Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crow

Ray Nayler has been writing some of the most interesting science fiction of the past four years or so. I wrote about his first novel, The Mountain in the Sea, here.

Nayler’s latest novel, Palaces of the Crow, is a historical novel, set mostly during World War II, but it still has its science fictional aspects. It is set in Lithuania, and is concerned with that nation’s calamitous history.

Lithuania was a major European power in the medieval and early modern period, sometimes on its own, and other times federated with Poland. But in 1795, Lithuania and Poland were both obliterated as independent countries. Lithuania was controlled by Tsarist Russia throughout the 19th century. It regained its independence in 1918, after the end of World War I, and persisted for two decades thereafter. When World War II started in 1939, Lithuania fell under the Soviet sphere of influence under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Lithuania was formally invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union in June 1940. When the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, they quickly occupied Lithuania. They controlled the country until June 1944, when a Soviet counter-offensive expelled the Nazis and re-annexed Lithuania. The country only became independent again after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the years 1988-1991. Through most of this history, Lithuania was a vividly multicultural and multilinguistic place, with ethnic Lithuanians living alongside Poles, Russians, Yiddish-speaking Jews, and other minorities. The Jewish community of Lithuania was one of the largest in Eastern Europe, but they were almost entirely exterminated by the Nazis during World War II.

Palaces of the Crow is concerned with four teenagers, two male and two female, who hide together in the Lithuanian forest during the calamitous years of the Second World War. Neriya is a Jewish girl, the child of doctors, who is separated from her parents when the Nazis invade. Kezia is a Roma girl, who escapes while seeing the Nazis murder her entire family. Czeslaw is an ethnically Polish boy but who was born and spent his whole life in the Soviet Union, and is cast adrift as the only survivor of his Red Army unit when the Nazis invade. Innokentiy is an orphan boy, a bit younger than the others, of unknown parentage; he has been severely traumatized, and does not speak (though he understands Russian, and is able to write out things he wants to say, once he has learned to read and write). The four of them are each distinct personalities, but they also experience commonalities due to their necessary closeness and reliance upon one another; it is clear that none of the four could have survived entirely on their own.

This is not something that Nayler mentions explicity, but I was reminded of Gilbert Simondon’s discussions of individuation, which both creates separate individuals, but also extends beyond them, and connects them in larger units. There are a few (but not many) references to biologists and philosophers in the course of the novel; especially to Uexküll, the biologist who had important ideas about the relations between individuals and their milieus (but who was also a Nazi collaborator, as is mentioned in the course of the novel). There is also some philosophical meditation about the ways that human and animal senses work, and also the ways that the can coalesce into a deeper feeling, so that “animals sense their place in the physical world”, and similarly “humans sense their place in society”: an overall “sense” that tells you “where you are in relation to the rest of the world… where you are in relation to everyone and everything else“.

The narrative shifts among the four, and mostly tells us about the happenings when they meet, and live together in the forest, during the period of Nazi occupation, hunting for food. This story is framed, or supplemented, by a meeting of the surviving members of the group, decades later (in 1971).

I still haven’t said anything about the crows, who are central to the story, and who provide the (perhaps) science-fictional element of the text. The crows interact extensively with the young people, who are able to identify and track individual members of the flock. At a number of points, crows lead one or another of the young people out of danger, by insistently leading them to walk further into the forest, in directions that the crows indicate. There is also something like gift exchanges between the crows and the humans; the crows bring Neriya and the others things like buttons and other pieces of abandoned human manufacture, as well as little sculptures (if that is the right word) of twigs and dirt that they have twisted together or otherwise constructed. The teenagers reciprocate by feeding the crows scraps from the game that that they (the humans) have managed to kill, and that constitutes their main diet.

Crows are known to be among the most intelligent of all birds; they can recognize individual human beings, and in fact do bring small gifts to people they like, and harass people they do not like. They are also extremely social, and have been known to mourn members of the flock who have died. So Nayler’s extrapolation here is relatively small, just as it was with his account of octopuses in The Mountain in the Sea. The teenagers are eventually brought to a crow city, in the middle of the forest, where the crows congregate en masse, where their constructions of nests and other connecting structures are particularly intense, and where they collectively care for elderly members of their flock as well as for the babies and fledglings.

The novel as a whole conveys a picture of sociality and mutual aid, both among the four teenagers, as well as among the crows, and between the crows and the human characters: all this set against the horrors of war, of Nazism, and of Stalinism. Besides giving a vivid and moving picture of some of the worst historical events of the 20th century, the novel gives us hope that such horrors can be resisted. And along with doing this, it deconstructs the binary of culture versus nature — a binary that needs to be rejected, but that is still all too prevalent and powerful within our imaginations today. All in all, Palaces of the Crow is a deeply thoughtful and deeply moving book, one whose feelings and ideas still seem vital in our world today, so many years after the events that form its backdrop took place.

Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, gives us the history of the Jewish Labor Bund. The Bund was a Jewish socialist party, formed in Russia in 1897, and prominent in Russia from then through the Revolution (after which, the Bolsheviks banned it), and then important in Poland from the end of World War I until the Nazi genocide against Jews during World War II.

The book gives a lively and thorough account of the Bund and of many of its members, throughout this whole historical period. Here Where We Live Is Our Country is beautifully written, and it combines an overall history with more personal testimonies, mostly written in Yiddish and available in archives, but not formally published. Crabapple has a personal stake in this story, since her maternal great-grandfather was a Bundist,until he emigrated to the United States in 1906. After that, like many other Jewish immigrants, he supported the Bund from afar, gave money, and anxiously watched the twists and turns of its history.

The Bund was a socialist and basically Marxist organization. It was centered upon the Jews of what is now Eastern Europe and European Russia, organizing with and among Jews specifically at a time of extreme anti-Semitism throughout the region. But it was anti-nationalist and anti-chauvanist, in favor of working class solidarity across lines of ethnicity and nationality. The Bund slogan which gives the book its title expresses the need to fight for a better present, not to postpone everything to a future that is distant in both space amd time. The Bund made alliances with other socialist organizations, and it was opposed to Jewish ethnonationalism (manifested at that time in the form of Zionism) as well as to other nationalisms in the region which often tended to be anti-Semitic (as was the case especially in Poland and in Ukraine). The Bund was active in the Russian Revolutions of 1917, but they were eventually shut out by Lenin’s exclusivity, and then suffered even more (like so many other revolutionists and leftists) under Stalin.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bund was a major force in Poland, which after attaining independence at the end of World War I had more than 3 million Jews, something like 10% of the total population. The Bund not only made cohesive political demands but also organized all sorts of facilities from hospitals to summer youth programs in the countryside, as well as exerting pressure due to their representation in the parliament.

