The Autodidacts

by Thomas Kendall

A man mysteriously disappears in a lighthouse, as if dissolved by light, leaving behind a notebook filled with bizarre claims of a curse and a series of drawings entitled 'The Death of the Jubilant Child.' The investigation into the disappearance unearths hidden connections between the disappeared man, Helene and the strange figure of the Man With The Forks In His Fingers. Fifteen years later, the discovery of the detective's copy of the notebook by Helene's daughter seems to set in motion a repetition of the events of the past.




Circuitously structured and intensely lyrical, The Autodidacts explores the mythos of friendship, the necessity of failure, the duty of imagination, and the dreams of working class lives demanding to be beautiful. It is a prayer in denial of its heresy, a metafictional-roman-a-clef trying to maintain its concealment, and an attempt to love that shows its workings out in the margins of its construction.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery

464 pages, Paperback

Published May 5, 2022

About the author

Thomas Kendall’s THE AUTODIDACTS is a brilliant novel — inviting like a secret passage, infallible in its somehow orderly but whirligig construction, spine-tingling to unpack, and as haunted as any fiction in recent memory.

– Dennis Cooper

Like skateboard tricks the most nimble minds struggle to unwind, Kendall's sentences are intricate mechanisms that merge action and abstraction into something so compelling to observe.

– Meg Gluth, author of NO OTHER and COME DOWN TO US

“The Autodidacts is a novel of impressive scope and detail. It’s an absorbing history of how several families have been haunted by a series of deaths and disappearances involving a mysterious lighthouse. It’s also an epic of the everyday, where small gestures and fleeting thoughts are given center stage, transformed into startling insights and astonishing sentences. Each moment of the characters’ intricately inter-stitched lives is illuminated by Kendall’s megawatt prose.”

—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters and Mira Corpora

“ ‘The Autodidacts reminds me of Chantal Ackerman's films, the slow analysis of scenes and characters, ambiguous motivations that are revealed through a jump in time. I was also intrigued by the liminal coastal setting - the island and lighthouse threatened by commercial enterprise, whispers of Poe - the man who disappears from the locked lighthouse, and the drawings, "The Death of the Jubilant Child" that tied the pontoons of past and present together, a physical artifact that linked the sections.”

— Susan Daitch, author of ‘Siege of Comedians’

The Autodidacts listed as one one LitReactor’s staff picks best of 2022: https://litreactor.com/columns/litrea...

Heavy Feather review: https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2022/0...

‘The Autodidacts’ now available to buy from Whiskey Tit press:
https://whiskeytit.com/product/the-au...
and all other bookshops online etc

Reviews

[inciminci · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Autodidacts just might be one of the most original works I've read, honestly I don't think I've ever read anything similar. The story, which starts off with a traumatic event, is broken off in two by a further loss, and the remaining bigger chunks of texts constitute the time before and the aftermath. Much like a theater company which operates with the same actors but in different roles, I had the cast of characters of The Autodidacts switching places in my head, moving in time towards what their parents used to be. It's a slow-paced piece of writing of high intensity and beautiful prose. My only criticism would be, and that's a highly personal point, that it is written in the present tense – that is for some reason something that throws me off and slows my reading pace.

I thank to the author Thomas Kendall for sending me a review copy and for his infinite patience.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This ouroboros of a novel smolders in eternal anguish below the otherworldly glow of the aurora borealis. Its collection of doomed archetypes navigate their entwined lives in perpetual confrontation of the burgeoning awareness of the futility of future planning. They experience the excruciating digestion of the inevitability of the never-happening happening again—the never-escaping of one’s recycled fate. Futility is inhaled into reused lungs, pills are popped with nihilistic impunity. How to live with the constant slow-motion collision of identities in one’s consciousness. The sadness inherent in the pointlessness of employing deliberation. And isn’t this what all fiction represents if one were to examine it closely. Intended originality deployed as slightly askew replica, always righting itself by the end. A flashbulb moment shattered with the first few keyboard strokes into a familiar spent cube, jagged cracks opening with infinite speed across its weakened surface. We all write the same stories. We all live the same lives. But it is all ineffable.

He read the notebook nearly every day. It was a mystery. Whoever wrote it wanted to convey a feeling so exactly that all they could do was torturously describe what was recognisably indescribable, fluid, alterable from moment to moment, yet distinct from any moment in particular but still ultimately contingent and appealing to the very chance its existence was dependent upon and therefore what rendered it indescribable. [...]

He imagined the writing as a huge lattice, a net...the sentences and paragraphs as wiring or string and in this system, this trap that hung loose in the world he thought, the indescribable buzzed about, testing the limitations inscribed around it until finally, exhausted or suffocated, it died weighting a few sentences here and there with the temporary outline of its meaning. The meaning was always the same and stood for something eternal that wasn’t. Something that stood.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

So guess what this lucky fan of the book gets to do??? Yup, that's right, I get to help Wiskey Tit promote it! If you think this sounds right up your alley, and want to review it for us, hit me up with a DM here!! We're seeking reviewers, interviewers, and shouters from the lighthousers!!!

