Berit Ellingsen's Not Dark Yet Is The Story of How Global Crisis Becomes Personal

Somewhere in a northern land, a man decides to leave his life and love in the city and sequester himself in a mountain cabin. The time is probably the not-so-distant future; but, as with so many aspects of Berit Ellingsen’s sci-fi novel Not Dark Yet, we’re asked to make up our own minds about that. The story is both a personal as well as a global one. In fact, Not Dark Yet is the story of how global crisis becomes personal.

The central character in this meticulously detailed narrative is Brandon Minamoto, a man in crisis—of identity, belonging, and loyalty. Although we know so much about him—his sexual orientation (gay), his job (photographer), and his ethnic heritage (Japanese if his name is an accurate indication of this); we also know he’s an athlete, an altruist and a dreamer—Ellingsen goes to great lengths to make this story about none of these things specifically.

There is one aspect of the character’s life that is central and telling: he has epilepsy. And while he has only a couple of seizures in the novel, they do give the reader an indication of what’s really going on in this character’s head. Not Dark Yet is about humanity’s quest for enlightenment. Of course it’s also about one man’s quest for enlightenment, but Ellingsen’s narrative technique of defamiliarizing the concepts of gender, language and place has the effect of universalizing this quest. But before I get to that, let’s talk about epilepsy and self-mummification.

There’s a brilliantly direct relationship between the Buddhist tradition of self-mummification and the central character’s decision to leave society for the mountain cabin. His epileptic seizures are described as euphoric glimpses of enlightenment—a brightness—more so than a malady. The Buddhist monk appears in a flashback, a scene with the central character’s brother. It’s one brief chapter, but it’s also a sort of key to the book. The description of the monk’s last stages of self-mummification are remarkably similar to the description of the main character’s seizures:

The monk:

“Yet, in the spring he dis­covered a brightness, a glow inside himself, that was beautiful and terrible at the same time. He had no words for it and did not try to explain it, but remained inside it when he could, and simply watched it when he couldn’t.”

Brandon Minamoto:

“During the previous spring the brightness became impossible to ignore, but he had gradually grown used to it. After the initial blast it usually faded to a glow behind his thoughts, but now, in the solitude of the cabin with nothing to distract him, the brightness over­took him.”

One can hardly ignore this consonance. And of course these are not the only similarities: the monk and the main character also share a strict diet, strenuous physical exercise, and the compulsion to leave this earth. This is, we shouldn’t forget, science fiction.

Being a hermit in the mountains isn’t enough for the central character. He’s also applied to the space program for a chance to fulfill his boyhood dream of going to Mars. And this is sadly all I can say about this part of the novel without giving away the end.

One important choice in Ellingsen’s narrative is how she defamiliarizes gender, language, and place. Other than somewhere in a northern country, we are not offered any place names. The city—as is often the case in Ellingsen’s shorter fiction—is described simply as, well, the city. The author has also reduced the continents to the points on a compass. She does something similar with the languages in the story. Instead of, say, Japanese, she uses the term “the language of their birthplace”. Though the story is transcribed in English, the reader occasionally has the feeling that the characters could be speaking any language. When the central character goes to a coastal town to get his medical exam for the space program, he has the following exchange in a shop:

‘He nodded at the man behind the counter, who addressed him in an eastern language he didn’t understand.

“Sorry,” he said in the language of the coastal country they were in. “Are you still serving lunch?”

“Lunch, dinner, whatever you need,” the man said, in their common language.’

In removing the names of the languages—and the names of the continents and cities—Ellingsen universalizes the themes in the story. This book is about enlightenment: global enlightenment during a time when humanity is just starting to feel the devastating effects of global warming, when global warming is starting to ruin personal dreams and impede individual quests for enlightenment. The title of the book may be a warning, or it may be a message of hope. It’s not dark yet.

Colin Winnette's Haints Stay Is A Solid, Layered Work of Genre-defying Beauty

““Left to their own devices, people will live out every pos­sible variation of a human life.” ”

— from Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay

Every possible variation. The unexpectedness of Colin Winnette’s fiction is nothing less than thrilling; so much so that I fear writing this review will steal this thrill from you. Haints Stay is a western; this is the first surprise I must apologize for ruining. And as westerns go, there’s quite a lot of shooting and choking and . . . well . . . gnawing, but this will come as no surprise to you if you’ve read Winnette’s prize-winning Coyote and the two novellas collected in Fondly. Exploring the instinct to kill has always been there in Winnette’s stories. Haints Stay begins with Sugar and Brooke, two carnivorous killers wandering towards civilization, but I see these two characters as a sort of parental unit to the main story—which belongs, in my opinion, to the character of Bird, a naked boy dropped out of nowhere into the care of killers.