The Bundists quarreled with other Jewish factions, particularly with the Zionists, who sought to get the entire Jewish population of Europe to emigrate to Palestine. But the groups still joined forces when danger arose (first from Polish anti-Semitic groups, and then much worse from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland. The Bund was behind the great Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, which was eventually suppressed by the Nazis with great loss of life. In wiping out 90% of the Jewish population in Poland, in other Eastern European countries, and in occupied parts of the Soviet Union like Ukraine and Belarus, the Nazis destroyed both the Bund and the world of which it was an organic part.

The Bund has often been dismissed in recent years, because it failed, whereas the Zionists succeeded (at the price of doing to other people what was done to them in Eastern Europe). But Crabapple argues, and I entirely agree, that the legacy of the Bund is worth preserving — and that, as I have argued many times, Jewish culture and tradition, including but not limited to religion, should not have its rich legacies captured by and subsumed within the State of Israel.

Indeed, a culture should never be reduced to a nation-state; the whole history of the 19th and 20th centuries, in Europe and in places reached and controlled by Europe, offers us lessons in to why such state capture is a terrible thing. Cherishing a culture, and benefiting from its historical resources, or from the many and often contradictory potentialities it offers us, should never be limited to a narrow identitarianism. Such cherishing — the generativity of any tradition — necessarily includes heretical potentialities as well as orthodox ones. (In this way, for instance, I see the two great heretical Jews of the 17th century, Spinoza and Sabbatai, as resources and exemplars to draw upon, in addition to more orthodox and ‘acceptable’ ones).

Molly Crabapple brings the history of the Jewish Labor Bund to life, and shows us how and why, despite its historical defeat (the latter chapters of her book, recounting the events of World War II, made me cry), its legacy is still very much worth knowing and drawing upon today.

Steve Aylett, THE BOOK LOVERS

I have been reading Steve Aylett for more than three decades — his first novel, THE CRIME STUDIO, was published in 1994. His latest book, THE BOOK LOVERS, was published in the UK in 2024, and has just now come out in the US from Anti-Oedipus Press.

Though I read Aylett with extreme delight and fascination, I have little idea how to write or speak about his novels. I told my friend Marleen Barr, trying to explain, that I think Aylett is the greatest prose stylist in the English language since James Joyce. While I stand by this claim, I do not know how to justify it to anyone who is skeptical about it (which is, I presume, almost everyone). Aylett doesn’t do lush and hypnotic long sentences like Marguerite Young, and he doesn’t compress the widest possible range of language into the verncular, like Thomas Pynchon. (They are the only two other post-Joyce English-language writers who, to my mind, have a similar brilliance of style). Rather, Aylett writes with such precision that every sentence in his books, whether dialogue or description, has the polished elegance and paradoxical wit of an Oscar Wilde-style epigram; only you have to imagine a Wilde who has been kidnapped by Mister Mxyzptlk and sent into the fifth dimension.

When the characters speak to one another, they seem to be referring to this style of their language as much as to anything else. To give an example — one where the prose is closer to apprehensible meaning than is the case ninety percent of the time — consider this: “This pose of yours, does it prevent your ablutions? You are so exacting in your affectations, they seem rather joyless. Are you merely following orders?” This is from Inspector Nightjar a female police officer trying to interrogate a man who never seems to conform to expectations. Nightjar is one of the heroes (or heroines) of this book. As the other heroine, Sophie Shafto, says of her at one point: “She’s a legend! Incongruously competent and honest! Her life is pure hell!”

Things do happen in the course of this novel, though it is difficult to explain exactly what they are. The book is set in what seems to be a simulacrum of late-19th-century London. Most people walk or travel by horse-and-buggy, though there also do seem to be primitive automobiles. A lot of the action seems to involve books and their ambiguities. We hear a lot about books that change their words every time they are read. There are even epic catalogues of such books: “A book of keyholes, a book of beginnings, a book illustrating ominous curse medals, a book in which every word is a reminder. A book to ruin your summer, gleaming like a scarab. A book bitten down like a sandwich, a book of thorns, a book of page thirteens” — and so on for much longer than I am able to quote here, concluding with: “It was all promise and potential”. Aylett seeks to maintain that promise and potential, rather than turning it into mere actuality.

I have already mentioned Sophie Shafto, the closest THE BOOK LOVERS comes to a protagonist. Sophie is enamored of all these books. She has spent her life struggling against the limitations to which women are confined in bourgeois society: “To ignore contradictions. To faint away whenever called upon to do so. To come bending into a room in pretend modesty”. Against these social norms and expectations, Sophie craves the sheer weirdness and otherness of the written word. She treasures texts in which “despite what I want the words to say, the words are going their own way”. In this, Sophie is different from most people; the bestsellers in the world of the novel are books whose pages consist of no words, but only of mirrors, so that in reading them people can conceitedly and complacently contemplate only themselves.

In describing THE BOOK LOVERS in this way, I risk making it seem much more schematic and orderly than it in fact is. I am only quoting the passages which, atypically, I can more or less understand. The novel is multifarious, but at the same time so compressed that I can read over sentences and feel that they make perfect sense in context, even though I have no idea what they mean.

I will cut off this review here, since the only alternative would be to quote every single sentence in the course of this contemplative recapitulation. Aylett is a writer like nobody else.

Transmentation | Transgression, by Darkly Lem

This is the second novel in the Transmentation series, also known as The Formation Saga, by “Darkly Lem” – which is a pseudonym for a group of five science fiction writers: Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm. Of these writers, Turnbull is the only one whose solo-authored works I have read. I wrote about one of his solo novels here. I also wrote about the first Transmentation novel last year, on Goodreads. In addition to their collaboration, “Darkly Lem” forms part of an even larger grouping, the Many Worlds consortium, who are all writing stories set in the same multiverse. This aggregation of worlds is called “The Simulacrum”, and (instead of space travel as in so many other science fiction narratives) the people are able to transit instantaneously from one universe to another, which also seems to mean from one planet to another. So far, I get the sense that each universe consists only of a single planet.

