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theartolater's review against another edition
5.0
I didn't expect to love this as much as I did, but this book is short of like it Jeff Vandermeer and David Lynch teamed up to produce an episode of Prairie Home Companion and it's just wonderful.
pearseanderson's review against another edition
5.0
I have five long pages of notes on this topic, most on this work of Rice's I finished a few minutes ago. Hopefully I will be sitting down to talk to him about it in the coming weeks. But, for now:
This book would not have gotten five stars (9/10 on my spreadsheet) if it was not self-aware. Knowing nothing about art, I would say this is a piece of Dada art, and I tend to hate that movement. It can be especially frustrating since I am living in a Dada apartment my grandparents decorated. Alas: I can find experimental style to be too out-there, too wild. I recently learned the idiom "if you open your mind too far, your brains will fall out." Thanks, the Guardian's longform journalists. Rice skirts this nicely. The Drifter narrator openly discusses the random segues, the format of the adventure, the twisted, wasted logic of Dodge City, and how others have oversaturation points where they stop caring. YES! My oversaturation point was in the Desert, where the Suicide Same / Sparklehouse B-plot felt too unconnected from the characters I had grown to love in Dodge City, characters like Big Pharmakos and Gottfried Bean or whatever he was called. It's a hard book. It's hard because it's a "novel of vignettes," making structure disjointed and flashy, but the ideas so intertwined in a classic novel-style that one should read a large portion at a time to absorb this. I love the vignettes, but the final product has the drawbacks an interconnected series of short stories might not have had.
But Rice knew what he was doing. He knew and he went forward, and he presented something interesting and different on every page. Could have used a dose less body horror a times (not squeamish, just felt lazy) but overall you could tell it is a force of nature, it is art.
This book is hilarious. Mostly because it follows one of the basic elements of comedy: it's relational. It's about how the audience sees themselves in the stories and observations of the speaker. The twists and turns here were interdimensional, but they got grounded quickly, with brilliant details that confirm that yes, this is HUMANITY we're looking at. David Leo Rice is a smart HUMAN, not a mass of seething flesh and fluid like those that appear in his stories.
Rice does a few things a lot, I've noticed
He loves Drifters. He always has a few in a scene or a piece. Mostly protagonists.
Connected, he loves heterotopic spaces. Perhaps this is just because I've been studying them, but almost every scene in Dodge City was in some kind of intermediary landscape. Mass graves, bus stations, comedy clubs, funerals, television sets, religious meetings, sideshows and carnivals, trials, prisons, hospitals, and breeding projects are clearly heterotopias by Focault's definitions. This leads to some amazing scenes. The mass of organized meetings lead to some real business. I love heterotopias, man.
He has a bunch of cars. I cannot remember any time someone used a horse. Often, these cars are more than transportation. They also act as confessionals, bunkers, graveyards, and mental asylums. Guess what I just named? More fucking heterotopias.
He has a lot of rubbery things in his work. Also, a lot of Internet culture tidbits, references to YouTube tutorials and GIFs. Perhaps this is organic for someone who publishes their novel on tumblr.
Often, things are compared to historical artists, sometimes philosophers or oral historians or writers. Many German, which makes sense given his minor at Harvard. Why was an Alan Lomax lookalike in one scene??
There is tons of nondiagetic logic. The protagonist knows the names of characters as they appear, and sometimes their function and role and their logic. This is true in some of Rice's fiction, too. There is a lack of connection between the gears behind the story/world and the reader, but there are sparks.
Connected, there are quite a few Power Dynamics. God, here I go capitalizing things, I won't try to Deny it. One byproduct/parallel symptom with this weird logic is characters knowing that Bad Things Will Happen if they make a choice considered "wrong." Who is making this greater philosophical decisions? Sometimes Eldritch abominations, sometimes mob justices, sometimes just greater authorities that are never spoken of, but their presence is there by their weight in the story. Characters instantly recognize of this greater Order, not quite a Black Helicopter Syndrome, more twisted and grand than that. But a lot of what they do is through fear of the Order. Can feel very authoritarian.
Other things are never explained. I'm incredibly curious how he wrote the short story "Egon's Parents," for reasons I won't spoil. Here, less is explained. We are constantly pushed into accepting this Dodge City Logic or we will die on page twenty. If you catch on it's a fascinating. The worldbuilding Rice has built into each paragraph can inspire countless stories. The original Sparklehorse ice cream shop letter inspired a Weird story I'm writing now that I could not be prouder of. There is a wealth of information and creativity here. It takes guts or stupidity to leave all that slop on the page and skid across it like its there as a thought- and story-lubricant. I hope Rice can remove some ideas from the lost city of Dodge and perhaps place them into more grounded universes, where they could go wild.
Slight spoiler: My favorite aspect of this was how we never stayed in base/original reality (like in Primer? Carruth and Rice have some overlaps). Early in the book, the protagonist falls asleep, dreams, and I don't think he ever woke up. The story continued, the logic unchanged because it was already dream logic. Characters will start telling stories, and slowly that story will become the main story, and again our characters are transposed. Characters will enter spaces and be forever changed by them, like the scene with the Eye and the Chain Gang.
In this book, things are capitalized. My favorites: Bus Station, this Town, Hotel and Hotel Lobby, my Material and my Blood. Heaven, Hell, Suicide, Folklore, Lecture, Death, Diner, Pilgrims, Dust Ritual, Outstretched Hand of God, Incest, Pagan Analogue, Celebration, Outskirts, the Dodge City Logic, Benefactor, Slaughterers, Porn, Names, Chemo, Flesh Pool, Deny, Corporeal Victims, Mass Watery Grave, and Internets of Spell and Prophecy.
Didn't love the ending. Didn't love some of the changes made to the setting. Did I already say that? This is getting to be too much for a review. See you guys later on Weird Fiction Review where I'll be talking to him. Overall, again this is a 9/10 satisfying experimental work of Lynchian Americana I did not think existed in book form without having some tie to some dumb Italian movement or whatever.
Connection: friends with David Leo Rice of Facebook, interviewing him for Weird Fiction Review in July 2017, read some of his unreleased work.
This book would not have gotten five stars (9/10 on my spreadsheet) if it was not self-aware. Knowing nothing about art, I would say this is a piece of Dada art, and I tend to hate that movement. It can be especially frustrating since I am living in a Dada apartment my grandparents decorated. Alas: I can find experimental style to be too out-there, too wild. I recently learned the idiom "if you open your mind too far, your brains will fall out." Thanks, the Guardian's longform journalists. Rice skirts this nicely. The Drifter narrator openly discusses the random segues, the format of the adventure, the twisted, wasted logic of Dodge City, and how others have oversaturation points where they stop caring. YES! My oversaturation point was in the Desert, where the Suicide Same / Sparklehouse B-plot felt too unconnected from the characters I had grown to love in Dodge City, characters like Big Pharmakos and Gottfried Bean or whatever he was called. It's a hard book. It's hard because it's a "novel of vignettes," making structure disjointed and flashy, but the ideas so intertwined in a classic novel-style that one should read a large portion at a time to absorb this. I love the vignettes, but the final product has the drawbacks an interconnected series of short stories might not have had.
But Rice knew what he was doing. He knew and he went forward, and he presented something interesting and different on every page. Could have used a dose less body horror a times (not squeamish, just felt lazy) but overall you could tell it is a force of nature, it is art.
This book is hilarious. Mostly because it follows one of the basic elements of comedy: it's relational. It's about how the audience sees themselves in the stories and observations of the speaker. The twists and turns here were interdimensional, but they got grounded quickly, with brilliant details that confirm that yes, this is HUMANITY we're looking at. David Leo Rice is a smart HUMAN, not a mass of seething flesh and fluid like those that appear in his stories.
Rice does a few things a lot, I've noticed
He loves Drifters. He always has a few in a scene or a piece. Mostly protagonists.