Lighthouse fiction is where it's at, people! This book is dark, disturbing, and holy crap how can you say no with a cover like that?! I can't let it fly under your radar. Go and grab it and thank me later.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Henry's watching Fiasco's jaw move in and out along the roll of his molars like a possessed chest of drawers as Fiasco explains to him that a man in the pub gave him speed, made him take a large quantity of speed from the end of the man's knife while loudly declaring - the man that is that he was a fucking animal."

Wow. Just. Wow. I don't even know where to begin with this review - it has been entirely too long since a book affected me as deeply as The Autodidacts did, it's been even longer than that since a book has reduced me to tears like The Autodidacts did. Despite my deep adoration for this book, it's a difficult one to review, because how am I meant to explain to anyone that I've just read something so utterly life-changing that it's genuinely destroyed a part of my soul? Reading The Autodidacts felt like witnessing something I should not ever be allowed to see, it felt almost wrong to read this. It's just such a deeply intimate, intensely personal book - Thomas Kendall knows what it means to bleed for his audience, it feels like he's stripped off layers of his skin and exposed us to whatever darkness lurks within his soul.

I've been searching for so long now for another author who can do for me what B.R. Yeager and Dennis Cooper and Porpentine can, and god, I think, I've finally found them. What Thomas Kendall understands is that simply writing a sad book is not enough - there needs to be a hyper-specific type of hopelessness to a book, a type of hopelessness that evades all description, it's simply something you either get, or you don't. And, because Thomas Kendall gets it, this isn't just another book, it's a god-damn biblical event, The Autodidacts is the rapture, it's the literary equivalent of a black hole. While this book is certainly one of the most original pieces of fiction you'll ever encounter, it cannot be ignored how reminiscent of the greatest pieces of bleak literature this is - it stands entirely on its own though, it's earned its place amongst the very best.

"They're sat at the beach under rags of clouds suppurate with sun. Strange vegetative forms lean towards a declining light. Henry, Evelyn and Fiasco in turn beginning to feel the effects of what they've so cavalierly ingested. What they've ingested being several mgs of a more than usual lysergically laced amphetamine. Wind scampers around the beach and jumps through their hair growing furious and emptier in found form. Pale swarms of attendant sand encrypt their faces as a heat, inborn, crawls through their scalps into the liberate air mating at last with the beach in little gorged buttons of moisture. Each of them inhales deeply through their noses."

It could be said that this book is self-indulgent and obsessive, and, it is, but, that's a great thing. In fact that might just be one of the best things about this book, because if you're obsessed by nothing, you're pedestrian, you're boring, and mediocre. I live for books that portray friendships like this, and I fucking live for characters like Fiasco, the character work in this novel is, beyond insane. The Autodidacts is a gem - and, Kendall can write. This man can seriously, genuinely, write. This kind of daring, subversive writing that displays so authentically how bad it can feel to be alive is what reading should be about. Books shouldn't hold our hands, they should challenge us, make us feel as uncomfortable as The Autodidacts will make you feel. This is like meeting God and learning that he actually despises you, it's fucking haunting.

"The tramp with the fucked up hand nods and then sits down on the bench. The tramp with the fucked up hand begins to scream. He doesn't seem to be able to stop. Fiasco backs away, sketched out, his good hand balling into a fist just in case. Fiasco is still walking over an hour later, his pace having slowed, his body having succumbed to the flashlight of pain strobing along his nerves. He's nearly at Henry's now. He's exhausted... feels caught up in his own skin, weighted by its drag and proliferation, a skeleton rushed against a mouldering damn of flesh."

[Jeff Jackson]

My blurb for this: “The Autodidacts is a novel of impressive scope and detail. It’s an absorbing history of how several families have been haunted by a series of deaths and disappearances involving a mysterious lighthouse. It’s also an epic of the everyday, where small gestures and fleeting thoughts are given center stage, transformed into startling insights and astonishing sentences. Each moment of the characters’ intricately inter-stitched lives is illuminated by Kendall’s megawatt prose.”

[Charlene Elsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Kendall knows his way around a sentence. Across almost 500 pages he’s developed a set of interwoven lived realities that at times intimate and at other times pretty explicitly suggest an alternative God’s eye view of the happenings of this novel. It feels like there’s a leak in lived experience through which the transcendent both threatens and promises to invade. Read it for the experience.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most all the boxes or circles get checked in his eerily imagined lighthouse seascape whose characters interact as of a dream floating upon those cacaphonous waves and shifting sands, the unknownability of memory and pathos embraced extinction. It is indeed a good read, one that will linger as all good one's do. The reader is auotdidact enough.

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a passage in what I have come to think of as, gun to my head, my all-time favorite novel—Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion—wherein a character complains to his therapist that he thinks he might be going mad, only to be met with the following response:

“No Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It’s become almost impossible for you to ‘go mad’ in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently ‘went mad’ and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now […] you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard […] You may be neurotic as hell for the rest of your life, and miserable, maybe even do a short hitch at Bellevue and certainly good for another five years as a paying patient—but I’m afraid never completely out […] Sorry to disappoint you but the best I can offer is plain old schizophrenia with delusional tendencies.”

