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Richo Reviews: The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Joe Koch (Weirdpunk Books, 2020)

A teenage girl is forced into marriage. The director of a weapons project tries desperately to prepare a bioweapon that may defeat the wave of mass insanity spreading across the globe under a strange Yellow Sign. And an entity begins to hatch, to develop, and to prepare for battle. Three storylines, reverberating with one another through time and through realities, entwine to form this masterful novella from Joe Koch. This was one I was excited to read even before I realised it fit into the 'mythos' originating with Robert Chambers' King in Yellow stories, one I've always found evocative and fascinating. But rest assured that this novella doesn't just retread familiar ground - instead taking the familiar imagery of the Yellow Sign, the King (or sometimes Queen) in Yellow, and Carcosa as inspiration for something as unique as it is powerful.

The strength of Koch's work is in recognising that a horror based on dreams and nightmares is at its strongest when manifesting through our traumas, our innermost darkness and deepest mental recesses. Which isn't to say this isn't cosmic horror - those songs of the Hyades are in full evidence, the crushing forces of entropy and chaos shaping every page - but the novella, rightly, drills deep into the psyche, putting us inside the tumultuous mental landscapes of the characters, simultaneously grounding the horror and unmooring us from reality in the way only dreams can. Cosmic horror - and the 'King in Yellow' oeuvre for certain - can fall prey to trite, simplistic 'the knowledge makes you mad!' clichés, but Koch instead takes as his starting point the real afflictions of the human psyche, using a genuine understanding of trauma and mental illness and the way they might become vectors for such darkness, exacerbated and preyed upon by the dreamlike world of Carcosa. This anchors some of the best passages of the novella, musings on how the viral dream can turn minds inside-out and drive cities into frenzied bloodletting not through external force but by realising the inherent tensions of human consciousness. This theme of mirroring unites the social and personal lenses of the novella. At the former level, we see violence and cruelty acted out in the name of perfectly mundane religion before we ever hear of the fanatics of the Yellow Sign; later, the description of the world on the brink of collapse deliberately evokes our own situation in the real world. At the latter, there are obvious connections to be drawn between the point of view characters, as well as the sometimes-King sometimes-Queen in Yellow, connections which are amplified, refracted and complicated as the story progresses.

Koch's prose is suitably magnificent for the subject matter, ornate and dreamlike. Yet florid as it is, it never feels unnecessarily drawn-out or overwrought. It is evocative and potent, by turns languorous and driving, reflecting the turmoil of the characters, the free-association imagery of dreams, and the terrible majesty of Carcosa. Fiction attempting to evoke dreams can sometimes fail to engage due to its 'randomness' or lack of concreteness, but Koch's writing effectively weds the powerful imagery he deploys to compelling emotional explorations and never fails to capture the reader.

Like the infamous play itself, the reader of this novella should beware - it may linger in the dark recesses of your mind, never to be excised.

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