When you move from one universe/planet to another, your mentality is embedded in a different body each time. When you leave, apparently the bodies continue to exist and have an ordinary social and working life, although without the je-ne-sais-quoi that is individuated personality. It is not uncommon for people to jump from one world to another, and then back to the previous one; when you do that, you re-enter the body you had before, which apparently hasn’t done anything unseemly that would disrupt your status or general sense of identity. This is the weirdest aspect of transit between worlds/universes, and it saves the novum of transit from being merely a Cartesian separation of mind from body. When you go to a planet/universe you have never visited before, it seems that a new body is created for you, but retrospectively woven into the history of its world, so that it is apparently the same age you are. This is what is called retcon (short for “retroactive continuity“) in speculative storytelling; it is not new to the Transmentation series, but it is interesting that the series makes this into an ontological feature of its metaverse, rather than merely a feature of how the narration works.

So much for the framework of the Transmentation series. (I have not yet read any of the other stories in Many Worlds, of which there are quite a few already available online). In terms of storytelling, I have found the Transmentation books to be rich and multifarious. (I have no idea how the five authors split up the task of actually writing the texts). The effect of the multiversal structure is that you get a wide range of characters and narrative threads. Many of these are interesting and compelling in their own right, in addition to what contribution they might make to the overall narrative. There are 12 worlds/universes among which we shift in the course of reading the novel. I think that the overall narrative situations continue closely from those of the previous volume, but I was able to follow everything without having to re-read the previous volume in order to pick up the details I might have forgotten in the year since I read that earlier volume. In any case, the effect is a kaleidoscopic one of shifting back and forth between the different localities/worlds/universes, and it is only slowly over the course of the novel that you start to get a sense of how it all fits together.

Some of the worlds are more powerful (economically, technologically, and militarily) than others, and eventually I realized that we were seeing the outline of a cold war or undeclared war between some of them. The most powerful world, Burel Hird Prime, is an imperalist power. It already controls hundreds or maybe even thousands of other worlds, and it is striving to increase this number. They are worried about all the world where they have some influence, but where the world/society as a whole is not “advanced” enough, by some standard that is not entirely clear, to be fully incorporated into the Burel Hird imperium.

There are many worlds that are entirely insular, i.e. they don’t send people into other worlds/universes, though they all seem aware of how the Simulacrum (the multiverse) works, and know of visitors from other worlds to theirs. Burel Hird has decided that the main obstacle to their success in annexing other worlds is that they have competition from several worlds (such as Firmare, Withered Stem, and Of Tala) that also travel a lot. What the Burel Hird agents try to do, over the course of the novel, is to kick out all the travelers from other universes, so that they are the only outsiders remaining on the worlds that they want to annex.

There are other issues in play — in the first volume, a leader of Burel Hird was assassinated by agents of a different world, and in this volume some of the Burel Hird people spend their time trying to figure out who set up the assassination, and punish them. By the end of the novel, it seems that we have a slowly moving cold war between Burel Hird and Withered Stem, with Of Tala primarily supplying mercenaries to Burel Hird. You might think of Burel Hird as roughly analogous to the USA, and Withered Stem as roughly analogous to Russia or China, but this is a narrative that is committed to the multiple points of view, rather than allegorizing a struggle between good and evil. Often the other worlds, which are being contested over by the major powers, have their own distinct points of view as to what their chances and possiblities are. On one world, Withered Stem agents warn the locals that they will not like falling under the control of Burel Hird; and on of the locals answers that such colonial dependency would still be better than the current planetary situation, in which two vicious totalitarian systems strive for control, and the people in general suffer from both sides. In any case, there are no final resolutions here; a third volume is promised.

What I liked most about the novel, and about its predecessor, was the way you get absorbed into individual details of the various worlds, each of which has its own vividness and complexity, its own particular cultural traits, while at the same time the meta-narrative of the larger struggle looms in the background. The novel features richness and multiplicity over large narrative strokes, and that is a good thing.

Kim Choyeop

Kim Choyeop is a South Korean science fiction writer. Her first collection of stories, IF WE CANNOT GO AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, was published in Korea in 2019, and will soon be released in English translation. I read an advance copy that I got through Netgalley, which provides early access to books in return for writing reviews.

The book contains seven short stories, all of which combine scientific extrapolation and speculation with all-too-human dilemmas. The overall tone is more melancholy than manic, but Kim takes seriously the ways that extreme possibilities (as Fox Mulder called them) can result from technological advances; rather than either visionary utopianism or bleak dystopianism, we get stories about needing to cope with situations that we cannot possibly be prepared for. I don’t know how to generalize beyond this, so instead I will say something, however brief, about each of the individual stories.

In “Symbiosis Theory”, a new technology allows us to access what is sometimes called the ‘language of thought’: ideas, feelings, etc. that animals and people have before they are ‘translated’ into language or (in animals like dogs) into other forms of indicative behavior. This leads to the discovery of sophisticated thoughts in babies who should not be capable yet of such feelings and articulations. The explanation turns out to be that, at early ages, human beings are symbiotically linked to alien intelligences that initially evolved on another planet in another solar system, and who came to Earth when their home planet was destroyed. Such a scenario could easily lend itself either to horror — we are controlled by alien parasites! — or to wonder — we receive visionary amplification from these guests! — but in Kim’s story, leads instead to neither. The aliens are simply there; and they leave us as we grow older. The scientist who discovers all this is left at the end of the story with “a longing for something she had never laid eyes on, for something that she could barely name or imagine”. One might think of this as the start of a Wordsworthian meditation on departed glories, but such a thing never develops: it is the end of the story, not the beginning. Kim just leaves us there. The sheer facticity of this situation is itself the point.

In the second story, “Spectrum”, the narrator recounts the story of her grandmother’s having spent ten years on a distant planet, among the sentient and vaguely humanoid inhabitants of the planet. Such an idea is frequent in science fiction; but again Kim rejects conventional fictional structures, by turning the “sense of wonder” we expect from science fiction into something that is charmingly mundane, rather than being apocalyptic or Earth-shattering.