This passage is one of those likely to live on forever in a rent-controlled corner of my brain until whenever I finally kick off, providing both comfort and dis- depending on whatever circumstances happen to prompt its recollection on any given day. Kesey wrote those words all the way back in 1963, and if they were true then, then they’re almost trite now. The sheer glut of information available to us today—both factual and faulty—likely dwarfs anything the Merry Prankster could’ve conceived of on even his headiest trip—glowing inside our pockets, growing out beneath our fingertips, forever on call to help or harm us via whatever self-diagnosis we choose to pursue. All of which is to say that, even though we might all feel like we’re going crazy all the time here in the infinitely peaking information age (I certainly do), all we’re really doing is slowly, laboriously, redefining sanity. We’re not crazy. We simply know too much, and learning more has ceased to provide us respite. Kesey knew it, and Thomas Kendall knows it, for no book has brought that particular sentiment so keenly and hauntingly back to mind for me quite like his entrancing family almanac The Autodidacts.

The Autodidacts too is a font of exactingly observed information, and the lighthouse on its cover plays a central role in illuminating its narrative. Divided into two three-part sections, the first focusing on a fractious 1980s love triangle (or quadrangle) (or maybe even pentangle, depending on how you want to read certain characters) that ends in mysterious tragedy, and the second centered more around the nearly-grown 90s children of the first’s surviving (and still-messily-entwined) confederates. Though not quite yet in the grip of our modern information cyclone, they too have come to know far too much, about themselves and the broken promises of the world around them, and trudging daily against the weight of that knowledge, they each begin to chart their own disparate, but indelibly linked paths toward some vague, unrealized, and possibly unreal terminus—the lighthouse watching over them all the while with the menace of Sauron’s eye. Across the book’s 15-some-odd years, it both blinds them to their stasis, and beckons them away—a totem to their shared, traumatic history, and a guiding light toward some dissociative future untethered from same—and the longer Kendall traces their workaday wounded existence beneath its loom, the clearer it becomes that living outlined in its beam has turned them all to shadows.

There is more than a hint of wizardry to Kendall’s prose—the way he describes emotions that are somehow too specific name, but so intrinsically familiar that you immediately recall times you’ve felt them yourself; the way he builds characters by describing absolutely everything around them—the way their skin reacts to the very air—and in so doing, allows you to step into that excised space and inhabit them fully, every one, as if you too were caught up in the intricate playlets of their Platonic cave wall. There were lengthy portions of this book where I found myself floored by a metaphor or turn of phrase on nearly every page: a town “braid[s] the cliffside with property”; a jaw moves in and out “like a possessed set of drawers”; eyes blink into “scribbled stars.” The care with which Kendall spends entire paragraphs describing the way a person takes a drink, or walks across a room, or picks up a piece of paper—the way their faces feel inside their heads and atop their bodies—announces him early and often as a thrillingly original new stylistic voice. I could tell you how I cringed every time Lawrence opened his mouth to swallow his foot, or how I ached for Henry every time he got close to Evelyn (who, for what it’s worth, I also ached for, to get as far the fuck away from these people as possible), or how I wanted to wrap Fiasco up in a shock blanket and never let him out of my sight again, but you won’t know until you read. You just won’t know.

Even as we observe them by-and-largely stuck in their eerily patterned drudgery, nearly all of the main actors in The Autodidacts teem with a staggering, but dogged forward momentum, and especially once the children have grown up, and begun to piece together the shrouded lives of the adults that shaped their pasts, a propulsive sense of inherited dread begins to take hold. Whether they’re actually headed toward legitimate existential crossroads or not, they all think and behave as though they are—as though something new and different must be coming for them, any day now—be it a job or a relationship or a vital piece of news; an escape from their house, or their town, or their life. At one point or another, every one of them would likely cop to at least suspecting that they’re “going mad,” but for most of these characters, these big, foreboding ends prove just more of the same—cresting wavelets in a vast, unyielding sea. What they discover is that, short of snuffing your own candle, that wonderful/terrible/necessary/impossible thing you’re sure is just around the corner is likely just a variation on the theme you’ve been humming since before you even knew what tune you wanted to hear. That no matter how significant the past might seem, the future just goes on writing itself, and whatever certainty we feel toward our imminent ends is largely a byproduct of boredom, or fear, or a hope that never quite learns. Kendall traffics in this nagging sensation that there simply must be something—something next, something more—as well as any writer I’ve ever encountered, and in keeping with his aforementioned stylistic necromancy, it somehow informs every scene without ever being explicitly stated. Rather, as each of his characters grapples with it in their own time, and comes to terms with it in their own way, it billows through them all like a ghostly seaward storm.

