Apocalyptic reading list

So I've been writing this end-times exquisite corpse with Darryl Joel Berger the last few months.

And then in December, I bought one of the Literary Press Group's All Lit Up Xmas book bundles, which contained nouveau-Manitoban Lauren Carter's Swarm, which I'd been hearing about all fall.

And then a week or so later, I was assigned to review Korean-American writer Chang-Rae Lee's latest, the apocalyptic On Such a Full Sea for the Winnipeg Free Press.

And so I found myself thinking on the pleasures and perils of apocalyptic fictions. My default is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but I thought I'd see what other people were reading, so I asked on Facebook.

To be completely precise, I asked while browsing the bookshelves at McNally Robinson Booksellers  while waiting for the late showing of second Hobbit movie. (SMOG! SMOG! I insist on pronouncing it SMOG!)

And I got such good suggestions that:

A) I bought Emily Shultz' The Blondes. (Also Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. But that isn't apocalyptic, opting instead for all kinds of tomfoolery in/around storytelling and myth-making.)

The Blondes reminded me pleasantly of Swarm. Both have young, slightly inept female protagonists who are contemplating maternity. Both books expend a lot of energy on the procurement of clothes and food in the wake of their individual apocalypses, which is how I think things would be. Both books parcel out grief and loss around missing loved ones, the randomness of loss, in a way that I deeply appreciated.

B) I thought I'd share the rest of the list, in case you want in...

Nod by Adrian Barnes;  Into That Darkness by Steven Price; The Age by Nancy Lee; The Blondes by Emily Shultz; People Park by Pasha Malla; The Paradise Engine by Rebecca Campbell; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; Pontypool by Tony Burgess; Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley; PostApoc by Liz Worth; Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson; Boating for Beginners by Jeanette Winterson; The Hollow and Other Fictions by Richard Truhlar; The Last Canadian by William C. Heine.

Some of which I was familiar with, some of which I wasn't.

Finally, as this bookish e-conversation was winding down, another friend shared an image credited to a group called Grandmothers Against Bullshit. (Ahem.) The image consisted of a sunset with the following text overlaid on it:

"Apocaloptimist. def: Someone who knows it's all going to shit, but still thinks it will turn out okay."

Which I think sums up my worldview nicely, as someone who likes to write about in-between natural spaces, who likes to live in in-between natural spaces. And hopes against hope that I/they will somehow persist.

And I thought that was it, until I saw that 49th Shelf just published Lauren Carter's reading list of Survivalist Can-lit. Which contains a completely different and excellent list.

Clearly, there is no end to the books (and book-chatter) about end-times.

Burning tires

You’ve got staying power, I’ll give you that. And you’ve got language. Like a virus.

I just wish I knew why you’re still writing me.

I wish I knew what you were saying. Your letters are like the blasted sky: they persist no matter what I do or say.

What AM I doing, exactly? The one question you keep on asking.

I’m confused by what’s happening and what’s not happening, and so I’m trying to live, to survive somehow, even though there’s no way of knowing what’s coming.

My number one criterion for recommending movies to friends, before, was when the filmmakers kept me from reliably predicting the end.

Your apocalypse is a mix of Charlie Kaufman and Cormac McCarthy: an absurd wretchedness. Mine is more mundane, about eating and cleaning and keeping warm, keening for what’s lost and connection to what’s here now. No ultra-violence. Though the air is scented with it, like someone is burning tires and prostheses in the distance.

My name is Chris. I’m confused but not lonely or hungry, most days.

That’s all. I’m sick of flourishes.

* * *

Exquisite corpse #24. You can listen to the audio too, if you'd like...

Darryl Joel Berger's #23 is here. It's the bee's knees.

Shaving by candlelight

Does that make me Cary Grant? ("If he can talk, I'll take him!") Or, since this is the end times, are you auditioning for the role of Paul Novak?

Does this mean that your delusions have finally consumed – and excreted – you?

Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?

Did you know that most predators kill their prey by biting their necks? They’re after the big vein or the trachea: you bleed out or suffocate. Wolves slash at the muscles and ligaments in the legs. But you’re no large ungulate.