The third story, “If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light” (giving its title to the volume as a whole) gives us a whole history of developments in interstellar travel (whether through cryogenics so that passengers can survive the immense time it takes to fly to other solar systems and worlds, or through wormholes), but puts this in the framework of disappointment, since the changes in technology mean that an elderly woman, formerly one of the inventors of such technology, will never get to the planet where her husband and son live, waiting for her to join them.

Next, “The Materiality of Emotions” recounts a commercial invention that allows various emotions to be physically materialized, and thereby owned by individual — the emotion takes the form of a brighly colored and aromatic pebble that you can hold in your hand. This leads to another history of disappointment; people do not strive for positive emotions, but prefer to purchase negative emotions, leading to a kind of aesthetic contemplation of disillusionment (which people enjoy at second remove, in the same way that we/they enjoy tragedies and melodramas).

In “Archival Loss”, when people die their personalities, ideas, and emotions are tranformed into data and stored in vast libraries. You can see and talk with a dead person, but nobody knows whether these preserved dead people are somehow still real, or only simulations. The story both asks whether this makes a difference, and dramatizes how recovering the dead in this way is related to our ambivalent or even sharply negative feelings about our parents and other people who influenced us in the past.

“Pilgrims” is a complex and resonant story about genetic engineering that makes it possible to eliminate human flaws and imperfections (of character as well as of physical traits), and ambivalently considers the psychic costs of such rearrangement of human life. I have mentioned ambivalence in most of my story descriptions at this point, and I would say that the insistence upon ambivalence, and the refusal to resolve it, is perhaps the key motif of all of Kim Choyeop’s fiction.

The last story in the collection, “My Space Hero”, is again about radically re-engineering human bodies (and, inevitably, minds as well) in order to permit us to travel through “The Tunnel” (again, a sort of space wormhole) and access distant points in the cosmos. As in the other stories, the real emphasis is upon whether such radical changes are worth it or not — will the other end of the galaxy really be different from our own solar system and galactic neighborhood?

So these stories by a relatively young author (she is now 33, and was only in her mid-twenties when this book was initially published in Korean) all express various modes of disillusionment, which necessarily attends the radical innovations and the “sense of wonder” that characterize science fiction as a genre, and that are particularly relevant to our own contemporary societies, which are (as Marx and Engels said) engaged in “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”.

Jacek Dukaj, ICE

I just finished reading Jacek Dukaj’s novel ICE, published in Polish in 2007; the English translation was published for the Kindle in November 2025 (although the hardcover will only be published in January 2026). It’s a stupendous novel, extremely long and dense — the hardcover publication will be 1200 pages long — and very difficult to summarize. It could be regarded both as science fiction and as alternative history.

In the world of this novel, everything changes (or diverts from actual history) with the Tunguska meteor strike of June 30, 1908 (an actual event, but with consequences in the world of the novel that it did not have in the actual world). Radiating out from the impact site in Siberia, large portions of the northern hemisphere freeze and are covered with ice — an eternal winter. This ice is frozen water, but has new and weird properties, such as apparent life forms made of ice, with internal flows of liquid helium as a sort of equivalent to blood, Together with the ice, a new element called tungetitum appears in the ground, and new technologies are developed that incorporate this new metal, making alloys of it with steel for instance, allowing adaptation to the extreme cold.

As a result of this transformation, history takes a different path than the one we are familiar with. In particular, World War I does not take place, and the Russian Revolutions of February/March and October/November 1917 do not take place. Radical change has been suppressed by the ice. The Tsar is still in power in Russia, and Poland has not become independent but instead is still part of the Russian empire.

The world of the ice is a sort of inverted world, with its own chemistry and physics, referred to within the novel as “black physics”. For instance, chemical reactions that would release heat under normal circumstances instead cool off the surroundings, for instance. This results in all sorts of metaphysical consequences. In actual physics, there is no force of coldness; rather, cold is defined negatively as the lack of, or reduction of, heat. But it seems that, in the world of ice and tungetitum, coldness itself is a positive force. The laws and properties of this new form of matter are investigated by Nikola Tesla, the actual engineer and inventor, who becomes a major character in the novel’s fictional world.

Beyond this, the differences are defined in terms of mathematical logic. In the actual world — the world of Summer, in the language of the novel — situations are ambiguous and hard to define; this needs to be handled by a three-value logic instead of by the traditional (Aristotelian) two-valued logic. A statement about what will happen in the future, for instance, is neither true nor false. Here Dukaj refers to “the Polish school of logicians and mathematicians (so called the Lviv-Warsaw School)”. (I am here citing an interview with Dukaj about the novel). The realm of the Ice, or of Winter, in contrast, is the home of traditional two-valued logic: everything is frozen into place, locked into its “soletruth”, so that ambiguities are abolished, and every proposition (or statement about the world) is unequivocally either true or false. Though this situation is stated directly in the text, or argued over by the characters, it is also demonstrated via the numerous situations and occurrences that populate the novel.

The protagonist and narrator of the novel is a young Polish mathematician, Benedykt Gieros?awski, who is sent from Warsaw to Siberia to make contact with his father, a former dissident who was exiled to Siberia for illicit political activities, and who is believed to have connections with and power over the Ice. During the first third of the novel, Benedykt travels east on the Trans Siberian Railroad, interacts with the other passengers, and experiences the ambiguities of Summer. Finally he arrives at the Siberian city of Irkutsk, frozen into eternal Winter; the remaining two thirds of the novel take place in and around this city.

Benedykt is an unsual character; though he is not insubstantial (if anything, he is way too substatial, locked into a particular perspective which might not be objectively accurate, so that we experience all the problems of dealing with an unreliable narrator), he is skeptical, among other things, of his own existence, or at least substantiality , This is reflected linguistically with in the novel itself: the narrator never says “I” until the last several hundred pages. Instead, he refers to himself impersonally; this seems bound up with overwhelming experiences of shame and inadequacy. Dukaj conveys this linguistically, apparently, through the use of reflexive forms in the Polish language that have no equivalent in English. The translator, Ursula Phillips, works out equivalents in ingenious ways (the novel includes an appendix where Phillips describes how she dealt with multiple translation issues). For most of the novel the narrator in English never says “I did” such and such, but instead describes his own actions using a tenseless imperative. e.g. (to give a random example): “fasten the warm sale-collared overcoat, pull on the gloves, step down onto the platform”.