Indeed, with its unsolved disappearances, its chilly coastal ambience, and its unsettling notebooks full of not-quite-“mad” sketches and pidgin scrawl, it becomes tempting to discuss The Autodidacts in terms of its inherent spookiness—but there is simply too much of the everyday at play here to pin it all on the surreal. To me, the uncanny doubling between characters and events felt less reminiscent of traditional horror/suspense touchstones than they did the intergenerational, missed connection dynamics of American Beauty, or Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, or even the subtle, hand-me-down fatidics we might associate with Dostoyevsky or Virginia Woolf. For every odd, Lynchian moment of disquiet, there is a tender exchange between loved ones connected not just by their coeval darkness, but also by their persistent striving toward the light. The Autodidacts is, perhaps more than anything, a book about the deeply human struggle against solipsism; about the innate desire to truly know others in a world that, virtually every day, insists a little harder that we can, and maybe even should, work only to know ourselves. Perhaps this is the lesson that this scrappy band of autodidacts are teaching themselves (and against all odds, each other): that no matter how crazy this world might make us feel, we’re all mad here together, and only by continuing to grasp and try and believe in some unlikely better future—to reach out and fumble and miss each other in the dark, and try again by the flash and flail of some steadfastly searching light—can we keep the most vulnerable among us from slipping over the edge, and going out for good.

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slipstream of grief, brilliant portraiture, uncanny revelations. Talk about a stunner. Kendall, warps time and language to render an unclassifiable novel. Part coming-of-age story, part metaphysical mystery, all effervescent prose that spins the reader in every direction at once. An original voice with an original vision.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This starts off promisingly enough. Some shenanigans around a lighthouse with the disappearance of some called James. This covers the 1st section of the book set in the 1980s.

However we jump forward 10 years to now focus more on the teenage children of these earlier characters and the fallout from the earlier events. This is where it went off the rails for me . The prolix prose was often incomprehensible and there were some annoying typos (a character from the 1st section who is dead by the 2nd is mentioned at least twice instead of the correct character's name).

[od1_40reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Thomas Kendell’s ‘The Autodidacts’ is a brilliant novel – inviting like a secret passage, infallible in it’s somehow orderly but whirligig construction, spine-tingling to unpack, and as haunted as any fiction in recent memory.” – Dennis Cooper

With a recommendation like that on the back cover from none other than Dennis Cooper, how could I not open with it? Thomas very kindly sent me a copy of his novel back in November, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit it’s taken me almost a year to get around to it. My most humble apologies Thomas! But I’m glad I finally have.

I initially thought I was in for a thriller/mystery type of ride, but as the novel progresses it unfolds into so much more. It’s a sweeping, family-centred epic with intricately woven layers and equally complex characters who, along with the plot’s strong connections to certain buildings – a lighthouse, two family homes – made the work for me reminiscent of both Dickens and Gaddis. As Cooper mentions above it’s a haunting tale, full of lost souls. The lighthouse and the ocean feature both literally and symbolically, claiming these souls, some of whom we hope find their way back, some gone forever. There are also some pretty hilarious moments, though perhaps not for the squeamish.

Kendall’s prose deserves a mention too. It’s impressive. At times poetic, other times deliberately vague, always beautiful, Kendall has worked hard with his words to create the sense of awkwardness, isolation and disconnect his characters feel. Hats off to Whiskey Tit Books for not bastardising it into something perhaps more palatable for a commercial audience. There’s real beauty in Kendall’s work that deserves time and space to breathe.

I’m thankful to Thomas for sending me his book, and hope this modest post encourages others to seek it out.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, the structure is twisted, it is like an escaped madman has found the book, ripped it into pieces and stuck it back together in a random manner…somehow it works, this unique flow pulls you in and doesn’t let go until it is done. The characters have had the same work done to them, it’s hard to tell who is who, each character seems to have multiple personalities. The conversation is disjointed, there is a character who doesn’t fit in but still manipulates the story, characters disappear with no explanation and there is one hell of a creepy lighthouse. On their own these things could be considered faults but put them together and you’ve got a poetic masterpiece, there is nothing out there like this and nothing that will mess with your emotions this much. The cover is epic, it informs you the sort of madness you are about to enter.

There is not much point in describing the plot to you, each reader will find themselves focusing on one part and this will alter their perspective, for me this was about the characters finding out who they are and where they fit into the world, it explains the multiple personalities, and whereas a “normal” book would focus on one character, this one has 7 individual journeys that all twist together. I reckon if I was to read this in 10 years’ time, I would discover a different side of this book and still be blown away and that is where it is so very clever.

A stunning book that burns bright and that is sure to split readers into two groups “WTF” and “WTF, I Love It”, incredible story and highly recommended for fans of David Lynch.

Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2022...

[Chris Kelso · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know where to start with this one so I won't labour my love of the poetic shape of the prose, the humour/horror balance, or any of that. It took me 2 months to read The Autodidacts, not because it was a chore but because it was pure pleasure for my experience-starved brain (and I have a baby which slows recreational reading to a virtual standstill). The Autodidacts is one of the best books I read in 2022, maybe one of the finest independently published books I've EVER read. I marinaded in it for weeks and weeks. The writing, man, it's so precise and vivid - I feel like a better writer and reader just for having made it to the final page. I will write something larger and meaningful on this, something thorough and analytical (as I am compelled to do when I read anything impactful) - but for now this brief, glib 5 star review will have to do.

[Ben Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What if the love you thought you had to give was really only your own pain and suffering?”

The Autodidacts is a brilliant lustrous novel that involves a lighthouse, a curse, and a family. What unfolds is a haunting journey that feels like a desperate search for an origin story, when there might not be one.
Kendall creates a truly unique metaphysical experience by dissecting consciousness and highlighting the space between thought and action. The words in this book feel like they were pulled from the grain of solarized photographed, it’s insanely beautiful. Reading this was like watching a music video for Jesus Mary Chain directed by Maya Deren, it continues to haunt my brain. Click.

[M Cody McPhail · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Thoughts on The Autodidacts by Thomas Kendall:::::::

A seaside town in England is the setting for this strange reality mangling story. Two families intertwine. A strange and creative human squats in a lighthouse writing his thoughts on time and space into a notebook. A love triangle transcends reality. A man with utensils for fingers proclaims portents of doom. Esoteric disappearances occur. Children come of age. People succumb to shifts in reality. Philosophical teenagers ponder. A marriage binds it all.

We live our lives day to day, sometimes unaware of any matters that occur around us. Sometimes we're drowning in thought and obsessing about possible outcomes. If and when we are in a dark mood, all is tinged with a murky and misty quality. It surrounds us. Permeates everything around us. To describe it is difficult. To pinpoint its nature could be impossible. We remember the feeling though. A smell can bring it back. Any reminder in time can flood our minds with memories.

To write exact situations that mimic reality and recreate certain occurences with beauty and precision is a gift. Within the Autodidacts lie passages that feel alive. There love feels real. Empathy that gives you goosebumps. Another world in your mind.

This book is a gift to behold. Here is what great artists can do. They can communicate with the reader, onlooker, or listener. Books that draw you in like a vortex and hold you there, even when you are away from the text, are a rare present.

The world of the Autodidacts is dark, mysterious, filled with real people, filled with people loving one another. It is a world that is real yet surreal at times. All of it is relatable, no matter how strange the story gets. The philosophy within, as discussed between two of the younger male characters, can be difficult at times to grasp. With a bit of study, further depths are revealed. It gives the story a weight unique to most contemporary writing. The book doesn't feed you its contents with ease. It takes a bit of effort on your part.

Art that takes time to ingest and digest is my favorite kind and yields the most rewards.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What if the love you thought you had to give was really only your own pain and suffering? And the place where you laid your love wasn’t a furnace for a consummation of a shared identity but the very blood of life poisoned by your existence in it? What if all your dreams of disappearance had taken on an essential misunderstanding and triumphed alongside it?" —from The Autodidacts

Do lies, obfuscations, and evasions of the past make its repetition inevitable? Is geography destiny? Thomas Kennedy’s The Autodidacts makes the argument, à la Faulkner, that “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Involving the entwined fates of three families, told over the span of 16 years. Hovering over much of that span is a murder that may be a suicide and a stalker whose eventual whereabouts are never discovered. Infidelity, regret, denial, and more suicide haunt a pair of parents (from different marriages), their three children, and their children’s friends, all who live within visual distance of a lighthouse, the site of the original trauma that sets the story in motion.

Diane lives w/ Lawrence. She is mother to Henry and Jude. She is married but has long been separated from her husband, and lives with Lawrence. Lawrence was widowed by his wife, Helene, who had an affair with a man named James. Lawrence and Helene’s daughter, Evelyn, may be the offspring of James and Helene’s affair. Lawrence and Helene’s friend, Diane, has two sons, Henry and Jude. Diane’s marriage is loveless and she and her husband have separated. At some point after Helene’s death, Diane and Lawrence become lovers but live in separate houses. Evelyn, Henry, and Jude lead directionless lives almost entirely bereft of friendship, except for Henry, whose friend nicknamed Fiasco comes from an abusive, loveless home.

Whether love and friendship—and the conditions in which they are given and received—are enough to bring about salvation to these damaged souls is what Thomas Kennedy explores. The comedic repartee between Henry and Fiasco during their formative teenage years provides a patina of relief sufficient to cover the profound grief that haunts their lives and fates.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Zak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Kendall's The Autodidacts is sublime.

There are books that you read and enjoy, but that will not leave any after images or effects.

There are books, like The Autodidacts that will remain a mystery, a complex burden, and also a book you can wholly embrace, and source inspiration from; a book that you can admit to understanding on a deep instinctual, emotional level, and still be forever haunted by its ambiguities and complex network of vaguities best left to fester.

The prose is raw, brutalist, and rather alienating sometimes, transferring strange ambiances of experience, in a terraforming of all that these characters use to shield, and hide, from their truer selves, which is conveyed in prose/passages that are poetic, abstract, oftentimes surreal, but never ever dishonest in the representation of the sufferers. And whilst it is comforting in its realistic abstractions of reality, the atmosphere is heightened, and more so by the conflicting and perverse nature of the human emotion therein.

The style comes across as loose, punk, only to unravel, and to reverse its polarity. Sometimes, the going is hard, the experience leaden, morose, and because of that, to me, it is beautifully human. And very evocative.