Do you think zombies go to heaven?

Does it matter that the noise I heard outside was a stony-eyed girl with a growling dog? We burned things and ate out of cans. A few days later, a pair of buzzcutt-ed boys with fresh needle marks. (We shared out our pork n’ beans.)

They didn’t mind my necklace of teeth but the beard scared them. So I shaved by candlelight.

Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men?

I caught a cold from one of the kids. Does it matter that I intend to survive?

* * *

Exquisite corpse #20.

Darryl Joel Berger's (harrowing) #19 is here.

Blurbing others

So I got my copy of Darryl Joel Berger's Dark All Day in the mail this week, with assorted goodies tucked inside the envelope.

(Except for the mini-ninjas at the bottom of the image. Those are my daughter's...)

Darryl and I have been collaborating for nearly two years. At first, we just sent images (him) and text (me) back and forth.

Which was great - many of the texts have found a place in my upcoming collection - but after a year of that, we decided to complicate things.

So for the past eight months, we've been working on a alpha-bestiary and an end-days epistolary novel.

Somewhere in there, Darryl was getting ready to publish his second collection of short fictions + drawings with American publisher Fjords. And he asked me to blurb it:
 
"Each of the illustrated fictions in Dark All Day is a few minutes of true darkness in a world of humming fluorescence. Taken together, they're an eclipse that doesn't require special eyewear, a black eye without the looming fist. To sum: Darryl Joel Berger's second collection of stories is a bleakly excellent mash-up of image and text." - Ariel Gordon, author of Hump.

This was my first blurb. Writing them is like gnawing on a chunk of horseradish, like sitting on the floor all day. Which is to say that I was sore all over but oddly proud of myself (and him) by the time I'd finished drafting it.

It turns out he asked everyone to blurb: Peter Darbyshire, Diane Schoemperlen, Gillian Sze, Carolyn Smart. But I'm still proud! (And will be interviewing for for an upcoming installment of Out of Town Authors...)

Heh.

* * * 

About DARK ALL DAY Fiction. "From the first page, you know you're in the wrong hands. So perfectly, exquisitely wrong," Peter Darbyshire said about DARK ALL DAY, DJ Berger's second book. Inconsolably drawn to the end of things, and the forlorn beauty of wreckages, "With his second collection of short fiction, DJ Berger offers 41 discrete tales of indiscreet characters. They will blow your mind one by one. If you crossed Stephen King with Raymond Carver you'd be getting close to what's going on here. The vision is bleak indeed, but also funny, intimate, and more than painfully real: a true dark triumph," said Carolyn Smart. Each story is introduced with a sketch in Berger's signature style. Hope and humor are used as distant but gleaming stars, to undermine the darkness where it can, and what fires many of these stories is a sense of anarchic theatre, where anything might come next. 

About the Author
Darryl Joel Berger's first collection of stories-called Punishing Ugly Children - was published in Fall 2010 by Killick Press. This same manuscript won the 2007 David Adams Richards Prize and was shortlisted for the national/Canadian ReLit Awards. His short story "Scissors" was a finalist in the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition and his novella Broken Hill was a finalist for the Malahat Review Novella Prize. He lives with his wife Christina and daughter Oona in Kingston, Ontario. See more of his illustrations at http://red-handed.blogspot.com/ 

Hold on. Please.

The day after I got your letter, I walked half a day into the wind’s scoured territory. After an hour I realized I’d forgotten a weapon & picked up a no-parking sign.

 There were engine noises in the distance, but whatever was humming & shrieking, loud & louder, never turned the corner. So I turned around. And now I’m at my house & my right pocket is full of softening teeth...

I’m still trying to digest your letter. I’m still trying to understand the blood & shit smeared on the front door of my house, the broken windows. How it looks like the trees burned.

 I think you’re sick so often because you’ve been practicing bad hygiene. Have you been washing your hands in between rampages?

Okay, that was a dig. But your symptoms…they sound a lot like radiation sickness.

I spent most of the last before-day in the basement vault at the bank where I work, doing the monthly security check. So maybe I missed the detonation. Or maybe I’m only a few weeks behind you & I’ll soon be adding my cavity-ridden teeth to the collection in my pocket…

 I find myself rattling them like coins.

Also, there’s no fresh food left. Except root vegetables. And, as my daughter noted once, turnip tastes like ass.

I’m antsy. I feel like climbing into the tallest tree I can find and watching the neighbourhood, to see what’s moving out there.

 Shit. There’s noise outside. Gotta go!

 But hold on. Please!

* * *

Or, if you'd prefer to hear it rather than read it:

listen to ‘Hold on. Please.’ on Audioboo

* * *

This was part eighteen of our exquisite corpse. Darryl Joel Berger's seventeen can be found here:

A single rock

Part sixteen of the exquisite corpse Darryl Joel Berger and I are building, limb by limb:

listen to ‘A single rock’ on Audioboo

(My character's a little woozy. He's just spent a week or so staring out of the window at a windstorm....)

Here's Darryl's part fifteen, over at SoundCloud:

Rattle and rattle

Windstorm. I spent the week by the window, watching the elm’s hundred-year-old branches, twice as thick as my thigh, being stripped off like twigs. The wind advanced a half block, so that my windows are now only feet from the roiling gusts. The windows rattle and rattle. I sit there, in the gray November light, and watch. It seems like watching is my job now, even if I know that the windows might get sucked out by the wind, might shatter. I thought about moving my stuff into a room without windows, about moving myself into a room without windows, but there’s nothing here that would be missed. I feel clean and empty. And only a little sad.

I think I saw you, sniffing around the buildings at the wind’s new edge. Hi.

* * *

Part fourteen of the exquisite corpse with Darryl Joel Berger. (Listen to lucky number thirteen here...)

A door, creaking shut

I’ve started sleeping in other people’s houses. My daughters’ rooms are splinters I can’t get out, doors creaking shut. It’s an endless awful sleepover.

Most of my zucchini went soft before I could eat it, thank you very much.

But maybe you’re right, maybe I need to be more practical. Or maybe I just need a good fistful of my neighbours’ pills, all gelatin and hardcore opiates.

I’m not sure I’m hardscrabble enough to survive you.

A hundred dead grackles, dark dusty brown feathers, on the ground in the yard three doors down. Not sick, not injured, just…unable to fly. And, then, dead.

I’m no henchman.

I have to decide. Do I build a proper hidey-hole, a dragon-hoard, a domain, and, then, defend it from desperate feral boys that I dimly recall from my daughters’ classroom photos, or, worse, don’t recognize at all?

Do I keep going as I have been, not acknowledging your misery, and accept my death how and when it comes?

Or do I spend what time I have left spying, a pile of ground glass trained on our tower of wind?

Why do you keep writing?

Part of me wants to know if you put them – those boys – in the ground. There’s no bigger fuck-you to your childhood, to the world, than to bury kids in your own back yard.

And even if you didn’t kill them, I wonder if some part of you didn’t say, “Four fewer mouths to fill. Four fewer enemies,” when you found them.

Fuck. Knowing that you – and others like you – are out there is what made me lonely.

What were you before?

* * *

Or, if you prefer, the audio version...

listen to ‘A door, creaking shut’ on Audioboo

* * *

This is part eight of the exquisite corpse Darryl Joel Berger and I are writing. (Darryl's got a list of the other seven parts here...)

I stole the hundred dead grackles from a news item in today's newspaper. 

More exquisite corpse-ing

listen to ‘Why you're so angry ’ on Audioboo

* * *

Here are parts three and four of my u/distopian exquisite corpse with Darryl Joel Berger.

He's so angry. (His character called mine a "spazatron"!)

exquisite corpse-ing

So Darryl Joel Berger and I have added another layer to our on-going collaboration, this time an exquisite corpse with zombie apocalypse overtones.

Here are the first two limbs:

listen to ‘My fingers hurt’ on Audioboo

Which is not to say that there WILL be zombies. But it does seem a little end-times-y...