The first-person “I” finally appears in the last section of the novel, when Benedykt has overcome his feelings of inadequacy to the extent of becoming delusional about his own powers and possibilities. (I won’t discuss this in any detail so as not to give away the major narrative developments of the final quarter of the novel).

The translator makes similar choices in order to convey the additional linguistic oddities of the original Polish. Dukaj self-consciously adopts the form of the 19th-century Russian novel, which is the reason for its longueurs and its somewhat archaic diction: again, all this is conveyed indirectly by the linguistic choices of the translator, and explained in the appendix; even before reading this explanation, howver, I still felt the slight but discomfiting strangeness of the writing, a sort of deliberate stiltedness that is nonetheless compelling.

I will not try to discuss the themes and metaphysical implications of the novel, because just after a first read I am still puzzling over them. I will just say that truth and power alike are continually under contention as the novel moves between its two poles: the oppressive absoluteness of Winter and the equally oppressive ambiguity of Summer. I will be thinking about this novel for a very long time; though due to its length I will not endeavor to reread it any time soon. Long novels tend to either repel me (if I do not find them interesting enough to occupy me for the time it takes to read them) or to obsess me, due to the way they expand into complete worlds of their own; ICE definitely falls for me into the latter category.

A House of Dynamite

One thing that most people have failed to notice about Kathryn Bigelow is that she is an ultra-formalist. Admittedly, this is something she never talks about in any of the interviews with her that I have seen or read. But it is a big reason why she is one of my favorite filmmakers, across a wide variety of genres and themes. I fell in love with her work when I first saw her revisionist vampire film Near Dark in 1987; and in subsequent years and decades she has never disappointed me — not even when a lot of people on the left whose opinions, and in some cases friendships, I value highly, criticized Zero Dark Thirty (2012) for its depiction (without overt critique) of CIA torture of political prisoners. Bigelow, despite being the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, has made far fewer films than I would wish; and this is in part due to the fact that she has had a much harder time raising money for her projects than male directors at the same level of accomplishment do.

In any case, her new film A House of Dynamite is as brilliant and powerful as anything she has done, and this is at least partly the case for formalist reasons. The film is about an apparent nuclear attack on the United States: a single nuclear missile incoming, launched from somewhere in the North Pacific, and headed for Chicago; the American Armed Forces are unable to stop it. The film gives us the same time sequence, the twenty minutes or so between when the missile is first detected and when it is about to hit its target, three times from three different locations and perspectives. First we see the command center where threats are evaluated and recommendations are made; second, we see the military command center which is responsible for execution; and third we see the President of the United States, who must decide whether and how to respond. The President is played, quite convincingly, by Idris Elba. The role is sui generis, reminding us of neither of Obama nor Trump. This President is not a superman, he is clearly unsure about what to do. We see him first in the White House and then traveling through the streets of Washington DC in a car under the protection of the Secret Service. His shifting location contrasts with the two bunkers, or securitized command centers, in the previous segments of the film.

Importantly, nobody knows the source of the missile, and no country or force has claimed responsibility. Russia denies involvement, and vouches for China’s non-involvement as well. This leaves North Korea as the obvious suspect, but this is never confirmed. The film concludes, in all three iterations, with the missile about to hit, in just a single second. But the film withholds what then happens from us. Is there catastrophic destruction? Or does the bomb fail to explode? And in any case, what will the President decide to do? Bigelow quite deliberately leaves us at the threshold, in a non-cathartic suspension. I think that this was absolutely the right decision; any conclusion would diminish the film’s intensity, and seem to partly answer or foreclose the questions it leaves us with.

I should also mention that each of the three segments is well over twenty minutes in duration; in other words, film time is dilated, rather than compressed, in comparison to the time of the story being recounted. This is quite unusual for any Hollywood film; it only happens in movies where a time limit is a central feature of the narrative. (I believe that High Noon is supposed to take place in a single hour, although that film is 85 minutes long; but examples of this sort of time dilation are quite rare).

I started by calling Bigelow an ultra-formalist. One sees this in all of her films, expressed in different ways. It certainly includes her nigh-perfect sense for camera movement and editing, but it goes beyond that. I have written in the past about how many of her earlier films are structured around a richly depicted milieu (nighttime in the rural Southwest for Near Dark; the beach for Point Break, even the desert for The Hurt Locker). We have some of that here, in the vast in size but nonetheless claustrophobic bunkers of the two command centers. These spaces are both vast and claustrophobically enclosed; and somehow Bigelow is able to communicate both of these feelings at once. We get a few establishing shots, but they are not enough to orient us visually within spaces that are bureaucratically organized into identical cubicles or identical rows or chairs facing computer screens. We get a kind of allover space, but without a link between micro and macro levels. There are a lot of tight closeups, but also ubiquitous links which are not spatial but telecommunicational. I haven’t seen another film that depicts this new organization of space (as far beyond the postmodern space of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel that Fredric Jameson wrote about in the 1980s, as that space was beyond the older and more linear space of cities in the age of modernism). There was some depiction of military and security command space in Zero Dark Thirty, but Bigelow pushes her vision of this spatial configuration much further in A House of Dynamite.

But there is more. The formal organization of A House of Dynamite, reflecting the formal organization of the security apparatus that it depicts, is a matter of time as well as one of space. Not only are most of the conversations in the film conducted through microphones and screens, we also have a sort of syncopation of events. We will see and hear one side of a conversation in one segment, and the other side in a different segment; for instance, when people communicate with the President in the first two sections of the film, we hear his voice, but his face does not appear on any of the screens that the people in the two command centers can see. We learn in the third segment that this is because the President is not in his office but on the move. A similar effect at a lesser level occurs when the Deputy Security Director Jake Baerington, played by Gabriel Basso, is speaking with people in the bunker while he is still on the way over — so that he communicates by mobile phone while walking quickly, leading to a shaky image that the people already in the bunker complain about.