There is an uneasiness to each page, and often it can get too loose, narratively, and then it goes unhinged, and all these contrary emotions make sense; where at other times it is sensual, wet, gelatinous, juicy page-slide of sensations.

There is addictive flow to Thomas's writing. It is also inflected with our own experiences of youth, random unrelated fragments we are forced to relate to; more so, the complicated nature of one's own identity and id-flow is brought into focus, on every other page.

The whole thing is a mystery, whereby the mystery box, The Lighthouse, is neglected, always present and at hand though, a gimmick, not for the author, but for the characters; a mystery in physical form, coiled in suspicions and lies, some white, some imagined, all in favour of the humans that lay all their issues, and all the permutations of experience into this haunting emblem of a bygone era; a rare age of furthered alienation, a place to put blame to their fallacies. To their mistakes. To their ghosts.

We meet characters all so powerfully entwined, but are so damaged, and so beholden to their pasts, their agonies, they can't cross that divide, where they can reach out, and touch and morph with one another. To express and voice the sometimes unwordable.

It is enigmatic, mysterious, and inwardly unique to such an extent that the prose mutates as certain characters' perspectives do.

Fast paced, relatable, at a distance it can come across as too honest, perhaps too vague; growing opaque, to then only transmogrify into a frenzied assault of obsessive detail, where representation of the body's convulsions and tics become a deeply grand and sophisticated representational form, on page, on metaphor, in narrative, in this environment, that works as indicators to the unwell and uncared for consciousnesses of our characters.

The book is breathlessly invigorating, representing the characters' fashioned alter egos and their guises to best hide the bleak haunting of their environments and status. The plot is vast, epic in micro-fashions. There is a wide net, where vague peculiarities confer to bring to light the inherent embroidered bonds between characters and their mental states.

The book is forever festering, coming to the boil via dialogue, location, and the sediments of the characters whacked out emotions.

Reading this book was akin to reading the work of Ramsey Campbell, only the melodrama, the true horrors are not ambiguous luminosities or wraiths, it is the horror, the raw energy and truth of the human condition. To fantasise, to obscure, to delude, to mask.

It is all explored and unexplored in this book.

The Autodidacts is a book about the things best left unspoken. It is about youth, the dregs of youth, unfailingly determined to remain stuck to our adult or older selves. It is about loss and not the clichéd variants found in literature.

It is also about the veils of reality, masterfully conveyed and embellished to obscure the true nature of our inner most turmoil, angst, agitation, spiritual dislocation, cultural obligation and loyalties.

It is in totality a masterpiece.

Buy a copy here:

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The Autodidacts https://amzn.eu/d/gtHYGzL

[Nick Padula · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not the greatest literary analyst, so hopefully I pay this complex work the proper tribute it deserves. I’m more of a creative than a critic, but I’ll do my best.

Where to start with The Autodidacts? Very few authors come to mind when I try to find a point of comparison to Thomas Kendall’s lyrical prose and storytelling. Pynchon? DeLillo? Bolanõ? Maybe! He’s really doing his own thing here, so I don’t want to put him in any kind of box.

The decade-spanning storytelling here following two generations of two separate (but linked) families manages to feel simultaneously cosmic and intimate. Each character we follow is burdened with their own personal tragedies and mental anguishes of varied severity. We gaze into each of their minds with a psychological precision from Kendall I couldn’t help but be impressed by. Their thoughts, whether relevant to the events of the story or to their characterization, flow across the page with rhythm and grace. Besides the decade-spanning familial struggles we witness, there’s some spooky mysteries and vaguely supernatural events whirling around the periphery of these characters. Those eerie elements juxtaposed with the more ordinary character beats create quite the narrative cocktail.

The way I describe this novel makes it sound like a hefty postmodern beast, but there’s levity to be found throughout. One section involving a very physically uncomfortable car ride stands out as both hilarious and awful to imagine. Quite the literary ride overall!

Another excellent entry from Whiskey Tit Books. I’m now three for three!

[Sherry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected to love this more than I did and I’m sad to say it wasn’t so. I really enjoyed the first part but much less so in the second part. All the promise and lead up of the beginning falls away with the time, character and story shift. When the novel focused on Henry, Fiasco and Evelyn, the story lost steam for me.

The things I found appealing in the beginning, the prose, the author’s ability to articulate little fractures of a moment, like an expression changing from one mood to another with an occurrence of thought or perception, became less engaging as the book progressed. In part, I didn’t find the teenaged characters or their stories very compelling so being privy to their thoughts, detailed perceptions and conversations became more and more challenging for me. It began to feel very slow and bogged down as the book progressed. It didn’t help that there was a three week hiatus as I was reading this as my husband came home during the read and stayed an extra 2 weeks so when I was able to pick this up again I found I remembered nothing and had to reread a large portion of the book. Obviously not the author’s fault, but it did seem to take the wind out of my sails with the story.

There just wasn’t enough happening, or, that what was happening wasn’t adequately described, the author choosing to keep the focus on the characters thoughts and perceptions, making it so they actually remained remote and at a distance. Intentional? At times, it felt very much as though it was over my head.