Haints Stay is a solid, layered work of genre-defying beauty—albeit a bit of a gory one at times; there is that. The overall work is circular like an absurdist play, returning to the same towns, the same camps, the same crime scenes; but also the same characters and their similar pursuits: killing, avenging, slaughtering. There is the exception of Mary, Bird’s fake wife, who hates killing and hates spiders, which is one of the funniest parts of this book by the way. As always in Winnette’s fiction, “horridness and dread” are tempered with razor-sharp wit and purpose.

We’re let in on this purpose by the character of Brooke. As he’s wandering through the desert, he muses that there has been a lot of middle in the tales of his killing but not much beginning or end. And that’s exactly how the tales wind through Haints Stay, edges “worn and indistinguishable”. This doesn’t stop him, though, from expecting things to end in total devastation; and more often than not, in this narrative, they do. True to this purpose, it is actually Bird’s story that has no beginning and no end but lots of middle.

Bird—as his name suggests—is a grotesque programmed to kill, but also to seek safety and food. His character, along with all of Winnette’s creations, is original and meticulously drawn, mostly through dialogue. Winnette’s dialogue uses repetition and stark, simple phrasing to reduce the characters’ motivations to instinctual impulses: “I want to kill it.” “Are we safe?” These phrases, and others like them, are guiding refrains in this story.

The most frequent refrain is Bird’s line that he’s going to be ready for anything that comes at him. That’s what his known life—his time with Sugar and Brooke and his not-so-pleasant time in the cave (which I’ll let you discover yourself)—has taught him: to be ready for anything that comes at him. “‘Lots of things are going to come at you,’ said Mary. ‘It is only the world saying hello.'” But Bird, who’s been crippled by the world, doesn’t really see it this way. The world sometimes—often really—wants to hurt you. And most of what comes at you is not what it seems.

In fact, the characters in Haints Stay are often not what or who they seem: complete strangers who pass as husband and wife and who later live more like brother and sister, children who aren’t really their parents’ children. Relationships come and go and seem to mean something for the moment but then morph, become meaningless after the next violent act. As important as these false relationships are to this narrative, an emotionless lack of self-awareness is even more central. The best example of this is Bird, who simply appears with no knowledge of who he is or where he came from, but there’s also Mary, another child with no past; there’s Sugar, who doesn’t even know his own gender. These are simple-minded creatures occupied with the satisfaction of their most basic needs.

Like food, water, and safety. The bands of marauders, wagon trains and ranch families spend most of their narratives worrying about where their next meal will come from, whether it’s safe to eat or drink. But there is also music; there is Martha, Bird’s fake mother and Brooke’s fake wife. Her piano playing serves as a placeholder for the sublime: for the feminine, for the civilizing of the lost and violent masculine—masculinized?—soul.

Most of the characters in this story are lost souls—as the title of the book suggests—in between towns, in the wilderness, wandering. Migrating? Like migratory birds? Wild animals? Herds? Creatures who are most dangerous when they happen upon oases of civilization? I think I could remove all these question marks, but I’m still trying not to ruin the surprises in this brilliant work of art.

And speaking of art, there’s a touch of surrealism in this story. I want to leave you with the conceit of a seemingly pointless, freestanding spiral staircase with an eagle sculpture at its base—a bird; the association is unavoidable. It’s in the middle of the town where Bird finds work as a killer. Does it lead to the higher calling that Martha pities the birds for not having? Or is it merely another metaphor for a life leading nowhere? A path of no certain origin and no apparent destination. But lots of middle.

A Portrait of Contemporary Rural Dysfunction: Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia

As a product of the blah-inducing New England suburban sprawl, I remember being fascinated by Appalachia. That rugged, heavily forested mountain corridor that isn’t out West but is still mysterious territory to a child of I-95’s coastal homogeneity, its intrigue made large by middle school textbooks describing the fortitude of the legendary settlers of the country’s first real frontier and later sensational reports of all-out clan warfare and moonshiner vigilantes. The trees seemed like they’d be bigger, and so did the people. Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia is nothing and everything like those stories. His memoir of growing up in backwoods West Virginia – a broken cultural microcosm wrapped in a tourist-friendly haze, languishing amidst the specters of mining casualties and even older ghosts – is more an unflinching, heartbreaking, and laugh-inducing portrait of contemporary rural dysfunction than a compendium of tall tales, though there are plenty of those as well.