Since nearly all the discussions that would be depicted via shot-reverse shot structures in an ordinary film are now between people located in different physical spaces, as well as the fact that we so often see one side of a conversation in one segment, while the other side is given us in a later segment, the structures that ordinarily suture a movie together are here divided up: precisely calibrated, but yet diffused over different segments of the film as we are watching it. This may just slip by as we are watching the film, but it is a mind-boggling formal feat for everything to be calibrated so carefully, and yet dispersed into different segments of the movie. It is both that everything is very nearly simultaneous, and also that there is no synoptic point of view that can grasp this simultaneity all at once. Everything is funneled through the apparatuses of capture and comprehension to the President and other top officials. This is conveyed in another way when we meet the Secretary of Defense, who cannot rescue his estranged daughter in Chicago from the impending holocaust, nor tell her about it, but who nonetheless futilely calls her to say somewhat lamely that he loves her. This is only one of several personal touches that the movie inserts, in order to give us some sense of the characters’ lives outside their jobs and procedural duties. But part of the point here is that these asides are all quite brief; Bigelow refuses the temptation to sentimentalize them in a way that would ‘humanize’ the film and detract from its insistence on the bureaucratic and procedural nature of everything that is otherwise depicted.

Let me try to bring this to a conclusion, though there are lots of other features of the movie that I could discuss. But the crucial point for me is that, though Bigelow is an ultra-formalist, she is a hot one rather than a cool one (to use the distinction promoted by Marshall McLuhan). Most formalisms are cool and distanced; think of, for instance, of Alain Resnais’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad. My claim is that A House of Dynamite is in a real way every bit as much a structured formalist work as that film is; but at the same time, Bigelow pushes us into an intimacy and urgency that most formalist movies, in the manner of Marienbad, entirely refuse us. I now realize that the combination of intimacy and affective intensity with an otherwise anti-subjective formalism is precisely what sets Kathryn Bigelow’s films apart from nearly everything else in the entire history of the movies. And this aesthetico-affective approach (if it is at all acceptable for me to use such a verbally infelicitous expression) is what makes the experience of Bigelow’s films so important and indeed overwhelming for me. Most of the reviews I have seen of A House of Dynamite focus on the film’s warning to us about the danger, still today, decades after the end of the Cold War, of a nuclear catastrophe. And of course I am not in any sense denying this. (Other discussions have similarly criticized Zero Dark Thirty for its ‘war on terror’ content, and Detroit for not sufficiently digging into the Black sensibilities that fueled the 1967 rebellion). I have no answer to such comments; I can only say that, aside from them, what thrills and moves me so much about Bigelow is that her films are perhaps the closest I have come to an experience of what (decades ago) we cinephiles used to call (despite the phrase seeming out of date today) pure cinema.

Philip Pullman

I first encountered the writing of Philip Pullman in 1979 or 1980. My friend Barry Schwabsky had discovered Pullman’s novel Galatea (1978) on the new books shelf in the library; after reading it, he passed it on to me. I read it too, and found it utterly remarkable. Galatea was (and still is) is sui generis, not much like anything else I have ever read. It’s a fantasy novel for adults, but very different from Tolkien or any other fantasy that I know of. At the start of the book, the narrator’s wife leaves him, and in order to find her again — though he never does — he embarks on a strange journey that takes him to Amazonia, where he encounters strange ruined or unfinished cities, and strange beings, some of whom have supernatural powers, and much of the time whose gender and sexuality do not fit into our usual binaries. Magic and imagination seem to be tied up with money (or more properly I should say with capital), and vicarious experience — the sort you get through literature and music — is just as vivid and present as ‘real’ experience. The narrator is evidently quite naive, but the beauty of the book comes in great measure from the way that, although most of what happens exceeds the scope of the narrator’s own abilities to perceive and understand, his initial naivete itself is never destroyed, mocked, or overthrown. It is something entirely refreshing, although, but also because, it offers such a weird perspective on our actual world of (what had not yet been called) capitalist realism.

I was delighted with Galatea, and I passed it off to other people just as Barry had passed it off to me. For a good while, I never encountered anybody who had read the novel, or even heard of Pullman, independently of the route of occasions, or the thread of acquaintances, that had started with Barry’s discovery of the book. Evidently Galatea did not sell very well; in the early 1980s, there were stacks of remaindered copies, available for a dollar or two, at used bookstores (such as, I most remember, The Strand in lower Manhattan). I would buy extra copies just to give them to people. I wrote about Galatea in my 1990 book Doom Patrols, though I fear I failed to do the book justice, because it was shoehorned into my own tendentious assertions that unfortunately characterize that book.

It took me a while to hear anything more about Philip Pullman. He had in fact written a novel prior to Galatea, but it was hard to find and turned out to be nowhere near as good. He subsequently, through the 1980s and early 1990s, wrote and published a good number of young adult novels, as well as short works for very young children. It took me a good while to find out about these (I did not have children of my own at the time). But I endeavored to read whatever I could find by him. I had read enough science fiction and fantasy pitched to younger readers, that the non-adult categorizations did not bother me.

Pullman became world-famous with the trilogy His Dark Materials, the first volume of which (The Golden Compass) was published in the United States in 1996. I was excited by these volumes, which constituted Pullman’s most ambitious work — the most complexly articulated and developed since Galatea, and far more ambitious in scope, since they constituted an epic spread across multiple worlds, including our own as well as the alternative Earth where most of the action takes place. [Sidenote: I have no liking for the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, which seems to me to make dubious and arbitrary metaphysical postulations in a futile attempt to conciliate quantum randomness with physical determinism; but many worlds has been a gift of inestimable value to science fiction and fantasy writing]. His Dark Materials deals with questions of freedom and tyranny, good and evil, and the relations between parents and children; it mounts a Blakean and Shelleyan defense of the imagination, of sexual liberation, and of moral autonomy, in opposition to the reductive Christian moralism of, most notoriously, C S Lewis. I note that Pullman published a scathing critique of Lewis at one point, accusing him of religious bigotry, misogyny, and narrow moralism. I find Puillman’s criticisms to be entirely justified, but the article caused enough controversy that he was forced to backpedal his assertions a bit. Pullman is no naive idealist about human character and human agency, but he always pushes against the assumptions of our contemporary hyper-atomized capitalist culture.

