Carlos’s Reviews > A Sick Gray Laugh > Status Update

"...history is a genre that occupies the uncanny valley between traditional, orderly storytelling and the drooling nonsense of a stroke victim."

This is why I'm quitting this book. It's just full of awful crap like this. If the goal of the phrase is to highlight the challenge of creating narrative out of the chaos of the past, there are much less annoying ways to express that idea.

By the time we had a second quirky group of missionaries who gave a quirky name to their boat, I began to fantasize about traveling back in time to kill baby Martin Luther, as Protestantism was clearly a huge mistake. It's probably time to DNF.

There's a combination of voice, themes and subject matter in this work that completely fails for me as a work of entertainment. I'm tempted to finish just to understand what this book is trying to do and whether I hate the goal or the methodology, but on the other hand, it's really hard to get through.

"And now, constant reader, it is time for an essential digression."

No, it isn't. The whole novel is a series of digressions, none of which have risen to the level of essential.

Just as with Edward Lee, I feel like I'm developing an antagonistic relationship with this text.

This whole epistolary section reminds me of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland.

1. All this talk of a veiled prophet makes me wish I was rereading Borges' A Brief History of Infamy. (IYKYK)
2. The prose is pretty rizzless.
3. There's no real sense of structure to the narrative, no feeling of set up, anticipation, payoff. The most recent passage is whether the prophet and their followers are literally or metaphorically "veiled," and I just don't care.

As much as the Ligotti influence is present, this feels like the opposite of "Nethescurial" (one of the finest tales in the weird canon). Mechanically, the focus is on writing instead of reading. More subjectively, while Nethescurial's writing feels like being lost in a maze, this feels more like reading about the steps to build a maze. We'll have to see if it ends up working.