A Question for the Damned
It’s a legitimate
question. But it can cause even the most confident of writers to run screaming
down the hall, lock themselves in the bathroom, and spend the night sobbing,
curled next to the toilet. Imagine spending years putting together a somewhat layered
and complex story only to find that the world needs - nay...MUST HAVE - a condensed,
easily digestible summary, in order to open the book.
“Yes, yes, all that’s a given – so what’s the novel
about?”
There are times when
I’m somewhat autistic when it comes to small talk, and during those times, I
immediately interpret the question in terms of theme: “It’s about illusion.”
“It’s about Fate.” Invariably, I’ll get the glazed look, the confused nod,
then a quick exit from the conversation: “Oh, fate…yes…you want another beer …”
“Okay, what I’m really
asking is this: What happens in the book? What’s the plot?”
Oh right, I understand now. Another
legitimate question, surely. When you pull a book off the shelf at a bookstore
(remember those?), or while scanning for books online, you want to know what the
book is about, yes? I do.
 |
| Cool Cover: Family Cannon/Halina Duraj |
First, like everyone else, I judge a book by its cover (“Ooh, cool image!”), then I turn it over and read the blurb on the back to see what it’s about. Now, you and I both know that the blurb is not telling us what the book is really about – it’s an advertisement, meant to get you hooked enough to dig into your miserly pockets and pull out fifteen bucks, just for the privilege of reading on:
"Running away from a
dark past, Ishmael ships out on a whaling vessel to the South Seas. Just when
he thinks his troubles are at an end…that's when his true nightmare begins. Is the captain taking
the ship on a one-way collision course into HELL? What hideous white beast has been lurking beneath the waves, waiting for this very ship, this very captain, this very crew? A cliff-hanging, edge of your seat, white-knuckle inducing, cosmic battle between good and evil awaits...."
Call
me Ishmael. Call me a cab.
“Unh-hunh. The question still remains – what’s the book about?”
The World of Among the Angels’ Hierarchies
The preoccupation in both compound and non-compound life is
with virtual games. (Yes, yes, I know
this is a clichéd trope – but in this case there is high
level of satire involved. To play a game you put your face into a blue halo - called
a Nimbus - projected off any available screen. The Nimbus enshrouds and triggers parts of the brain, giving the player the sensation that they are actually a character in the game – thinking
what they think, feeling what they feel. But there is no winning or losing, you are just along for the ride. All choices have already been made....a bit like participating
in our economy, many parts of our political system, and the entertainment/spectacle
culture. The only choice is usually which 'character' to be.)
The corporations (in reality, just one, under different 'imprints') control all media technology and are almost exclusively engaged in
broadcasting spectacles of fake natural disasters: giant sand plumes in the
Sahara; mutant cranes as harbingers of a Christian apocalypse (known as
crane-gels); plague pyres in China. Games are released to accompany each
spectacle (For example, images of plague pyres are synched with a game
called Voyages, in which the player participates in a ghost dance until
they leave their body and travel the globe, visiting shamans and healers in
search of a plague cure).
The corporations (in reality, just one, under different 'imprints') control all media technology and are almost exclusively engaged in
broadcasting spectacles of fake natural disasters: giant sand plumes in the
Sahara; mutant cranes as harbingers of a Christian apocalypse (known as
crane-gels); plague pyres in China. Games are released to accompany each
spectacle (For example, images of plague pyres are synched with a game
called Voyages, in which the player participates in a ghost dance until
they leave their body and travel the globe, visiting shamans and healers in
search of a plague cure).
Meanwhile Deth, a drug that simulates a near-death
experience, ravages the country. Deth-heads hear angelic voices compelling them
to carve words into their skin. The drug is fatally addictive.
Oh, for the Love of God, Christien, What the F@#$ is Angels' About?
Okay, fine. Here's a short synopsis-type-thingie:
Angels' is the story of Caleb Mission, recently returned to Christmas City, his hometown in northwest Iowa, after an abortive search for his cousin and childhood mentor, Christine, an artist and apprentice shaman/healer, who mysteriously disappeared in Colorado ten years before.
The novel tracks his first month back in town, including
dangerous run-ins with the local Deth-house leader (called an Azrael); encounters with mutant cranes,
said to be apocalyptic angels; misadventures procuring euthanasia drugs for a possible
immortal in an old folk’s home; and building a tentative relationship with his
Aunt Therese, the local healer, who he blames for Christine’s disappearance.
Interwoven with the present-day action are chapters tracing Caleb’s
past in the megalopolis of Des Moines (food riots, anarchist collective
shenanigans, marriage and divorce) and Christine’s journey from Iowa up to her
disappearance in Colorado.
Throughout , the three main characters – Caleb, Christine
and Therese – struggle with and against their understanding of fate and free will
and what these things even mean when seen in the context of vast, cyclical patterns of the natural world.
All threads are eventually
tied together when a local territory dispute between Deth-houses erupts into
all-out war.
Greek Fate.
Among the Angels' Hierarchies: The First
Chapter
New Moon
New moon is blindness. The
bat jerks, insect to insect – mouse-bodied, monster-faced – a black thread
through the holes of night.
