha, maps, sprawling timelines, travelogues, journal entries, and lexicons, strives not simply to unveil the mechanisms, techniques, deceptions, distortions, and methodologies of our assassins, but what his powerful book, something I would recommend for all readers interested in savoring entry into a mesmerizing speculative narrative, when operating at its best, The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood, which could resonate as a case study in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, in which we study the cyclical rise and fall of empires under the obsessive allure for pure consumption and total annihilation, neatly fits into the brighter luminously beaming light we can call an essential contribution to the future of fiction whose achievement is one that constructively pushes the novel as a form into exciting new directions.
Literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson has stated that “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” In many respects, this harrowing perspective by way of Jameson in the many thematic positions of Brandon’s book, which orbits the likes of Yevgeny Zamyatin, David Mitchell, Terry Gilliam, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, Kalle Lasn, David Foster Wallace, Edward Bernays, and Guy Debord, captures a world seen across the course of 139 years, spanning from 1975 through 2114 which follows a kaleidoscopic fabric of vibrant characters through a labyrinth of tyranny, political power, surveillance, entertainment obsession, propaganda, coups, conspiracy, dynasty, betrayal, scandal, and corruption that moves with the furiously page turning pace of a thriller, all the while constructed with the structural complexity of an experimental metamodernist masterpiece, occurring in world where the American Dream, according to Chief Executive James Calhoun’s Peace and Prosperity Through Entertainment Act in the book is “to do nothing and have everything.”
On pg. 285 of The Exile The Matriarch and the Flood, Brandon writes, “We have seen the ravages of war, racism, and genocide; the graft, prevarication, and agonizing schisms that come with these stories; these myths of absolution from suffering for the chosen and none else. As a species we have over and over violently rejected the concept of the benevolent idealist dictator because we know that the myth always collapses. If we had the ability to see once and for all that there is no life after death, we would be forced to re-think our dedication to madmen and their myths of distant-yet-attainable perfection.”
In reflection upon this brilliant literary moment we are again brought back to consider this question of what is the function of fiction? It is at this point that we step back for a moment from our soaring critical admiration for the central praise of the methodically articulated erudite interconnected dendritic narrative apparatus patchwork that binds the pages of The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood together, essentially, on some levels, a Pynchonian systems novel, not only as a necessary material object existing in the world, but also as a more theoretical construct that argues that this book, is a manifesto, it is a samizdat, it is its own Invisible Committee, it is its own Occupy Movement, it is its own Situationist International, it is a call to arms, it is a revolution, thus here we address another awe-inspiring, brilliant central thread of this book, while we are at it, which is a quietly developing metafictional technique at work in the book which explores the book within a book gestalt that an infinite loop of communication powerfully evolves existing between author, character, then reader in which our protagonist of sorts Victor, sits down at his typewriter to begin writing his great “rain piece,” when the reader should be reminded of Wallace Stevens when he wrote that, “Human nature is like water, it takes the shape of its container,” thus, like Victor authoring Il Diluvio, his great water novel, William M. Brandon too sat down to author The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood, which itself is a model of the world that does not fall simply into the category of speculative dystopian fiction, in which Fredric Jameson’s portrait of late stage capitalism will prevail in which we are all simply passive spectators in the front row of the end of the world, instead Brandon leads us more positively to an outcome that helps us cultivate our own answer to that larger prevailing question, what is the function of fiction, and the function of fiction is to allow the species to experiment with the infinite number of new novel ways that we can change our perspective of the world so that we, on the outside of the book, can then move outwardly into the future to forever better change the shape of it “To Unify our People and Protect Against Tyranny.”
Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic
Buffalo, NY
February 2023
Author Willian M. Brandon writes with a towering, brilliantly luminous urgency, creativity, and energy which not only demands our attention as readers, but his colossal achievement in The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood also demands that we use his extraordinary vision to help us build the wings that we will need as we jump, descending through a complexly woven, daring, revolutionary novel, skillfully assembled by the careful guide of an author whose mastery of craft dazzles the reader from beginning to end, into a new possible world that should deeply disturb those that have become complacent or too comfortable to reengage with the management of their willful participation in the world to become once again inspired by the spirit of resistance to create actual measurable change so that we may evade the divisive, classist hierarchies of unchecked governing politically driven corporate oligarchical power, and oppression that we face now at the height of our most dominant contemporary power structures, to one day imagine a new concreate outlook upon the world that not only liberates the individual from these nefarious institutions, but it dares to inspire in us a new more inclusive, sustainable vision of our future.
