Status Updates From Ossuary of Dreams: Twenty-F...

I can't tell if this story is hitting it's stride or not. Time will tell.

As I was listening to the skipping of an old scratched record (Jean-luc Ponty's "Cosmic Messenger" if you must know), I realized that the wincing I get from the choppiness of a skipping record is what I often encounter in Grain's prose. Either he's trying to cram too much into each sentence or there's something about the translation that makes it irksome. Splitting one sentence into several is a possible solution.

. . . a rumbling like from a squadron of unleashed poltergeists in the entablature.

This phrase has so many problems, I can't even begin to enumerate them. Well, maybe I can, but I really don't want to. Suffice it to say that I have more questions than answers about what is happening here.

An interesting start to the longest work in the collection, "The Path of Saint Mephis". I'm hoping this holds up as well as (most of) the other long works herein.

"Holding Out at Castle Von Lohe" is a mixed bag. It's like watching a marathon runner who stumbles every couple of miles, even falling down once or twice. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it, either. I'm firmly in the middle on this one.

"A Scientist from the Darkness" follows the predictable thread of a techno-utopian society in the making with the un-astounding revelation that it was all a trick of a cosmicly-horrific deity who watches all with an immense eye. This time, my wife was listening to a podcast in the other room, so I had to read aloud to keep my concentration - and it was horrible. The prose is so overwrought as to be inscrutable.

"A Walk in the Morning" is a highly effective story. As enjoyable as the last story was laughable. This collection is a bit of a roller-coaster ride. But the restraint and clever shift of perspective make this one a great short story. Bravo!

"Pacific Atrocities" was, well, an atrocity. All the devolving nazi practitioners of the occult and floating kraken in the world could save this story. I hated it. Waste of reading time. If there's another this bad, I might just lem the book.

Apparently, the purpose of life, according to "Extinctor Fortis," is to serve . . . as a meal. Yes, one might say, of the entire history of humanity, "it's a cookbook"!

"3:33" is a tale of forced possession and instinctual murder of the ritualized sort. What if you are your own worst monster, unable to control the urges and actions that impel you forward to soul-less-ness?

There are echoes of Dhalgren in Grains hurtling-toward-the-collapse story "Our City at Night," but with a strong injection of occult forces. At this point, I am confident in saying that I prefer Grains at longer word counts. It gives his voice needed breathing space and makes the flourishes more emphatic and impactful. I'm glad there are some longer pieces left in this collection.

In a timeless vision, or, rather in a vision where time is all-at-once, "Anima M" is revealed as the narrator's utmost desire. But getting what you wish for doesn't always lead to clarity. On the contrary, the culmination of desire here reveals a nightmare of boschian disjunctures, time run amok into pure chaos.

"Eternal Advent" tries hard to be syncretic. Alas, too hard. The symbols and metaphors of Christmas and Babylonian myth and the ubiquitous recounting of a deluge that destroys the world congeal together (notice I didn't use the work "combine") in a sort of ur-mythic clump of . . . I dont quite know what. Something seems to have unraveled in this story; the elements do not cohere.

"Forest of Monsters" was . . . adequate. Somewhat. There was potential there, and an interesting ending that was so interesting that it didn't fit with the rest of the story, even if one was to treat it as a story of time travel, which was never really clear. All in all, I was left . . . confused and disappointed? Three stars. I didn't hate the story, but I just barely liked it. So much wasted potential.

I rather liked the unfolding-apocalypse (with a dream-time glimpse into the pyrrhic acknowledgment of respect to the lone survivor, imparted by the new God of this world) portrayed in "The Golden Age". I, for one, embrace the arrival of our robot overlords. This was an effective story, paced perfectly, with an air of reverent restraint that fit the tale to a tee. Well-played, not-quite-terminator.

"A Devil" has a very enthusiastic narrator . . . that I found absolutely annoying to read. Some people might love the voice of a manic meth-head, but I'm definitely not one of those people. Add to that the fact that I am not a fan of second person and . . . well, you can see where this is going. I'll spare you the conclusion.

I would have liked "The Lord of the Sea" a lot more if I hadn't already been saturated in tentacles and cosmic doom and esoteric whatevers. Sometimes, a collection is too much because it shows the hackneyed self-repetition of an author over and over and over again. At a certain point, it becomes more than a little tedious, especially for one who has been reading cosmic horror for so long.

The narrator of "Organism," a proponent of stark materialism to the exclusion of anything smacking of the spirit, discovers that materialism is more stark than he could have imagined.

I've discovered why Grains uses so many adverbs and why it bothers me so much: he's trying too hard to pack too much information into too small of a receptacle. Economy of syntax becomes clumsy, at that point. Let language breathe!

"Razorwraith" sustains a prison of dream-state futility, the absolutely inevitable doom that one frequently feels in the worst of nightmares.

"The Portraits of the Baron," the second-longest work in this collection, was, admittedly, very enjoyable. If you enjoy horror, that is. Grains can even be excused, at this length, for his love of adverbs, as they are softened by the length of the work. I loved the deep dives of esotericism here and the ending, while predictable, was satisfactory and held an ironic twist. This is the strongest work in the book.

"The Army of the Others," more a vignette than a full story, combines military discipline with the chaos of cosmic horror. Effective, but incomplete. 3 stars.

"Alone With the Guru" was adequate and unsurprising. A decided "meh" if I'm being honest with myself (which the narrator of this story was not). Three stars.

I had hoped that Grains could, with a longer work, have the textual room necessary to let his prodigious vocabulary and strident style breathe more freely. This is exactly what happend with "Under the Sun of Yabalon-Xi," another Smithian tale, but one that features an inevitably doomed quest through bizarre landscapes and corners of reality. Five stars.

The poetic reaching of "Dark Starlight" is about right, but maybe a smidge over the top. I still like the thematic thread and the central conceit of the discovery of one's own clone (and the fact that the narrator may have unwittingly been replaced by and become that clone) is original, if familiar. Three stars.

Had this been the first horror story I ever read (say at age 13), I would have been very impressed by "Nightgrim," a tale of being absorbed into, then becoming nightmares. Alas, this isn't my first horror story, and the most horrible thing about this story is the obscene abuse of adverbs. 2 stars.