That being said, I must say, there were parts of this I really loved. Little phrases I underlined and savoured…‘significantly motherless’ ( an underlying theme throughout the second half I thought) …’a melancholy porosity’ …’a budgeted expenditure of joy’…considering the illuminating prose and the strength of the first half of the book, this definitely would have been a book with all the stars for me had the story carried through and not shifted its focus.

It could be that I’m just not the right reader for this book but I’m glad I was given an opportunity to give it a try and I thank Whisk(e)y Tit for sending me a copy for review.

[Emily Lorié · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Autodidacts by Thomas Kendall is a beautifully melancholy, eerie, yet nostalgic read bursting at the seams with dazzling prose and a hefty dose of relatability.

The cast of characters had me nodding in remembrance of my teen years while sympathizing with those middle-aged ailments and adulthood pressures.

The author’s deep dive into the minds of said characters inspired me to no end. The descriptive beauty of his settings and how he so elegantly meandered through the story transported me to this coastal town. The dark undertones pleased my horror-loving soul while remaining alarmingly realistic.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to read this masterpiece, and I highly encourage you to give it a go if you’re looking for a jaw-dropping reading experience.

Thank you to Thomas, Whiskey Tit Books, and Lori for blessing me with such an incredible story. I will revisit this book time and time again.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique in style, voice, and structure while plumbing instantly relatable depths of teenage friendship, yearning, and exploration. A completely immersive headspace to enter, one that becomes a part of your mind, ever free for the roaming, once you finish -- a novel about curses, and a cursed novel, in the best possible way.

[EVA UJHELYI · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think reading this book once is enough.

I have re-read the first 30 pages three times. At first, because I started the book at half-asleep so I could barely function. The second time I still couldn’t pay any attention. The third time was because there was simply way too much time between finishing the first 30 pages and actually reading forward that I thought I might as well just start it again. The third time I’ve read it in one sitting.

What do you mean? I asked the author while reading over and over again. It is not an easy book, it is a dark, philosophical thriller that truly eats you up by the time you finish this story. Still, you can’t put it down because the characters are so humane and relatable that you want to know what’s going to happen to them. And also what happened to them in the past.

The Autodidacts starts in 1982 in the UK, with a lighthouse. There is a man living in it, James who is in love with the woman living across on a cliff: Helene.
Helene has a husband Lawrence and a baby girl Evelyn. The marriage is far away from being perfect, for a matter of fact, both the husband and the wife have their own demons fighting with them daily. There is also Henry, who is taking care of Evelyn while his mom is cleaning the couple’s house. So we have this idyllic deeply troubled group of people who are literally one step away from spiraling into something even darker. That one step happens when the man in the tower, James disappears and all it’s left behind is his notebook. In it, there are drawings about a child and essays like paragraphs about curses and characters based on real-life ones.

I wasn’t thinking I would be able to read it in one sitting. It was actually years ago the last time when I could do this. Not because of my reading speed but just because I can’t do it anymore. So This was a pleasant surprise. It truly sucked me in and I couldn’t even tell why. Maybe because as I mentioned before the characters were so well done and relatable. I loved that the author was not stagnating on one character for chapters but jumped from every two pages to another one. It kept me on my toes and kept me going because I wanted to know what was going to happen with ‘my characters’ the ones I was rooting for. It also had characters that I almost despised and that’s not a bad thing at all in a book. As long as it’s not the main character camouflaged as a good one.

Maybe it was the atmosphere of the book that kept me turning the pages. I live in Fort William, Scotland. Practically from September till March it feels like someone stole the sunlight away and brought some clouds and fog and never-ending humidity instead. And as I was reading the book the way I could picture the small town near the sea just like here near the mountain, it felt like I was reading the right book at the right time. There is something weirdly satisfying about it and also helped me to get through my usual autumn melancholy too.

It is a philosophical book so there is a lot of thinking and me trying to make sense of all of it, while mentally copy-pasting my own messages and my own little dialogues. The poems I wrote when I was in high school. Yes, maybe the other reason why it truly took me away was nostalgia. Or more precisely, the essence, the thought process of my adolescence. Oh man, I did think a lot back then. About literally everything, and oh did I write it all down back then. Maybe this book found my soft spot. My longing for my teenage self who was burning with passion and love for writing.

I truly recommend this book, especially if you want to read something different that is not so easy to find in today’s mainstream ocean.
Let it be your lighthouse this autumn and all the time when you need it. When you feel nostalgic for your old self but still love the new one.

[Matthew Brockwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Autodidacts is a promising debut by Thomas Kendall. A decidedly esoteric read, the novel blends styles and genres to create something that feels wholly unique and excitingly abstract.

The novel first presents itself as a sort of seaside mystery with a suggestion of the supernatural before gradually developing into a coming-of-age drama. Exploring the lives of three families over several years and through several tragedies, the story feels intimate and deeply personal. Describing it in concrete terms and pinning the story down can be a challenge, but this feels intentional and serves as one of the novel’s strengths. Kendall establishes an engaging premise and provides enough teenage angst and family drama to keep readers invested, all while leaving enough unsaid to make it all open to interpretation.

