Die Closer to Me

by David Kuhnlein

David Kuhnlein's debut novella-in-stories Die Closer to Me follows Jo as she cares for her mother on planet Süskind – Earth's failed disability experiment. Along the way we meet a suicidal construction worker, a waitress who secretly eats her tip money, a jaded poet, a militant monk named Bhikkhu Brendan Fraser, and a small blue hypnotist named Bath.

Genres: Fiction

174 pages, Paperback

First published June 26, 2023

About the author

David Kuhnlein writes fiction, poetry, and criticism. He is the author of Ezra's Head, Bloodletter, Die Closer to Me, Decay Never Came, and Six Six Six (horror film reviews). He co-edited the horror anthology Lizard Brain and hosts a reading series at Cafe 1923 in Hamtramck. He lives in Michigan and is online @princessbl00d.

Reviews

[Matthew Kinlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foucault describes power invested in the body of a species, its “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity” that undergo “an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.” What is the endpoint of the supervision of all bodies? David Kuhnlein offers wry speculation in his debut novel, the evocatively titled Die Closer to Me set on Süskind; Earth’s failed experiment to populate and care for a planet of disabled bodies. Reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, Kuhnlein’s prismatic and trippy text channels the sensory aberrations of its inhabitants. In a cybernetic twist on Proust, they exhibit an astounding level of smell, both primal and evolved. Its desperate characters appear drawn to bizarre mysticism, a nightmarish form of Buddhism where the terminally ill pray to escape reincarnation. A bhikkhu monk explains an entire industry of the human soul, “Unlike happiness, enlightenment didn’t come free with quality hormones. It needed to be bought and installed.” A constellation of sick souls wandering across a bankrupt planet where suicide feels like a clearance sale. Monopolised detritus as capitalism par excellence. As Foucault writes, “entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.” Jo, caring for her dying mother, expresses, “I can’t unsmell the things I’ve smelled.” Ten million neurons in a nasal cavity firing signals through an olfactory system. The body processing its own encroachment. A recognition. The vengeful reek of organ failure. As Kuhnlein describes, “The world around her relaxed its bowels. She didn’t smoke to mask the scent. She was glad that she could smell it.”

[Tom Over · Rating 5 out of 5]

This shit makes me wanna write

[Alyssa Rogers-Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely a work of art is so visceral that it makes me feel uneasy. Die Closer to Me got me a few times. Kuhnlein has such a way with words and a natural talent to describe the world they have created in such detail that you are fully transported there. A bold and unapologetic look at all the worse parts of the medical field. Each substory is so captivating and leaves you wanting more only to swiftly fade into the next character. The end of the novella is very strong and delivers some of the most powerful narratives of the whole work while also tying them all together.

[Ian Townsend · Rating 5 out of 5]

DCtM is an absolute treat for the reader. Kuhnlein's prose is poetic and strange. He is able to navigate the thin line between beautiful words and story. DCtM presents the reader with a multi-faceted view of the future that reflects back upon us like a kaleidoscope of chaos. The fact that Kuhnlein obtained a blurb from Kenji Siratori says enough about the experimental nature of his work. Part Burroughs, part Neuromancer, DCtM is a must read for anyone into strange fiction.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this novella are a series of vignettes about various characters who inhabit a planet that serves as a mostly neglected government controlled ghetto for the disabled and those who manage their care. Kuhnlein’s style tends towards poetics, and his tales of extreme sensation seeking, medical experimentation, and loneliness are filled with symbolism and rich sensory detail. As the stories unfold we are presented with a curio of oddities and grim spectacles. Many of the horrors we encounter on the planet Süskind are framed as positive or experiential, creating an unsettling Nelsonian atmosphere that pervades throughout the book. Die Closer to Me cuts through the tendons and the social fabric for a darkly incisive look at sickness and sophistry.

[Ben Isely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really exceptional. DK commits eloquent acts of violence with and against language.

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Kuhnlein. Die Closer To Me. Merigold Independent. 2023. 171 pages.

Die Closer To Me is a slim novella but a considerably large jigsaw puzzle that needs to be reread to see in greater detail where the pieces interlock. A novella-in-stories, as the back cover reads, the book is a literary sci-fi tale comprised of thirteen short stories that have tantalizing overlaps. Blink and you might miss the slivers of the Venn diagrams where one story interfaces with another. This is not to suggest this is a design flaw; rather, it is a spring-loaded mechanism which unleashes its potential energy and sends the reader back to the beginning of the book to put it all back together again.

Plot-wise, it’s a little unclear — chopped into chunks as it is — but the central mass of the story seems to concern another planet named Süskind which has existed unseen in our solar system and which has become home for a vast experimental home base for people with disabilities. Indeed, medical ailments and their treatments form the background scrim against which the story is told. Or untold. Narrative canvases are painted and arranged into triptychs or tetraptychs (?) that may not be delivered in sequential order. Like an artwork not meant to be taken in in a linear fashion, the stories allude to one another through revealed names, bags of drugs, Buddhist texts, hyper-developed senses of smell, photographs, motorized wheelchairs, and other incidental details and clues with interrelated matrices that don’t vex the reader (at least they did not me) but give a pleasurable teasing sensation. It’s a book to be reread and taken apart and fitted back together for fun.

The prose style of the book should be mentioned as on first reading (there will be more than one) it is the real star of the show which upstages everything else, including plot and character. Not that those are lacking. But Kuhnlein has shown himself to be a poet and a skilled weaver of lyrical, surprising linguistic units. Much care was put into paragraphs such as this description of an Earth-bound psyop to re-scramble domesticated dogs for nefarious purposes (it has to do with Süskind, I promise):

“Spontaneity is regarded with suspicion. The result of a universal love based on abstract principles is meaningless since any extreme contains its opposite. Too much love becomes hate. Project House Dog didn’t anticipate that dogs would become cognizant of what they’d lost, or what might happen when they did. After a while, eunuchs thank those who sever them from time-consuming and pointless arousal. Imagine the potency of a reverse orgasm spilling backwards against the sense organs, bittersweetness increasing by the bite. Lying with a proper muse can rebuild an inner banquet in minutes. By way of encrypted audio files hidden in DOG TV videos on YouTube, dogs were reprogrammed with their original fertility and virility, as well as their predatory instincts. These dog-friendly messages slipped under the radar, unheard by human ears, spraying across a sky of satellites, scrambling themselves into domesticated tissue.”

Dogs activated by YouTube videos as if Manchurian candidates or sentient masks in Halloween III: Season of the Witch are just some of the fiendish creations in Kuhnlein’s novel. Homicidal bounty hunters, psychopathic anesthesiologists aboard interplanetary spacecraft making jaunts to the disability planet, dangerous insects, Buddhist cults — all are found there and yet they seem to transcend genre fetters as we might imagine them and are instead written about with delicacy and inner penetration. The literary/genre divide is straddled and, in many instances, smashed as thoroughly as a marble bust by an iconoclast, if only to have the pieces reconfigured into some new pattern that retains some allusive hints of the old: it is sci-fi, with the trappings and atmospherics but the speculation and imagination are taken into fresh directions.

It’s dark, it’s cyberpunk, it’s as fleshy as Cronenberg’s most outlandish charcuterie board. It’s alive, it’s menacing, but in addition to that it’s sensitive and human writing. It’s a spiritual act to go among these broken people and glitching relationships and to reflect that in the distant future Buddhist concerns — the freeing of material from disappointment and suffering — will still be on people’s lips. The natural order of things is probed, lanced, massaged, and bombarded with mutagens under Kuhnlein’s pen.

[Rebecca Gransden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was grateful to be asked by the author to provide a blurb for this. Here’s what I say:

KUHNLEIN PROBES THE SPIRITUAL DEPTHS OF FUTURE DECAY, WHERE BODILY MYSTERIES ARE REVEALED IN CORRUPTION. A SHUTTLING NARRATIVE INTERWEAVES BRUISED CHARACTERS, RIFE WITH CELESTIAL GRIT, PLACED WITHIN THE ROT OF A BANKRUPT SYSTEM. DIE CLOSER TO ME SPECULATES ON CONDEMNED DESTINY, WHERE DAMAGED ANATOMIES DREAM OF A PHANTOM SATELLITE. WRITING THAT PULSES WITH BROODING PREVISION.

[Radiator_Blessed · Rating 5 out of 5]

"....Defrosted Eyes in feedback"

"Decadence disguised as its opposite was back in style"

Rarely do you find something this simultaneously well written, abstract, evocative, emotionally cogent, and actually funny.

Feels like current reality without bowing down to a single trend. Gold standard shit.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

read between Albuquerque + LA: https://5cense.com/24/1161.htm