The Charnel Imp

by Alan Singer

Tells the story of a remote prairie town and its bizarre inhabitants, includi Moertle, who drives steers to the slaughterhouse, a doctor obsessed with death, and Dinah, a burlesque star.

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

'“THIS IS A WARNING

Report all stray animals. Alive or dead. Refrain from touching enigmatic carcasses. Stock animals are a source of pestilence.”

Still Lazarusly alive, this novel itself is an enigmatic carcass, one you shouldn’t refrain from touching and reading, because its postmortem pulse is more animated than the paper bodies of most books. And if we enter the architecture of this carcass, like Jonah jumping into the halitotic maw of the whale, we see that it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, doing more in under 200 pages than many novels double its length. Among the tendons and broken bones, readers will find fine sentences and evocative topsy-turns of phrase that are Faulkner-fried and McCarthy-encrusted, but also with embryonic intimations of Joseph McElroy, a legendary author who has praised Singer’s later work.'

Read my full review here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/01/2...

I interviewed Alan Singer here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/01/2...

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enigmatic slaughterhouse cowhand Hustus Moertle saunters through the dusty sun-baked trails of this novel engaged in arcane and not-so-arcane activities. At one point he falls down in the street and a crowd gathers. At another point it begins to rain for the first time in as long as anyone can remember except for the old ones sitting on their porches who felt it coming in their bones. Moertle's lost a lot and gained some, not all of which he's happy about. His relationships with the beings around him are complex: his dead parents, his lover Lilli, his numerous children, the herds of steer he leads to their demise, and the portly town doctor on the trail of a suspicious pathogen.

Singer slyly rotates the storytelling among a cast of narrators. His prose, evasive even as it ripples lustily in the hot breezes blowing through this fractured desert noir, encysts narratives within themselves. His sentences are as sinewy as the massive animals marching to the abbatoir. To know what is happening at any given moment is to part the thick muscular tissue and peer beyond the ribs to where the air passes in and out.

When we are talking to each other, we are always speaking over water, moving other faces with our breath until the imping recognition comes that they are our own trembling faces below us, and we are chest high in the flow of things.