His Dark Materials came out at around the same time as J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which overshadowed them but which at the same time made the literary world in general more open to “young adult” fiction, which as a result became increasingly legitimated for adults as well. I was living in Seattle at the time Pullman’s books came out, and he made American book tours for all three volumes, which allowed me both to meet him and to see the growth of his audience. He gave a reading from The Golden Compass at Elliot Bay Bookstore; there were barely a dozen people in the audience, and I was the only person there who was neither a child nor an adult accompanying a child. His reading from The Subtle Knife was held in the University Bookstore, with an audience of fifty or sixty. For The Amber Spyglass, they had to move the reading from the bookstore to a larger auditorium (ironically enough, given the novel’s opposition to traditional Christianity, a church down the street from the University Bookstore), which accommodated several hundred people, with more not able to get in.

At all three of these readings, Pullman signed my copies of his books, but I didn’t get the chance to talk with him for more than a couple of minutes. That was enough to give me the sense that he was a genuinely kind and generous human being. My personal impression of him somehow synergized with my love of his novels; somehow his personal warmth (behind a level of entirely justified reserve) goes along with the psychological insights of his novels, which range from Galatea‘s chamber of wonders to his depictions of the ways that people interact with their daemons, or embodied souls, in His Dark Materials and related works. I have come to consider Pullman one of the rare sources of wisdom in our age, even if I do not always agree with him, and even though I much of the time lack his faith in the redemptive possibilities of storytelling. (I should note that he has supported the rights of trans people, in opposition to the bigotry of his better-known contemporary J K Rowling).

Pullman wrote several other books after completing the trilogy of His Dark Materials, in addition to a few short pieces set in the world of the trilogy. But he only returned to the world of those novels in a big way two decades later, with a new trilogy, The Book of Dust. The first volume, La Belle Sauvage, came out in 2017. The second volume, The Secret Commonwealth, was published in 2019. And the third and final volume, The Rose Field, just came out today — which is what has occasioned my discussion here. Pullman has now published six volumes concerning his heroine Lyra Belacqua, aka Lyra Silvertonge. At age 11 or 12, she was the protagonist of His Dark Materials. In the new trilogy, the first volume went back to her infancy, while the second and third volumes re-introduce her to us as a college student, age 20. I am now about to start The Rose Field, which begins just where The Secret Commonwealth left off, with its cliffhanger ending.

I know that I have not said very much here about the intricate details of Pullman’s vision, which brings the Romanticism and radicalism of poets like Blake and Shelley into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And I still have to start reading The Rose Field, which I pre-ordered and which showed up on my Kindle this morning. Philip Pullman is not the only contemporary author whose writing I love — I just completed reading Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful new short novel, for instance. But there is a way that, unlike any of my other favorites or fan obsessions, Pullman has seemed to me to be like a companion, a wise guide, someone whom I have had the privilege of walking alongside of, ever since I first encountered Galatea forty-five years ago: which is to say for more than half of my life. Pullman is seven and a half years older than me — he recently turned 79 — but I hope that he will continue to write more books, and I will get the opportunity to read more of his words, in the years to come. Nonetheless, the publication of The Rose Field, the sixth and probably last of the volumes featuring Lyra, feels like a culmination of some sort, a stopping-point (even if not the ultimate end) of the journey I have taken with Philip Pullman for all these many years. Which is why I felt impelled to write about him today.

Johanna Isaacson on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, has always been controversial and divisive. It has been praised as High Camp, and denounced as misogynistic caricature. Even for those of us who love it (myself included), the film is excruciating: it consists in more than two hours of aging, dueling divas Davis and Crawford tormenting and indeed torturing one another. Though it had some precursors, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? pretty much invented the “hagssploitation” subgenre. It renewed the careers of both stars, but did this by portraying them as delusional and violent, pretty much erasing their earlier accomplishments as glamorous stars and Oscar-winning actors. While male Hollywood stars are presented in such a way that allows them to preserve their allure into middle age and even beyond, female stars are considered to br washed up and devalued once they hit the age of 35 or so. They can only continue developing their personas by resigning their sexuality and vigor, and instead embracing monstrosity. In this respect, Davis and Crawford were preceded by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950); the pattern continues even today, as witness Demi Moore in The Substance (2024).

Johanna Isaacson renews our understanding of all this with her brilliant short book on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. She deals head-on with the film itself, in terms of both content and form, as well as with the dilemma faced by women who are no longer young –a kind of entrapment that the movie at once dramatizes, exploits, and exemplifies. In Isaacson’s account, Baby Jane indeed “registers older women’s devaluation”; however, “instead of responding with dejection or grim realism,” it “retaliates with fabulousness, excess, and pitch-black humor”. The film, she cogently argues, is “a bold manifesto on how to fight back with theatrical flair rather than meek apology”.

Isaacson’s book is wonderful for several reasons. Most importantly, for me, is how powerfully it gets at a level of aesthetic feeling, or aesthetic response, that is very difficult to put into words. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? overtly invokes sensations of disgust, as well as self-reflexive shame at one’s own implication in enjoying such disgust at the expense of others. The movie even invokes a sort of hilarity, as we cannot help laughing as well as grimacing at the over-the-top absurdity of what is happening on screen. But beyond all this, the film draws us into a mood, or an atmosphere, that doesn’t fit neatly into any of our descriptive categories: a kind of ferocious partial identification with, and partial enjoyment at a detached distance of, the very wrongness of everything that is happening on screen, and everything that the protagonists are doing. Isaacson conveys this sensation that is almost impossible to pin down: a complicated feeling of complicity, distance, and anger, one that can partly be situated in the terms of ideology critique (the feminist analysis of how older women are mistreated and devalued), but that somehow pushes beyond such terms in order to express a kind of joyous but oxymoronic intensity.

Isaacson evokes this mood throughout, but her discussion is anything but vague. She analyzes the film in exquisite depth, both going through the action scene by scene, and also considering its various informing contexts. There are careful discussions of what was happening in Hollywood at the time Baby Jane was made — the collapse of the old Hollywood studio system with which both actresses were identified — as well as of the overall careers of Aldrich, Crawford, and Davis, and even of the infamous Davis/Crawford feud (which may have actually existed to a certain extent, but which was grossly inflated and exaggerated in the press and in other venues in order to help sell the film).