My eyes are stones. They slip
from their sockets, sink through the surface of the earth; through the faces of
those not yet born, clinging to the underbelly of a white grub; through the
brittle lime-crust of the still-aching dead; through harsh tunnels of
anthracite that beckon like the claws of the lonely; through the underground
veins of water, warm as blood, that dissolve thirst, dissolve hunger, dissolve
cloth, dissolve the soft electrical thoughts that shoot between the phantom calcium
carbonate skeletons of horn coral fossils...
A black dog stops at the edge of a field, turns, listens. Dawn is coming. Do not be afraid.
*
Silence the length of Highway
6. No wind, no crickets. Caleb Mission wiped sweat from his
eyes. Ten yards ahead, a half-burnt deer carcass stretched across the
road’s shoulder; five empty beer bottles propped against the torn belly, one
stuffed into the deer’s black mouth.
The stench was unbearable, eye-watering.
He lifted the back of his hand to his nose, looked across the fields south of
the highway: burdock, ragweed, Canadian thistle, horseweed. A grove
of trees a quarter mile off marked where a farm house used to stand.
Beyond the grove, a silo rose from a patch of scrub sumac, listing slightly,
wrapped in grape-vine and clutchweed. When he was a child all these
fields had been Renascorn; a pharm-strain grown by Renascorp. Their
motto: a renaissance in corn.
He scanned the dark blue thunderheads flashing on the western horizon.
Somewhere out there, across ten miles of abandoned weed fields, the storm was
drenching the long-abandoned town of Jasper in cool sheets of rain. But
here – no wind, no scent of rain, nothing.
What was he doing out here? Back in Christmas City for only one day and
he was already walking away?
There was a shiver of grass, leaves. Caleb squinted east down the
highway. Twenty yards beyond the deer, a black mongrel appeared through a
curtain of wild carrot. The dog crossed the road, angled toward the
carcass. Ignoring Caleb, it sniffed a leg bone, then took a black hoof
into its mouth and pulled, tearing the rotten haunch away from the body.
One of the bottles propped against the deer’s stomach fell, rolled a few
inches, stopped.
Flies scattered, settled.
Caleb spotted a fist-sized slab of broken macadam on the road’s shoulder,
slowly bent down, and picked it up. The dog dropped the deer leg and took
a step towards him, growling low, baring yellow teeth.
Rock in hand, Caleb waited for the dog to make the next move. Waves of
heat rose off the black road. Sweat trickled down his temples, hung off
his chin.
The rattle of an engine, coming from the west, drove the dog into a patch of
burdock next to the deer. Caleb turned. A black Dodge pickup was
heading towards him, riding the center line.
As the pickup passed, Mike Shiner, shirtless, handprints the color of dried
blood across his naked chest, leaned out the passenger window and tossed a beer
bottle over Caleb’s head. An arc of yellow liquid trailed behind the
bottle, raining down onto Caleb’s head and shoulders, into the ditch
grass. The truck squealed to a stop next to the deer.
Caleb sniffed his t-shirt. Piss.
Three women, naked to the waist, sat in the bed of the pickup. Their
emaciated shoulders, breasts and torsos were streaked with dried blood from the
gibberish words they’d cut into each other’s skin. They giggled, still
high on their run, seeing angels everywhere, in everything.
Deth-girls.
Danny Shiner leaned out the driver’s window, nodded at the deer. “You see
the present we left you?”
Caleb waited.
“There’s more there than meets the eye,” Danny continued, “but you gotta look
real close. It’s our way of saying ‘welcome back.’”
One of the girls stood up, raised her face and arms to the sun and erupted into
a long Deth-shriek. The two sitting on either side of her opened their
mouths in unison and let fly shrieks of their own.
It was all Caleb could do to keep from covering his ears to block out the
terrible sound. The scream echoed around him, inside him. He took a
deep breath and slowly lifted his hand, gave Danny the finger.
“C’mon, Mission, I expect more from you,” Danny said. Mike laughed.
The girl dropped her arms, looked at Caleb; smiling, ecstatic. Her face
had the caved-in look of a long time user, as if the skull behind the skin had
shrunk, leaving the face prematurely wrinkled.
She was already dead.
“I think Kalia here likes you,” Danny said. “And I would have offered her to
you...but now…” He pointed at Caleb’s upraised finger. More
laughter from inside the truck.
Danny slid back into the cab, punched the brake and accelerator at the same
time. The rear tires screamed against the blacktop and all three girls
shrieked back, echoing the tires. The truck fishtailed, shot east,
pitching the Deth-girls forward onto their hands and knees.
More shrieks, laughter.
Caleb held his finger aloft until the truck was out of sight and he was, once
again, enveloped in silence. He scanned the burdock for signs of the
dog. Runnels of sweat trickled down the back of his neck, along his
spine, down his arms, dripped off his
fingers.
Water. He needed water. Maybe the storm would reach him on his way
back to Christmas City.
The clouds were so dark. A promise of cold rain.
Next week, a new series: Poetry? I Just Don't Get It.
One poem with commentary by the author
First up in the series:
"If I Ring My Body Like A Bell of Coins..."
by Michaela Kahn
