With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer
J.R. Hamantaschen
West Pigeon Press
September, 2015
Reviewed by Josh Black
J.R. Hamantaschen’s debut collection, You Shall Never Know Security, was a very well-regarded one in the horror and weird fiction communities. The followup, With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer, further proves that Hamantaschen is the real deal. Hopefully he’ll bring us many more stories.
“Vernichtungsschmerz” shifts between dreams and consciousness, the crux of the plot hinging on a literal life or death decision. Julia, a high school junior, is visited in a dream by a being that offers her a choice: live out the rest of her life knowing the truth about death, or follow the being into death, voiding her existence painlessly and immediately. The truth, as it turns out, is that death is a subjectively eternal agony, “… every nerve and molecule of your being, flayed, in perpetuity.” After Julia makes her choice, the gauntlet is passed to her three closest friends, and the rest of the story follows them as their own choices play out.
The glimpse into depression offered in “A Related Corollary” is painful, but primal in its honesty. It’s a scant few pages describing, ostensibly, a couple of friends sharing drinks. What it really defines is the bleak interior landscape of a woman caught in an ineffable blackness. The sadness, hopelessness, and alienation of depression are painstakingly described, and likewise the paradox of being simultaneously engaged with the world and seeing reality for what it truly is.
In “The Gulf of Responsibility”, a social worker who’s mildly disillusioned with the mundanity of his life draws himself unwittingly into what may or may not be a grand conspiracy involving some sort of death cult (it’s essentially a mystery story, so the less said here, the better.) As it turns out, sometimes when you’re paranoid, they are out to get you. The conclusion works as well as it does partly because the main character is more or less an everyman who makes the simple decision to live a little. As he says, “I made myself care. I should have just minded my business, like everyone else. No one really cares. I just wanted something to do. I wanted to feel like I was doing something, well, like I was doing something productive. I’m so stupid.” A later story in the collection, “Oh Abel, Oh Absalom”, expands on this one with a different main character.
In “Big with the Past, Pregnant with the Future”, the accidental leak of the admissions materials of roughly half the first-year students at Yale Law School dredges up an otherworldly, traumatic event from one student’s past. The politics of academia meet personal horror, and if anything is certain, it’s that nothing ever can be.
“Soon Enough This Will Essentially Be a True Story” begins innocently enough and becomes the literary equivalent of a book reviewer’s worst nightmare. Karen, a top Goodreads reviewer (and fervent entrant of contests) wins a book in a giveaway. Five minutes later she gets an email stating the book has been sent. After reading some of the book, she realizes she doesn’t like it and decides not to leave a review. From here on the author makes himself known in an increasingly disturbing manner, and it’s clear he’s a volatile individual. Murderous, even. As all of the stories in the collection do, this one works on multiple levels. There’s the sheer terror of being stalked and threatened, and the eventual gore factor. Beneath the lurid surface it looks at the precarious balance between validation-seeking and the importance of privacy in the digital age.
While the previous story had some nasty gore, “I’m A Good Person, I Mean Well and I Deserve Better” has it by the bucket-load. In a considerable change of pace from the previous stories, this one is set up as a standard revenge tale and ends up being a blood-drenched, riotous love letter to horror b-movies and retro video games, with a side of laugh-out-loud scatalogical glee. The strains of ineffectuality and estrangement that mark the collection as a whole are still at play here, but “play” is the operative word.
“Cthulhu, Zombies, Ninjas and Robots!; or, a Special Snowflake in an Endless Scorching Universe” takes a scathing look at a Cthulhu convention. Explored here is the absurdity of reducing Lovecraft’s mythos to a series of trinkets, clothing, and pornography, the lauding of his work despite his personal beliefs, and the paradox of capitalizing on his philosophy in fiction while avoiding it in everyday life.
Depression is the focal point once more in the final story, “It’s Not Feelings of Anxiety; It’s One, Constant Feeling: Anxiety”. Here we have a man who seems happy enough with his lot in life, but scratch the surface and we find he’s merely going through the motions. There’s something to be said about caring enough to go through the motions, of course, but this too can fall apart under the right circumstances. These circumstances are front and center here, as the main character’s feelings of despair and futility are given tangible form. The end result is far from pleasant.
Put simply, With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer is a brilliant and vital addition to the landscape of dark fiction. Hamantaschen has an impressive eye for detail, for the absurdities, imperfections, grit, and so often unvoiced thoughts, gestures, and actions that mark us as human. There’s a pitch-perfect balance here between emotional depth and philosophical questioning. The supernatural is deftly combined with urban malaise, personalized fears and anxieties, and an undefined, deeper darkness encroaching from all corners. It’s not often a collection of this caliber comes around.
Highly recommended.