Connected, he loves heterotopic spaces. Perhaps this is just because I've been studying them, but almost every scene in Dodge City was in some kind of intermediary landscape. Mass graves, bus stations, comedy clubs, funerals, television sets, religious meetings, sideshows and carnivals, trials, prisons, hospitals, and breeding projects are clearly heterotopias by Focault's definitions. This leads to some amazing scenes. The mass of organized meetings lead to some real business. I love heterotopias, man.
He has a bunch of cars. I cannot remember any time someone used a horse. Often, these cars are more than transportation. They also act as confessionals, bunkers, graveyards, and mental asylums. Guess what I just named? More fucking heterotopias.
He has a lot of rubbery things in his work. Also, a lot of Internet culture tidbits, references to YouTube tutorials and GIFs. Perhaps this is organic for someone who publishes their novel on tumblr.
Often, things are compared to historical artists, sometimes philosophers or oral historians or writers. Many German, which makes sense given his minor at Harvard. Why was an Alan Lomax lookalike in one scene??
There is tons of nondiagetic logic. The protagonist knows the names of characters as they appear, and sometimes their function and role and their logic. This is true in some of Rice's fiction, too. There is a lack of connection between the gears behind the story/world and the reader, but there are sparks.
Connected, there are quite a few Power Dynamics. God, here I go capitalizing things, I won't try to Deny it. One byproduct/parallel symptom with this weird logic is characters knowing that Bad Things Will Happen if they make a choice considered "wrong." Who is making this greater philosophical decisions? Sometimes Eldritch abominations, sometimes mob justices, sometimes just greater authorities that are never spoken of, but their presence is there by their weight in the story. Characters instantly recognize of this greater Order, not quite a Black Helicopter Syndrome, more twisted and grand than that. But a lot of what they do is through fear of the Order. Can feel very authoritarian.
Other things are never explained. I'm incredibly curious how he wrote the short story "Egon's Parents," for reasons I won't spoil. Here, less is explained. We are constantly pushed into accepting this Dodge City Logic or we will die on page twenty. If you catch on it's a fascinating. The worldbuilding Rice has built into each paragraph can inspire countless stories. The original Sparklehorse ice cream shop letter inspired a Weird story I'm writing now that I could not be prouder of. There is a wealth of information and creativity here. It takes guts or stupidity to leave all that slop on the page and skid across it like its there as a thought- and story-lubricant. I hope Rice can remove some ideas from the lost city of Dodge and perhaps place them into more grounded universes, where they could go wild.
Slight spoiler: My favorite aspect of this was how we never stayed in base/original reality (like in Primer? Carruth and Rice have some overlaps). Early in the book, the protagonist falls asleep, dreams, and I don't think he ever woke up. The story continued, the logic unchanged because it was already dream logic. Characters will start telling stories, and slowly that story will become the main story, and again our characters are transposed. Characters will enter spaces and be forever changed by them, like the scene with the Eye and the Chain Gang.
In this book, things are capitalized. My favorites: Bus Station, this Town, Hotel and Hotel Lobby, my Material and my Blood. Heaven, Hell, Suicide, Folklore, Lecture, Death, Diner, Pilgrims, Dust Ritual, Outstretched Hand of God, Incest, Pagan Analogue, Celebration, Outskirts, the Dodge City Logic, Benefactor, Slaughterers, Porn, Names, Chemo, Flesh Pool, Deny, Corporeal Victims, Mass Watery Grave, and Internets of Spell and Prophecy.
Didn't love the ending. Didn't love some of the changes made to the setting. Did I already say that? This is getting to be too much for a review. See you guys later on Weird Fiction Review where I'll be talking to him. Overall, again this is a 9/10 satisfying experimental work of Lynchian Americana I did not think existed in book form without having some tie to some dumb Italian movement or whatever.
Connection: friends with David Leo Rice of Facebook, interviewing him for Weird Fiction Review in July 2017, read some of his unreleased work.
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