Kendall’s prose is rich and detailed as he fuses the literal and the metaphorical. It is through the combination of the two that Kendall is able to craft moments of great beauty and poignancy. Characters feel painstakingly rendered throughout as Kendall uses them to explore themes of generational trauma, grief and self-discovery, all with the skill of a veteran novelist.

Reading this novel was a unique experience, one that I enjoyed a great deal. I found myself enjoying it for different reasons throughout and enjoyed re-reading particularly beautiful bits of writing as I went. The Autodidacts is a must-read novel for those looking for something refreshingly different, and is one I wholeheartedly recommend!

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

What the fork [<---Read this book and you will see that this is not an autocorrect mistake] is going on?
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I can't tell you how many times I reread passages from this book... sometimes because I had no clue what was happening and others because it was so beautifully written I needed to devour the words again.
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Throughout the entire book I felt like I was living inside a schizophrenic mind. Everything is jumbled up, all of the characters seem a bit unstable, and I was left questioning what was actually real.
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I don't think I am capable of even beginning to describe the plot of this book, but I do know I didn't want to put it down.
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If you are looking for a wild semi-mental breakdown kind of ride, this is the book for you!
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A special thank you to Thomas Kendall for sending me a copy of your book!

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Creepy, compelling, unique.

This book has a very eccentric writing style, one that I'm not ashamed to say, may have been a tad above my reading level. A style that is incredibly lyrical and poetically written. At times I found myself unable to set it down!

A great read for those who want something that strays from the ordinary, and offers fascinating insight into the mind and our human condition. Complete with a horror feel to the novel, between the odd relationships formed among different characters, the strange and old rusting lighthouse, the spooky notebook found there, and to top it off, the overly religious Grandfather inflicting his bleak world views on his young innocent grandchildren.

At times I found this book difficult to follow, and would likely need to read it a second time to get a better understanding of the story. If you are a "word of the day" type of person, this story will offer endless contributions to your list!

[Patrick Gamble · Rating 5 out of 5]

."'What if the love you thought you had to give was really only your own pain and suffering? And the place where you laid your love wasn't a furnace for a consummation of a shared identity but the very blood of life poisoned by your existence in it? What if all your dreams of disappearance had taken on an essential misunderstanding and triumphed alongside it?”

I really loved The Autodidacts.; Not just because of its original prose and unique voice, but for how intelligently it approaches the topic of intergenerational trauma and how it is passed down unconsciously.

A masterly combination of things pregnant and poised, an initial atmosphere of suburban dread soon gives way to a heartfelt tale of adolescent confusion that mixes tenderness, depth and a bone dry sense of humour . At times it's a challenging read - with Kendall's character's much more well-read than I was at their age - but the rewards are well worth the effort, and as the novel spirals into a whirlpool of trauma, repetition and recovery, a gnawing sense of hopelessness is gradually replaced by the ache of possibility and the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope that this cycle can be broken.

[Deborah Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent well written book. Believable characters and the storyline keeps your interest throughout. A book to put on your reading list

[Jonathan Dunkle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like to think that I read a variety of books, that my tastes are diverse. Reading this book, though, made me realize that perhaps I am fooling myself.

Published by Whisk(e)y Tit Press, a house that prides itself on publishing "texts that would otherwise be abandoned in a homogenised literary landscape", this is a book that is hard to envision existing.

I loathed the style of the writer. There is a quote attributed to Mozart that goes "music is not in the notes, but in the silence between". I feel like that applies to how Mr. Kendall writes. Not every word needs to have a modifier. Not everything needs to be described in detail. When everything is done in the same manner, nothing stands out as being special. I felt like with some judicious editing and reduction, this could have been a better read.

I also hated how he uses nouns as verbs way too much. Perhaps my vocabulary is limited and the words he used can actually be used as verbs. He did it enough that I started to question myself. If they can, though, it is uncommon to do so and like the overuse of descriptives, it was just too much.

That said, I also started to question myself as to how irritating his writing was. Was it irritating or was it just different? Am I just used to the homogenised literary landscape? Ultimately, different is a good descriptor of this book. The story is different, the characters are different, the writing style is different. For how much I disliked the writing, the story was compelling.

No one else could write this book and I don't think anyone else could publish it either. While it might not have been for me, I did enjoy it enough that I am glad that it was written and published.

[Not Sarah Connor Writes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to The Next Best Book Club for this sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review!

3.5 - I don't think I'm smart enough for this book because I just didn't understand it no matter how hard I tried to. I liked the characters, and loved the themes of repetition, but it overall didn't hit like I thought it would though I appreciate the structure of the book.

Read the full review on my blog!

[Brett Glasscock · Rating 2 out of 5]

i wanted to like it more than i did. the prose was incredible, so many sentences to underline. but im less convinced about the plot and characters. it introduces a ton of mystery and very high emotional stakes. but those threads get dropped in favor of overexplained shoe leather description of minutiae in the second half.

i understand not holding the readers hand, and leaving things to the reader to figure out, but introducing a major, mysterious plot and entirely dropping it just doesn't work. unfortunately, i think the book was too committed to being unexplainable.