Brandon in many ways is not only a terrifically gifted contemporary author, wildly skilled as measured relative to his experimentation with structure, plot, complexity, scale, character, style, and theme, but it should be noted that when being evaluated in the grander historical position within our larger generational conversation concerning the function of the novel in our time, Brandon is a revolutionary, a provocateur, an agent of resistance, and a visionary exploring, in his book, the potentially irreversible dystopian perils that accompany the trajectories of acceleration and annihilation which are the true prevailing undercurrents, even if sometimes obscured by the spectacles of our obsessions with entertainment and consumption, of late Western capitalism that he, in this case, performing as a high order literary technician, through the use of exquisite, provocative prose, footnotes, iconography, apocrypha, maps, sprawling timelines, travelogues, journal entries, and lexicons, strives not simply to unveil the mechanisms, techniques, deceptions, distortions, and methodologies of our assassins, but what his powerful book, something I would recommend for all readers interested in savoring entry into a mesmerizing speculative narrative, when operating at its best, The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood, which could resonate as a case study in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, in which we study the cyclical rise and fall of empires under the obsessive allure for pure consumption and total annihilation, neatly fits into the brighter luminously beaming light we can call an essential contribution to the future of fiction whose achievement is one that constructively pushes the novel as a form into exciting new directions.
Literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson has stated that “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” In many respects, this harrowing perspective by way of Jameson in the many thematic positions of Brandon’s book, which orbits the likes of Yevgeny Zamyatin, David Mitchell, Terry Gilliam, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, Kalle Lasn, David Foster Wallace, Edward Bernays, and Guy Debord, captures a world seen across the course of 139 years, spanning from 1975 through 2114 which follows a kaleidoscopic fabric of vibrant characters through a labyrinth of tyranny, political power, surveillance, entertainment obsession, propaganda, coups, conspiracy, dynasty, betrayal, scandal, and corruption that moves with the furiously page turning pace of a thriller, all the while constructed with the structural complexity of an experimental metamodernist masterpiece, occurring in world where the American Dream, according to Chief Executive James Calhoun’s Peace and Prosperity Through Entertainment Act in the book is “to do nothing and have everything.”
On pg. 285 of The Exile The Matriarch and the Flood, Brandon writes, “We have seen the ravages of war, racism, and genocide; the graft, prevarication, and agonizing schisms that come with these stories; these myths of absolution from suffering for the chosen and none else. As a species we have over and over violently rejected the concept of the benevolent idealist dictator because we know that the myth always collapses. If we had the ability to see once and for all that there is no life after death, we would be forced to re-think our dedication to madmen and their myths of distant-yet-attainable perfection.”
In reflection upon this brilliant literary moment we are again brought back to consider this question of what is the function of fiction? It is at this point that we step back for a moment from our soaring critical admiration for the central praise of the methodically articulated erudite interconnected dendritic narrative apparatus patchwork that binds the pages of The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood together, essentially, on some levels, a Pynchonian systems novel, not only as a necessary material object existing in the world, but also as a more theoretical construct that argues that this book, is a manifesto, it is a samizdat, it is its own Invisible Committee, it is its own Occupy Movement, it is its own Situationist International, it is a call to arms, it is a revolution, thus here we address another awe-inspiring, brilliant central thread of this book, while we are at it, which is a quietly developing metafictional technique at work in the book which explores the book within a book gestalt that an infinite loop of communication powerfully evolves existing between author, character, then reader in which our protagonist of sorts Victor, sits down at his typewriter to begin writing his great “rain piece,” when the reader should be reminded of Wallace Stevens when he wrote that, “Human nature is like water, it takes the shape of its container,” thus, like Victor authoring Il Diluvio, his great water novel, William M. Brandon too sat down to author The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood, which itself is a model of the world that does not fall simply into the category of speculative dystopian fiction, in which Fredric Jameson’s portrait of late stage capitalism will prevail in which we are all simply passive spectators in the front row of the end of the world, instead Brandon leads us more positively to an outcome that helps us cultivate our own answer to that larger prevailing question, what is the function of fiction, and the function of fiction is to allow the species to experiment with the infinite number of new novel ways that we can change our perspective of the world so that we, on the outside of the book, can then move outwardly into the future to forever better change the shape of it “To Unify our People and Protect Against Tyranny.”
Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic
Buffalo, NY
February 2023
August 5, 2024
Such a cool ride! I enjoyed the prose and the way the story just swept along like, yep, a flood.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews