Simulacrum and Other Possible Realities | ||||||||
Jason V. Brock | ||||||||
Hippocampus Press, 252 pages | ||||||||
A review by Seamus Sweeney
Others however are ruined by wildly implausible, unnatural dialogue and inner monologue. The tone is set in the first story,
where we read the father of a murdered girl report to the TV news that "Now she's gone. The marriage, the kids, the SUV, and the
big house in the suburbs -- her list was left undone." Immediately before the innermost thoughts of his wife and himself are
reported as being "she had never been right, not like her brother, the short-haired, God-fearing Republican."
Throughout, characterisation is fatally undermined by a tendency to delineate the dramatis personae as if they were personifications
of the most irritatingly hackneyed online argument. The nadir of this is undoubtedly the opening pages of "Milton's Children,"
which would otherwise be a promising horror tale (with various nods to Mr. Lovecraft) set in the Antarctic; instead we read
pages of straw man characters attacking each other. Sample dialogue:
"Yeah? Well, fuck those towelheads! They just want to destroy our way of life. They hate it that we have freedom!"
On and on it goes, two characters whose opening scene never allows them to rise above the level of the most entrenched ranting
YouTube Commentators. One rarely loses the sense, with Brock's characters, of stock figures defined by the formulated phrases
of a few attributes -- the God-fearing Republican, the righteous atheist vegetarian, the meat-headed jock.
Brock clearly has a conceptual élan and, when the story is either a brief execution of a concept, or a longer pastiche of
another writer or style, things go well. When characterisation of any depth or length is required, things break down. For some
readers this may not matter much, but for me the stories were far too full of the jarring, implausible notes which can break the
spell of even the most conceptually interesting story.
Seamus Sweeney is a freelance writer and medical graduate from Ireland. He has written stories and other pieces for the website Nthposition.com and other publications. He is the winner of the 2010 Molly Keane Prize. He has also written academic articles as Seamus Mac Suibhne. |
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