Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

After recently reading and reviewing two fiction titles from the up and coming British publisher InkerMen Press, I was looking forward to reading something from their nonfiction Axis Series. I was not disappointed. Simon King has put together an entertaining and thought-provoking collection of three essays (plus an introduction and a coda) looking at the relationship of human society to ant colonies through the joint lenses of Cultural Entomology and the fiction and nonfiction writing of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the novelist/socialist HG Wells, and the philosopher Henri Bergson, among others. King’s journey into the social world of the ant began when he received as a gift a modern ant farm, contained in Perspex and filled with a blue-green gel, based on a 2003 NASA experiment. Along the way, we get everything from philosophy to hard science, to sociological and anthropological considerations examining the influence of the ant’s (perceived) daily condition on that of humans. There...

Every so often we are lucky enough to stumble across a collection of stories that speak to us on several levels all at once—the tone, the atmosphere, the characters, and the locales all coalesce into a whispering wind in our ear—the unconscious is awakened and vaguely recalled stories from our childhood come bubbling up to the surface of our carefully managed swamp of secret information. This is one of those books. From the moment I opened the Just Maybe..Stories and mistakenly read the table of contents as a disjointed, fascinating poem, I knew that I was walking in a familiar wood. I was none too surprised to see on the inside cover that the stories were all Traditional, and arranged by the author. I read each story with growing interest and a buzzing in my gut and as soon as I was done I hit the Internet, searching out the distinctive character names and when that turned up dry, entering every combination of keywords my mind put forth. I came up as empty as the treeline as the morni...

The Underside of Flight is a stark, poetic chronicle of one artist’s journey into the darkness brought on by losing his job after 10 years and facing the uncertainties that poured forth from such a deep, piercing wound. It is a collection of 120+ pieces categorized as Poems, the writer’s own Quotes (e.g., “Life is a granting of living; when is the last time you lived?”), and Mind-Blasts (e.g., “Some of my favorite madmen were scholars of their craft”). The collection opens with a page full of dedications to family and friends—a signal that although the word-shaman has gone into the wilderness, alone, to seek the darkest of caves and deepest of rivers, he has not forsaken his vital connection to his Tribe. These works are some of the most raw, honest, and at times brutal that I have read in quite some time. The artist wrote with his mental blood as he bled and was not so presumptuous or cowardly to feel the need to go back and cover his tracks, soften his truths, or make any apologies i...

Pieces for Puppets… is a well-written and engaging collection of six short stories (totaling 89 pages) split into two sections: Past Puppets and Modern Marionettes. Watt is a skilled writer whose precise use of language, attention to rhythm and flow, and capable story structuring weave subtle tapestries of the supernatural where the darker, more sinister world of the popular theatre is never far out of reach. Past Puppets opens with a quote by the influential Swedish playwright August Strindberg: “The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, dissolve and merge. But one consciousness rules them all: the dreamer's; for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples and no laws.” (Although it is unattributed here it is from the prefatory note to Strindberg’s 1901 A Dream Play, produced in 1907.) It is a most fitting opening quote in many ways, as the first three short stories take place soon after the turn of the century and Watt is a drama lecturer who seem...