I want to preface this by saying that I don't live in the US, and am not under constant threat of gun violence. My partner does and is, and I am constantly scared for her, but I understand that a US reader will be coming to this with a context that I don't have, and I'm trying to be aware of that.
What would you do if you knew that your actions truly had no consequences? If you knew that, no matter what you did, you would wake up tomorrow and everything would be back to normal?
Carson Winter's The Guts of Myth (part of Split Scream Volume 1, reviewed here) was a blend of gravel-crunching pulp and shimmering obsidian cosmic horror, a darkly majestic, savagely cool novelette. And while his name was the first thing to grab my attention with this novella, the concept cemented this as something I needed to read. Here it is: two office drones find that certain days are less 'real' than others. On these 'low tide' days, the abnormal is slightly more normal, strange coincidences and aberrations mount up - and anything you do can be washed away by the returning tide the next day. Already prone to morbid imaginations and edgy humour, the two realise they can use these days to live out wild, freeing, even (especially) violent fantasies, letting everything set back to normal when they wake up.
Set against this is the 'real' world our protagonists live in - a grey sludge of data-entry drudgery, empty lives on the edge of poverty. Of course they adapt easily to the idea that their actions don't matter, because that's the world we live in. Their jobs are pointless tedium - we never even learn what the company is supposed to do, because it doesn't matter. Just like many, many people before them, while their analysis and action is clearly incorrect, they've correctly identified the situation - that we are just cogs in a huge machine that doesn't care about us, where the only consequences our actions have seem to be negative ones.
In The Guts of Myth, Winter's prose sang - a song from a mouth full of chipped teeth, blood and whisky, but a song nonetheless. The style here is very different - fair enough, different setting, different character, different themes. I can't say that the style here is a poor choice, and even when it makes the protagonist sound like a jerk, well, he's supposed to be a jerk. When it comes across as flat and detached, well, so is he. It's not ineffective. It's very effective, in fact, when the extreme violence breaks that detachment, and the understated prose throws that nastiness into much sharper relief. But the feel is of flat detachment, and it doesn't always make for the most compelling reading. It's readable, pacy, believable - and as I say, sometimes very effective - but something about it didn't quite grab me the same way Winter's other work has.
Despite the obvious draw of the 'high concept' here, some of the best, eeriest parts of the novella are where Winter describes the little oddities and signs that the reality tide is out. Our characters become adept at monitoring their world for things that are not quite right, indicators that this is indeed a 'low tide' day, and these are both inventive and subtly creepy,
But, well, about that high concept. This is certainly going to be a difficult read for some. While an editorial note informs the reader that this isn't intended as a commentary on gun violence, obviously it was written in a USA that is very much in the grip of gun culture, flooded with horrifying mass shootings. It's important to remember that this isn't a book 'about gun violence' but about the story of these two individuals and the violence they, particularly carry out. There is a lot of discussion of mental illness in this novella but it doesn't come across as presenting this as a talking point, the thing to blame for real-life shootings (and, as a mentally ill person, I'm pretty glad of that). Instead, while Winter is acutely aware of the pressures that might push a person into no longer treating this violence as unthinkable in the way it should be, the cultural trends that might lower a person's resistance to doing something so awful, he never shies away from portraying the grotesque, chilling consequences of these actions, and the choice to take them - a choice that can be, must be denied. In fact, despite that editorial note, the 'low tide' concept works so well as a metaphor for violence caused by thinking that only you matter, that other people aren't real, or at least that the consequences of your actions to them are unimportant, that it seems pretty intentional.
Maybe this novella doesn't work quite as well as it could have. Maybe it will be deeply uncomfortable or upsetting to some readers. But what's for certain is that it casts a light on a toxic kind of thinking, a crushing society, in a truly inventive and thought-provoking way.
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