Forrest’s Reviews > Waystations of the Deep Night > Status Update

"The Lost Street" is a more traditional ghost story. I use the word "more" intentionally, as it is not a fully-traditional ghost story. There are enough more surreal elements that take this beyond the realm of, say M.R. James and approach Bruno Schulz by way of Dali.

"The Glass Organ" was every bit as ephemeral and strange as the object in the title implies. It is a multi-faceted story, but tenuous, images slipping onto one another, transforming into a world that may or may not exist.

I'll probably need to quote the para ending on page 151 in full. This clearly denotes some of my feelings about wandering in the night, particularly when I was a teenager.

I'll try to skip all the comparisons in my review, though it will be difficult. Rather, I hope to show the *feeling* I got as I read these stories. They evoked a visceral familiarity within me, feelings I've felt mostly when I've had too little sleep (day or night) and some of the oddities of life in the deep night. We'll see. I wish I could just "give" you those feelings. They need to be felt, not read.

"La Capitana" is a child's long, slow fading into a dreamworld of potential adventure beyond the seas. It is simultaneously happy and sad, bittersweet, full of hope and, yet, utterly hopeless. Imagine your eight-year-old self on a boring, sunny afternoon, given the power to disappear into mysterious dreams of exotic lands on a ship named "La Capitana," a name that you gave the ship, because it is yours, in dream.

Though it could be read merely as a fabulously well=written eerie tale (in the Fisherian sense), "Dead Waters" is, pardon the pun, much deeper than that. It's a story primarily about agency, manipulation, creation, and causality, with many of the characters being potentially marionettes or God Himself, or neither. There are no clear answers, but plenty of compelling questions about what transpires on dark streets.

I would swear David Lynch had written "Incident on a Journey," had I not read it in this collection. The ending came as no surprise, but the inevitability of the tale made it all the more uncomfortable and awkward, like you know you're walking into a trap, but there is no way to avoid it, so you take in every excruciating detail and just watch in desperate silence as the void closes in on you, closer and closer.

"The Fire Sonata" did not disappoint. My expectations were met snd then some. This could have been an episode of the Twilight Zone that Rod Serling would have been proud of. That's the highest praise, coming from me, as TZ is my favorite show of sll time.

Halfway through "The Fire Sonata," and I am all-in! Hers, Brion's voice reminds me of Calvino, but with a sinister edge much sharper and darker than anything the Italian master wrote. I sincerely hope that the last half doesn't disappoint!

"The Field Marshal of Fear" is a quiet, somber piece, but steady as marching feet. The short, simple sentences, however, do not fail to evoke a stupendous sadness, an eternal drudgery experienced by the dead veterans of wars long since won or lost.