A prolific short story writer, McClanahan imbues his mosaic of brief yet enduring memory bursts with same easy, gritty exuberance that makes his fiction so distinctly habit-forming. From the outset, he grabs the reader, initiating him into the captivating Southern Gothic grotesqueries of his adolescence. There’s Grandma Ruby, the deeply flawed but endearing matriarch whose hobbies include extreme manipulation and taking photographs of corpses, and who cares for 52-year-old Uncle Nathan, a sufferer of cerebral palsy who’s also a big fan of six packs and Walker, Texas Ranger sans the irony. The dozen other aunts and uncles, distinguished by the Y sounds at the end of their names (Stanley, Elgie, Terry) and a proclivity for verbal brevity (“sheeeeeeeeeeeeet”). And the embarrassingly neurotic Little Bill whose hardcore OCD will make you never want to listen to Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” again. McClanahan shows a deep regard for not only the people of his home state but also the facets of its unique history, embellishing his painfully funny, jarring prose with bits of local and family lore, coal miner death tolls, fried chicken recipes, and the repeated exclamations (“What the fuck?”) of a perverse country preacher striving for a taste of the supernatural but only allowed to choke down the harshness of the world’s absurdity: “I knew that the dying were selfish, and the living were too.”

Subtitled, “A Biography of a Place,” Crapalachia is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining delving into the inextricable linkage of a writer and where he’s from, but it’s also a gut-stabbing meditation on the universality and pointlessness of suffering. Casual teenage viciousness, ambivalent and at times borderline criminal parenting, drug use, and especially death – what McClanahan cheekily anoints as “THE THEME OF THIS BOOK AND ALL BOOKS” – are motifs as prevalent as the 40 ounces the author and his friends slug to relieve constant boredom and a sinister, gnawing suspicion:

I awoke and saw that life was one big practical joke full of pain. Someone was laughing at us. Someone was torturing us. I remember being at Grandma Ruby’s as a little boy and crushing the ants on her sidewalk.

But there’s also hope, a fiercely ingrained hope for better days ahead and a deep-rooted cultural satisfaction in making the best of a tough situation, a sense of resilience McClanahan admires in his coal miner forebears and ostensibly in himself. It is evident in his poignant attempts to prolong the legacy and memory of his dead grandmother and uncle by depositing bags of Appalachian dirt throughout the country, in the tenderness he shows an illiterate child while substitute teaching. It is also a feeling he desperately wants to share with the reader, whom he addresses at the end of most of the short chapters, a call and response technique usually employed, interestingly enough, by the religious zealots he often ridicules. This loud plea for inclusivity, for me, is ultimately what sets Crapalachia apart and above other recent works of autobiography. In order to find meaning in the past and to solidify his identity, McClanahan wants, no needs the reader to acknowledge the harsh realities of his own decaying life. Only through understanding and acknowledging a shared condition can we create the solidarity necessary for survival: “We pass the torch of life for one another like runners in the night. I WILL forever be reaching for you. PLEASE keep reaching for me. Please.”

Daunting, but undeniably powerful. This punchy, inimitable book is one of the best memoirs I can remember reading, a prescient and preposterous ode to Americana’s charms and failures with enough greasiness to stick to your bones like homemade gravy for as long as you let it.

"a rare sort of book"

Perplexing and mystifying, frenetic and endlessly engaging, The Orange Eats Creeps is a rare sort of book, the kind that's hard to compare. Many see the influence of Burroughs, which is fair, I think, because she takes that cut-up technique and pushes it as far as it can go, to awesome effect. It has that same kind of wild energy, that frenetic and ecstatic prose that completely swallows the reader and gets her/him lost within, but never caring.

The prose is such a pleasure, constantly surprising, constantly reinventing. It's a book that teaches you how to read it by pushing you in the deep end. To be honest, what happens, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you in clear detail. It certainly deserves a second read, maybe a third, but, I imagine, it's one of those great books that gets better with each read, rather than tired. First read is for the ride, and all subsequent reads are for understanding where you start, which direction you're heading, and how you get there.

My favorite book of 2010: A true original.