If you are in any sense a fan of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, you certainly need to read this book. But even if you are not particularly attached to the film, you will learn a lot from it about American popular culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and about how the position of women (and in particular of privileged, but still discriminated-against, white women) is both refracted though, and to an extent produced by, the Hollywood dream factory and the mainstream media more generally.

Cassandra Khaw – The Library at Hellebore

I scarcely have the words for this stupendous novel, whose visceral horror is only matched by its eloquence. (I should probably say, “elegant eloquence”, because its power comes in part from the way its gross splatter in terms of content is recounted in so artful a prose style). I have read horror fiction by Cassandra Khaw before — she is Malaysian, but currently lives in Canada; her day job is as a game designer — but she surpasses herself in this new book.

I guess you can say that Hellebore, where the novel takes place, is the anti-Hogwarts. It’s a school for young practitioners of magic, only the magic here is entirely violent, destructive, and feral. The narrator and protagonist, Alessa Li (a name with the same syllabic pattern as the name of the author), has the magical power of tearing bodies apart: a power she first discovers when she uses it in self-defense against her stepfather, who tries to molest her. But there is no innocence in the world of this novel: Alessa has no sense of being a victim, and she sees no distinction between self-protection and aggression. She claims that all the people she killed deserved it, but not that she was always defending herself. It is almost as if the novel is telling us: ‘oh, you say that there is no such thing as society, but only individuals and families? You say that the world thrives through competition, all against all? Well, I will show you what that is really like’.

We get a backstory for the novel, contemptuously dumped by the narrator in a single page, telling us how magic thrived in the older world, but was driven underground by the rationalism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. These years were characterized by people’s craving to “cut the cosmos open and see what was inside.” This led to what we know as modernity, “a revolution in human thinking. We went from soothsayers to science, gods to generating electricity. Our lifespans grew; childbirth stopped being a macabre lottery.” The narrator’s point is that this flourishing of rationality, involving the absolute rejection of an earlier world of magic, for all its benefits was itself a sadistic drive to dominate the world. Rationalism and enlightenment were as barbaric as magic itself. And so, after “these years of frenzied development, interspersed with decades of war”, by a sort of inevitable backlash the magic returned. It quickly became a problem, because “this plague of global re-enchantment led to a decimation of the workforce… Capitalism was unsustainable without bodies to feed to the machine”.

What I have just summarized is passed over quite quickly in the novel. But it seems important to me because it sets up everything that follows. Alessa is not admitted to the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted by some owl messenger; rather, she is brutally kidnapped, and finds herself there against her will. She tries to escape, but discovers that this is impossible. The students are nasty, and continually bicker with one another; but the faculty is even worse. I think this resonates with the actual world in which I live, and in which I read the novel: what Fredric Jameson once called “the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital” is extremely difficult to grasp in objective, cognitive terms; rather, it is experienced on the subjective, individual level in the form of neofeudalism (as Jodi Dean and many others have argued). Although social relations are, in their overall structure, highly abstract and highly mediated, we experience these relations in the most immediate, visceral, and personal or sub-personal terms, through vast hierarchies of mastery and subordination. While the social world as a whole may be governed by ineluctable and inscrutable laws, as is envisioned and explored in Kafka’s texts of a century ago, today my individual experience of these structures is a partial and extremely localized one: the power to which I am unwillingly subjected is embodied, immediate, and directly branded into my flesh.

Khaw only intimates this historical background. For the most part, The Library at Hellebore narrates body horror as it fills the register of immediate experience. Everybody at Hellebore, student or faculty, is a monster: “someone with the potential to destroy the world three times over, and still have time for a good long brunch”. Put a lot of such people together, and they will both ally with one another and brutalize one another. Everything horrific about them will be cultivated and drawn out by the faculty, intent on shaping them into their worst selves.

But there’s even more. The novel mostly takes place at a crisis point. At the end of the school year, when the students graduate, the faculty devour them in a cannibalistic orgy. Many of the novel’s chapters are marked as “Before”, and give an account of the entire year Alessa spends at Hellebore. But these sections are interspersed with chapters set in the present: a few students have escaped being consumed, and they barricade themselves in the school library, doors locked so the faculty cannot enter. (They still have to deal, within the library itself, with the Librarian, a monster with the face of a human woman, but with a long caterpillar-like body). As the students try to defend themselves, and also fight among themselves, Khaw’s glittering prose (I can only call it that) details a seemingly unending series of wounds and aggressions, spillings of blood and gore and internal organs. But these are accompanied by subtle internal, affective shifts: moments of fear, but also moments of caring and (strange as it may seem) intimacy.

The realm of fear and violence is also, subtly, a realm of affection and sensitivity, in which Alessa and her peers experience surprising moments of otherness-contact, or what the philosopher Joseph Libertson called proximity. These moments are expressed in prose that is surprisingly delicate and subtle, even as it describes sheer atrocity. For instance, at one moment Alessa describes experiencing “a vertiginous sensation half like food poisoning and half like the worst migraine ever…” Something like this is as much excitingly unfamiliar as it is excruciating; and this is the way that the prose of the novel moves us forward, although what it describes is unremittingly horrific and bleak. Even at its most caustic — as when Alessa says that “years spent around men who believed that their dicks were reliquaries taught me how to smile despite the wave of nausea rolling through me” — the novel’s language is carefully exploratory, and illuminating in its precision and lack of pretense.

This extends even to the strange intimacy and recognition that sometimes passes between Alessa and the other monsters:”Minji smiled thinly and we sat then in a new silence, aware we had, very companionably and without a shred of animosity in our hearts, declared, in fewer words than perhaps were merited, that we would eventually be at each other’s throats. Whether such a time would come to pass was irrelevant. The words couldn’t be taken back and a sliver of me would always regret our honesty in that moment.”

Such quivering sensitivity at the heart of brutality is what really makes the novel work for me. I would not want to live in the world imagined by Khaw; but the really disturbing thing about the book is how insidiously it insists that, most likely, I already do. The few vestiges of saving grace the novel offers us only make sense in the context of its overall frightening vision; this is what is most deeply disturbing about it. Monstrosity is not an intervention from the Outside (as it is, for instance, in Lovecraft’s stories), rather, it is as intimate as my relation to my neighbor, or even as intimate as my relation to myself.