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The Deadheart Shelters
Never fall in love, and never try to escape.
Born into a life of brutal slavery, Peter spends his days driven into the wild by vicious dog-masters, forced to pick delicate swamp berries from the skeletons of dead reptiles. His nights offer only the brief escape of hushed conversation and the strange magnolia perfume of fellow slave Lilly.
A moment's opportunity turns to violence and Peter is thrust into a bizarre new world populated by devious goat-men, poisonous coal-slugs, and murderous royal processions. With the help of his newfound companion, a man-sized infant named Dirt, Peter must decide between embracing his narcotic new world or returning to his old life to save the beautiful souls haunting his dreams.
With a unique poetic prose style Forrest Armstrong delivers a surreal and resonant Bizarro parable for all those who find themselves trapped deep within...
The Deadheart Shelters
144 pages, Paperback
First published August 3, 2010
3 people are currently reading
116 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 12, 2011
Emotional power. Synesthetic word jazz. Weirdness, depth. Forrest Armstrong carves his name into your heart and into underground literature with this book. If you're a writer, this book will make you write the book you dreamt of writing, the book that changes the game. If you didn't have enough reason to do so before reading The Deadheart Shelters, you should afterwards. So beautiful it hurts. So painful it's gorgeous. Forrest Armstrong will be a name to watch out for and an author to admire, for his integrity, his talent and his poetry.
July 16, 2011
listen. Some books demand to be read. Some books peck at your neck for days, weeks,plopping off the shelf and buzz you while you try to catch up on your Scientific American Subscriptions. THey say "read me! I'm the one with the intriguing cover art! I'm the one with the blurb by the other author you like! Check me out! Don't let the fact that you haven't read the other work by this author deter you any longer! Read me!"
So, you do.
That is to say: I did.
I started reading this book because it wouldn't let me not read it. I kept meaning to read it, then I would start reading something else (which wouldn't happen if they didn't release a new bizarro book every two weeks!) and then I would misplace that book, and inevitable consider reading this one. Finally, I did, and I was hooked from the get go. Awed was I by Mr. Armstrong's lyrical intensity. Floored was I by the sheer originality of the tale. Holy Crapped was my response as I read the last three pages.
Seriously. This book takes bizarro to exciting new places. There is literally not enough I could say about it. I could write a book that is equally as long as the book itself and fill it with nothing but long, intense descriptions of my favorite passages, phrases, descriptions, and lines.
Really, I would just like to thank Forrest Armstrong for the last two days. As far as books go, this is one of the absolute most enjoyable I have ever had the pleasure of coming across. From now on, I won't ignore those books buzzing on my shelf.
So, you do.
That is to say: I did.
I started reading this book because it wouldn't let me not read it. I kept meaning to read it, then I would start reading something else (which wouldn't happen if they didn't release a new bizarro book every two weeks!) and then I would misplace that book, and inevitable consider reading this one. Finally, I did, and I was hooked from the get go. Awed was I by Mr. Armstrong's lyrical intensity. Floored was I by the sheer originality of the tale. Holy Crapped was my response as I read the last three pages.
Seriously. This book takes bizarro to exciting new places. There is literally not enough I could say about it. I could write a book that is equally as long as the book itself and fill it with nothing but long, intense descriptions of my favorite passages, phrases, descriptions, and lines.
Really, I would just like to thank Forrest Armstrong for the last two days. As far as books go, this is one of the absolute most enjoyable I have ever had the pleasure of coming across. From now on, I won't ignore those books buzzing on my shelf.
February 27, 2014
The Deadheart Shelters is a strange, sad and powerful tale that takes the Bizarro genre to new, glorious heights. Forrest Armstrong truly displays an impressive ability to craft a beautiful and emotionally-charged story with a particularly inspired setting, breathtaking imagery, gorgeous poetic prose and oddly realistic and refreshing characterization.
After what appears to be an eternity of slavery, the protagonist tastes freedom at last. He makes new acquaintances, learns how to be part of a strange society and encounters new obstacles. However, his past keeps haunting him; will he go back to help his old friends escape ? the author keeps us guessing right to the end, and thrillingly so.
After what appears to be an eternity of slavery, the protagonist tastes freedom at last. He makes new acquaintances, learns how to be part of a strange society and encounters new obstacles. However, his past keeps haunting him; will he go back to help his old friends escape ? the author keeps us guessing right to the end, and thrillingly so.
November 30, 2012
I had heard great things about this book prior to picking it up. I didn’t really know anything about it, but the people I spoke to about it, or the people that were talking about it had nothing but praise for this book. So basically this book is about a slave who escapes and becomes a coal miner. That’s the simple way of putting it. But really, it’s a bizarre smattering of stunning descriptions of a world that is both beautiful and terrifying. This is a story of love and loss, heartbreak and tragedy. It fills you up with so much vivid, surreal imagery that the story powers through purely on the emotion that imagery provides. The characters are fuelled by the tragedy of the world they live in, the devices of a terrible machine that are seemingly incapable of questioning the status quo. Yet the story is about one man who challenges the nature of the world, yet he simply escapes one tragedy to fall into another. Hope is built up then torn away, built up then torn away. What more can I say? The writing is beautiful, and the book is totally, wonderfully touching, emotionally conflicting, and leaves you feeling woefully wounded. In the afterword, Jeremy Robert Johnson said one thing in particular I felt captured the awe of the book perfectly: “It appears Mr. Armstrong has an obsession with the atmosphere in its various states, and when I mentioned this to him he simply replied ‘It’s the biggest thing in the world’ and left it at that.” Woah. Buy it, read it, love it.
March 17, 2011
The Deadheart Shelters is Forrest Armstrong’s third book, an amazing novella with beautiful prose and breathtaking imagery. It’s about a slave,Clyde, who manages to run away and consequently finds freedom. He meets Dirt, a man born from a tree. Both of them, new to the world, begin to work as coal miners and integrate themselve into a commune of sorts. Eventually, Clyde realizes freedom isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be. Forrest Armstrong paints a beautiful, yet rough world and uncomfortably reminds us all what it means to be human.
April 13, 2011
Totally scared me off at first by the poetic writing style.
I hate poetry.
But you know what? I found that even with a style I normally find pretentious, this work came off as very real, very touching, and quite sad.
Full of real emotion.
Loved it. Caught me completely by surprise.
I hate poetry.
But you know what? I found that even with a style I normally find pretentious, this work came off as very real, very touching, and quite sad.
Full of real emotion.
Loved it. Caught me completely by surprise.
January 20, 2020
This is a lyrical and strange novel that at its heart is about friendship, love and what freedom means. There is little to no context for when the story takes place and why they world is as it is, but the writing eliminates these questions as you are drawn into the protagonist's story starting out as a slave watching others suffer horrible violence for any disobedience.
Armstrong's skill as a writer never lets things float into becoming too weird, which in lesser hands could easily have been the case. There are great and unusual descriptive lines throughout and vivid imagery throughout the prose.
Definitely one of the stranger books I've ever read, but it is also completely relatable with regards its worldview on universal topics.
Armstrong's skill as a writer never lets things float into becoming too weird, which in lesser hands could easily have been the case. There are great and unusual descriptive lines throughout and vivid imagery throughout the prose.
Definitely one of the stranger books I've ever read, but it is also completely relatable with regards its worldview on universal topics.
May 27, 2018
This is one of the best bizarro novels I've ever read--blistering and violent, with prose both poetic and confrontational. The plot is simple--a slave escapes the life he's known and flees to a strange, foreign city. But the real magic here is the surreal world Armstrong has created, bringing to mind some of the strangeness in Alejandro Jodorowsky's greater works. Reading this often felt like being caught somewhere between a fever dream and an all-out nightmare. Do yourself a favor and pick this up.
July 2, 2021
Liked the first part but then i could no longer wrap my mind around it.A very weird tale;more an bad acid trip than a real story.
March 21, 2011
Forrest Armstrong, The Deadheart Shelters (Swallowdown Press, 2010)
If you read book reviews for any length of time, you will come across novels where the language is described as 'poetic'. 99% of the time, said reviewers are talking absolute hogwash; they're using 'poetic' to describe a certain way the author has with descriptive passages rather than pointing at the language and saying 'this is like poetry'. After all, taking poetry and transforming it into prose seems like it would be about as successful a conversion as taking prose and making it look like poetry. (And for an example of that, all you have to do is pick up an Ellen Hopkins book.) Consequently, I'm one of the reviewers who has resisted using the term 'poetic' to describe any work that isn't actually poetry. I can't say I've resisted all the time, but I've done my best.
And then I found The Deadheart Shelters. I actually bought this book sight unseen, something I almost never do, simply because there was more buzz surrounding this book than I've heard for most big mainstream novels over the past six months. There was a bit of cognitive disconnect there; I'm hearing more about a little Bizarro book coming out on Swallowdown Press than I am about the new Stephen King collection? But so it was, and I had to see what the fuss was about. After all, the fuss is usually made of smoke and mirrors. But not in this case. The Deadheart Shelters falls short of brilliant, but only just. And as for 'poetic', well, it's the poetic nature of the book that makes it fall just short of brilliant, for reasons I'll get into as we go along. But don't get me wrong: if you were going to take poetry and make it into a novel, if you came up with something a tenth as good as The Deadheart Shelters, you would have created something orders of magnitude better than any of the extant “verse novels” polluting bookstore shelves at present.
Plot: meet Peter. Peter is a slave. He, along with a number of other slaves, works for dogs. Or men with dogs; it's hard to tell which in this hallucinatory manuscript. (Carlton Mellick calls this book the literary equivalent of a Jodorowsky film; I'd liken it more to the bizarro equivalent of an Arenas novel.) The only really interesting thing in his life is Lilly, a fellow slave. When he is given the opportunity, he escapes and discovers there's a whole new world out there beyond the slave pits, but is it really any better than where he was before? And will he ever see Lilly again?
You can safely ignore the jacket copy; it places a lot more emphasis on a conundrum that really doesn't exist here (whether he should mount a campaign to free the other slaves); as he assimilates into industrial culture, he spends less and less time thinking about his time as a slave at all, save some random thoughts of Lilly. And in this I think that jacket copy does the book a disservice, because I believe that was one of Armstrong's main thrusts in this novel: the dehumanization of industrial culture. It's a bit facile, and not exactly subtle, but it works. I wish I could say more than that without giving the game away, but it all happens during the climactic scene, so no go. And to be fair, given the absurdity of the world Armstrong sets up, the lack of subtlety seems less intrusive than it would be in a realist novel.
All of this, however, takes a backseat to the simple joy of reading Armstrong's prose:
“I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped up on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn't beat. Something else suffering that I could unburden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it.” (p. 88)
...but on the other hand, as I said before, this is also where the book falls apart (in a minor way). There's a fine line between leaving things ambiguous and simply letting them fall away altogether sometimes, and Armstrong is just on the wrong side of it more often than not at the end of this book. In the general scheme of things, I found that a minor problem at best (and one whose expectations were mostly set up by that misleading jacket copy, really), but others may be a lot more annoyed by it than I was. Thus, I present it as a warning more than anything. The book's still brilliant, and you should most definitely still read it. Just be prepared for something a bit different than you think you're going to get. Or way different, if you're not familiar with bizarro. ****
If you read book reviews for any length of time, you will come across novels where the language is described as 'poetic'. 99% of the time, said reviewers are talking absolute hogwash; they're using 'poetic' to describe a certain way the author has with descriptive passages rather than pointing at the language and saying 'this is like poetry'. After all, taking poetry and transforming it into prose seems like it would be about as successful a conversion as taking prose and making it look like poetry. (And for an example of that, all you have to do is pick up an Ellen Hopkins book.) Consequently, I'm one of the reviewers who has resisted using the term 'poetic' to describe any work that isn't actually poetry. I can't say I've resisted all the time, but I've done my best.
And then I found The Deadheart Shelters. I actually bought this book sight unseen, something I almost never do, simply because there was more buzz surrounding this book than I've heard for most big mainstream novels over the past six months. There was a bit of cognitive disconnect there; I'm hearing more about a little Bizarro book coming out on Swallowdown Press than I am about the new Stephen King collection? But so it was, and I had to see what the fuss was about. After all, the fuss is usually made of smoke and mirrors. But not in this case. The Deadheart Shelters falls short of brilliant, but only just. And as for 'poetic', well, it's the poetic nature of the book that makes it fall just short of brilliant, for reasons I'll get into as we go along. But don't get me wrong: if you were going to take poetry and make it into a novel, if you came up with something a tenth as good as The Deadheart Shelters, you would have created something orders of magnitude better than any of the extant “verse novels” polluting bookstore shelves at present.
Plot: meet Peter. Peter is a slave. He, along with a number of other slaves, works for dogs. Or men with dogs; it's hard to tell which in this hallucinatory manuscript. (Carlton Mellick calls this book the literary equivalent of a Jodorowsky film; I'd liken it more to the bizarro equivalent of an Arenas novel.) The only really interesting thing in his life is Lilly, a fellow slave. When he is given the opportunity, he escapes and discovers there's a whole new world out there beyond the slave pits, but is it really any better than where he was before? And will he ever see Lilly again?
You can safely ignore the jacket copy; it places a lot more emphasis on a conundrum that really doesn't exist here (whether he should mount a campaign to free the other slaves); as he assimilates into industrial culture, he spends less and less time thinking about his time as a slave at all, save some random thoughts of Lilly. And in this I think that jacket copy does the book a disservice, because I believe that was one of Armstrong's main thrusts in this novel: the dehumanization of industrial culture. It's a bit facile, and not exactly subtle, but it works. I wish I could say more than that without giving the game away, but it all happens during the climactic scene, so no go. And to be fair, given the absurdity of the world Armstrong sets up, the lack of subtlety seems less intrusive than it would be in a realist novel.
All of this, however, takes a backseat to the simple joy of reading Armstrong's prose:
“I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped up on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn't beat. Something else suffering that I could unburden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it.” (p. 88)
...but on the other hand, as I said before, this is also where the book falls apart (in a minor way). There's a fine line between leaving things ambiguous and simply letting them fall away altogether sometimes, and Armstrong is just on the wrong side of it more often than not at the end of this book. In the general scheme of things, I found that a minor problem at best (and one whose expectations were mostly set up by that misleading jacket copy, really), but others may be a lot more annoyed by it than I was. Thus, I present it as a warning more than anything. The book's still brilliant, and you should most definitely still read it. Just be prepared for something a bit different than you think you're going to get. Or way different, if you're not familiar with bizarro. ****
August 13, 2013
I picked this one up without knowing much about it, other than I’d heard a few people say it was good. A blurb on the cover says it’s the literary equivalent of an Alejandro Jodorowsky film, and I like Jodorowsky, so this seemed like a promising book. Overall, it is pretty good, though I don’t know that I’d really compare it to Jodorowsky’s work, unless maybe I were contrasting the two.
The Deadheart Shelters is a bit like a fairy tale, in which the protagonist is caught in the conflict between slavery, in its various guises, and freedom. Armstrong’s language has a poetic quality (poetic prose?), and flows in a dreamlike or stream of consciousness kind of way, but it stays within the boundaries of the constrained storyline. It’s sort of like most people’s lives, where just some stuff happens within a loose framework of a story in which things are connected via the fact that they occur in a sequence, all in the shadow of The Absurd. So, in a way, it’s actually quite relatable.
While the story itself is minimalistic, it’s wrapped in some great scenery. I think, though, that its strength is also its weakness- Armstrong makes heavy, heavy use of simile and metaphor. Sometimes, it’s fantastic, but other times, it gets lost on itself, with similes embedded in metaphors embedded in similes… and it’s in these cases that the poetry of the writing may be too much for some people. In the end, though, this didn’t detract from the book, and I can comfortably give The Deadheart Shelters a 4/5.
The Deadheart Shelters is a bit like a fairy tale, in which the protagonist is caught in the conflict between slavery, in its various guises, and freedom. Armstrong’s language has a poetic quality (poetic prose?), and flows in a dreamlike or stream of consciousness kind of way, but it stays within the boundaries of the constrained storyline. It’s sort of like most people’s lives, where just some stuff happens within a loose framework of a story in which things are connected via the fact that they occur in a sequence, all in the shadow of The Absurd. So, in a way, it’s actually quite relatable.
While the story itself is minimalistic, it’s wrapped in some great scenery. I think, though, that its strength is also its weakness- Armstrong makes heavy, heavy use of simile and metaphor. Sometimes, it’s fantastic, but other times, it gets lost on itself, with similes embedded in metaphors embedded in similes… and it’s in these cases that the poetry of the writing may be too much for some people. In the end, though, this didn’t detract from the book, and I can comfortably give The Deadheart Shelters a 4/5.
January 11, 2013
Great Story Occasionally Lost In Language
At the heart of The Deadheart Shelters is a story of becoming what you hate. It's a strange journey, complete with little hippos and coal mining. There's substantial brutality along the way, as the main character yearns for an idealized version of the past while stumbling toward an unexpected future. While there is some stunning language, there's also excessive use of similes and metaphors, to the extent that they will occasionally knock you out of the story. They frequently come mixed, inaccurate, and two or three to a sentence, often wandering so far off track that they defeat the purpose. Sifting through them certainly has its rewards though.
At the heart of The Deadheart Shelters is a story of becoming what you hate. It's a strange journey, complete with little hippos and coal mining. There's substantial brutality along the way, as the main character yearns for an idealized version of the past while stumbling toward an unexpected future. While there is some stunning language, there's also excessive use of similes and metaphors, to the extent that they will occasionally knock you out of the story. They frequently come mixed, inaccurate, and two or three to a sentence, often wandering so far off track that they defeat the purpose. Sifting through them certainly has its rewards though.
November 22, 2011
have actually delayed writing this review twice because I didn't believe I could do this novel justice. If you do the right thing and get this novel you will understand. I found myself, reading sentences and feeling compelled to read them out loud. DHS is a surreal novel filled with poetic prose that is disturbing and beautiful all at once. This story of an escaped slave is like a journey on a spiral staircase into another world, Armstrong creates a surreal landscape that is vivid, and the prose itself has to be savored like fine chocolate that slowly melts in your mouth. This is an amazing book, it deserves to be celebrated.
December 20, 2013
Bold visions from the soul of a musician. These here words are music to my eyes. "I hum my mind into a soundproof place, a gun-dark ocean with cardboard skies." is only the beginning. A great example of the side of the mind and mental landscape you'll be journeying through.
What starts out as a simple escape story turns into a reflection on modern life and the trials of beginning fresh with a new life, changed social status and all. I can't decide if I just read an ascension of the heart or a kamikaze of the mind. Maybe both.
What starts out as a simple escape story turns into a reflection on modern life and the trials of beginning fresh with a new life, changed social status and all. I can't decide if I just read an ascension of the heart or a kamikaze of the mind. Maybe both.
August 4, 2015
Too much a litany of freewheeling abstractions, too much oddity with nothing but the desire for oddity to justify it. A narrative so meandering and without motive it almost borders on stream-of-consciousness (albeit one delivered along the bizarro-fallbacks of grotesquery and insanity).
Either too smart or too artless for me.
Either too smart or too artless for me.
November 13, 2015
More like 3.5
November 20, 2016
All the reviews for this are tldr.
Read
October 6, 2020This is a wonderfully brutal and poetic book.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews