The Glacier

by Jeff Wood

"Gorgeously and urgently written." ― Library Journal , starred review
The Glacier is a spellbinding work in the spirit of Tarkovsky or Jodorowsky that reimagines the American frontier at the turn of the millennium, a time when suburban development was metastasizing and the Social was about to implode. Following a caterer at a convention center, a surveyor residing in a storage unit, and the masses lining up for an Event on the horizon, The Glacier is a poetic rendering of the pre-apocalypse and a requiem for the passing of one world into another. "Jeff Wood’s cinematic anti-story and artwork... binds the genres of novel, screenplay, and poetry in a collage of horror and humming imagery. His work hangs in the balance of past, future, and apocalyptic present, weaving the themes of Midwestern suburbia, collective theater, disturbed nature, and transcendental experience."
― The Rumpus

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novels

216 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2015

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read 9/16/15 - 9/24/15
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to readers who enjoy being mind-fucked the entire time (yes, in a good way)
Pages: 214 pages
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Released: September 2015



It opens on a forest. The forest lies just beyond the backyards of the homes in a new suburban development. Three surveyors are marking trees in the woods while a boy plays back there. And then the woods are gone, replaced by more vinyl sided homes.

Now:

A caterer fills water glasses and salt and pepper shakers in a giant, empty conference hall. She's lost all sense of time and doesn't understand her job though she goes through the motions.

A man has a cup of coffee and inserts the business end of a rifle into his mouth.

Another man hops into his modified ice cream truck and heads into town.

The boy is outside drawing chalk circles on the street.

Jonah, one of the surveyors, is on the side of a different road, doing his surveyor thing, when traffic comes to a standstill. A mushroom cloud appears in the distance and quickly begins to demolish everything around him. A brilliant white light threatens to eat him up until he tells the apocalypse to "wait", and it pauses.

Then reverses.

Everyone is suddenly back to what they were doing before, but now with a new, confusing sense of doom and dread.

Was it simply a vision? Or did Jonah actually stop the apocalypse? Are we now following an alternate reality? Or a pergatorial one?

(And no, don't worry. I'm not spoiling anything for you. All of this takes place within the first thirty pages.)

Throughout the remainder of Wood's impressive novel-as-screenplay, we find ourselves asking these questions over and over again as we play the role of observer, watching as each of these small town neighbors continue to live their lives and perform their jobs and interact with each other, all the while haunted by the feeling that something is not quite right. That they, and we - as the reader - are on the cusp of something big, something terrible, some kind of ... event.

Brimming with quiet tension and thick with atmosphere, The Glacier dug its fingers deep into my cerebral cortex. It played me like a puppet - hooking me with its concise language, surreal situations, and unreliable characters. I followed along blindly, more uncertain of what was happening with every turning page yet loving every moment of it and regretting none.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't sure about this book at first. It started in jolting flashes of many different characters, then dramatically shifted from narrative to play format.

As I continued to read beyond the early plot hook, I realized just how brilliant the story truly is. It's more of an experience, which the front cover suggests, by calling it a "cinematic novel." The tone is decidedly sinister, which gives it further weight and texture.

The keys to unlocking the esoteric themes are to recognize that time is something humankind made up in order to create ordered structured predictable lives. And if we accept this, we may at least consider that the past, present and future (even the apocalyptic future) are bound up together, overlapping and bleeding into each other, along with every potential version of these events.

The most powerful character in the book asserts that we confuse perceptions with concrete measurements. We don't even know how to define events, moments, or instances. We don't know how to describe the Universe, let alone spacetime, and besides, human nature is notoriously unreliable.

There's a lot of seemingly disjointed scenes, so your tolerance for experimental fiction matters here, a lot. I happen to think it's worth it. This is a rare, mind-stretching, hypnotic, and impressive work. Each reader will probably get something different out of this novel, since it's a little open-ended and a whole lot open to interpretation.

[M- S__ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has some really provocative interesting imagery. I was sucked in pretty often to this bizarre landscape. But it can be hard to follow and the conversations between characters can be a little jackoffy. That's standard fare for high-brow post-apocalyptic lit. Everyone has to think deep about their place in the universe. I really appreciated the just weird magic is-this-in-their-head-or-does-this-world-work-different shit. I don't know. This is the best annoying book I've read in a long time I guess.

[Matthew Burris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this as an ARC. Maybe I didn't know cinematic novel meant it's set up like a screenplay but after getting used to that I finished in an afternoon. I liked it more than I initially thought I would.

[Conor Heilferty · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a whole I didn't get the narrative of the screenplay/ cinematic novel, I think I need to re-read it maybe. But some of the most visual and starkly beautiful writing from a screenplay perspective.

[Joseph Haeger]

It's like Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and Shane Carruth all decided to write a story together. It plays with time, messes with fantastical elements, and layers storylines. Very well done. I'm not sure if the screenplay format helped it, but it certainly didn't hinder it.

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of sublime descriptions of an otherworldly suburbia, a pharmaceutical-packed ice cream truck and a starkly empty convention hall, this novel/screenplay was (like most Two Dollar Radio books) weird and unsettling. I’m not really sure what I just read but I liked it.

[Charlotte Emery · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some cool ideas and concepts but it really didn’t hold up in the end, it’s so jumbled that when you finally finish you ask yourself “what did I just read?” Or “what was the point?”

[Downward · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that I enjoyed quite a bit even though, plot-wise, I'm not sure I could tell you much about it. It's about suburban sprawl and the creeping numbness of modernity as enacted (or rectified) by an apocalypse put on pause, but I'm not really sure what...happens. it's written in half screenplay format, which invites a kind of collaboration with the viewer to fill in the gaps beyond imagery and action. there's something here that's intentionally out of reach, sort of reflecting themes throughout the novel of timelessness and uncertainty, the inability of linearity and physical space to fill in the gaps to create meaning,, but maybe it's something you have to experience through your own reading of the book.

[Mr. Derek Dietz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Glacier's more of a screenplay than a novel. I'm not sure it could be made into a film that reaches a mass audience, but I loved the described visuals and the nightmarish descriptions of suburban development in the face of the natural world. There's a particular existential crisis at the heart of our current ecological one. We can recognize the ways human civilization is irrevocably harming the planet, and yet we are too small to enact meaningful change. We're either at the mercy of the other billions who aren't willing to change or else we're hypocrites for not changing enough. Jeff Wood's work is slim and readable in a couple of sittings (if not one), and I was propelled through the entirety of it, able to easily imagine his shots and characters.

[Kevin McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Was something wrong with the world?” seems to be the question hovering on the surface of this book. Self-dubbed a “cinematic novel,” the style and structure are strange and fun. I’m certain I didn’t “get” everything that Wood was doing, but the book gave me that feeling of humanity sort of wandering into a destructive version of the future that they don’t really understand. And for transmitting that mood (similar to the mood I got from Stephen Markley’s “The Deluge”), I commend the novel.

[Carl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in a sprawling suburban purgatory and filled with eerily serene apocalyptic imagery, Jeff Wood's The Glacier reads like a cinematic fever dream scripted and co-directed by David Lynch, Alex Garland, and Shane Carruth. Enigmatic, evocative, and pretty damn hard to put down.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two Dollar Radio is incredibly good at publishing peculiar books. I honestly have no idea what to make of this one. It was deeply strange, very interesting, and beautiful at times. I’d call it pre-apocalyptic and existential.

I’m still confused. That was a thing.

[Gregory Bunce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language that conjures and inflicts moods which sink into your core. As you read The Glacier, you're there.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to describe, hard to put down.

[Wheeler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong start but fell apart at the end. Way too many jump cuts.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoying and interesting--two things necessary for innovation fiction. The glacier has a lot of things hidden underneath it that will melt you're soul. The prose-poem, screenplay-as-novel conceits works to illustrate the themes of death in suburban Ohio. I myself was born in Ohio and recognized the unreal-yet-real world the characters occupy. Maybe one of things I liked most about it was the fact that it didn't have the Standard Operating Procedure MFA style so prevalent in contemporary literature. The "cinematic novel" conceit would have fallen flat, but because the theatrical is the literary is the imagistic is the slipstream flow--it works to subvert and exceed narrative storytelling. I often thought it was a story told like an atom being split or nuclear fusion happening in real time. Some of the abstractions in the book have a lovely frontier spirit about them and print the flag to plant it into the 21st century. I imagine this could be adapted into a video game one day. Anyway, it got me thinking about the narrative constraints we put on literature and how there are ways to throw them away and tell a story that disturbs the familiar and is readily readable.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguingly strange and cinematic.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story - I'm still deciphering meanings... but the layers and thought processes involved! This is a great story that challenges reality and our understanding of time and history. But why not? Sure hope the screenplay - like format means I'll see this on the big screen someday, I can already envision the moments that will stand out. It doesn't hit us over the head with all the answers, we actually have to think. The problem with cracking the code is that the answer is in code.

[Andrew Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in hybrid script style this story is a playground of visualization running the gamut of suburban sprawl and religious fervor. The characters conjured up by Wood are readily recognized even in the most bizarre moments of surreal world ending times.