Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology

by Justin Isis (Editor), Daniel Corrick (Editor), Avalon Brantley (contributor)

From the ashes of countless decayed Modernities comes Neo-Decadence, a profaned cathedral whose broken stained glass windows still glitter irregularly in the harsh light of a Symbolist sun. Behind this marvellously vandalised edifice, a motley band of revellers picnic in the graveyard of the Real, leaving behind all manner of rotting delicacies and toxic baubles in their wake.

During the last eighty years, world culture has seen an explosion of popular aesthetics, art-forms and the movements associated with them: clothing, trends in fashion, tattoos, recreational drugs, musical sub-cultures, cosmetics, photography--all of which can be the subject of obsessions, damnations and salvations. Devices and formats, initially vulgar, are worshipped, only to be forgotten by all but the few initiates who, through their maniacal fixations, manage to uncover their hidden allure. These twelve stories and their preceding manifestos, then, arise from a shift in aesthetic consciousness: synaesthesia, ecstasy in extremes, the Divine and Infernal alike seen through a neurasthenic lens of supreme focus.

Daniel Corrick - Introduction
Brendan Connell - First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence
Justin Isis - Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence
Brendan Connell - Molten Rage
Justin Isis - The Quest for Nail Art
Damian Murphy - A Mansion of Sapphire
Yarrow Paisley - Arnold of Our Time
Ursula Pflug - Fires Halfway
Colby Smith - Somni Draconis
Colin Insole - The Meddlers
DP Watt - Jack
Avalon Brantley - Great Seizers' Ghosts
Daniel Corrick - Chameleon is to Peacock as Salamander is to Phoenix
Quentin S. Crisp - Amen
James Champagne - XYSchaton

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Anthologies

252 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2018

About the author

Justin Isis //primary succession psychic automatism citizens of teh universe publishing industry intransitive cauliflower !! Shizuka Muto's brand "Rady# is recommended International law must properly be regarded as another branch of fantastic literature

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The temptation is to give this book a five star review and not make any comments or appear to sound like a passion-infatuated first time reader. However my apologies in advance, if I sound overly gushing about this book. The book “Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology” edited by misters Justin Isis and Daniel Corrick does contain a plethora of my favorite authors and a number of authors who soon will be.

This anthology of stories will certainly be able to overwhelm you with its excellence of authors and stories presented here. The authors are published by the likes of publishers such as Chomu, Zagava, Snuggly, Tartarus and Ex Occidente. So we are talking top tier creators, working on the boundaries of wordsmithing.

You may ask WTF is Neo Decadence ? Well, Neo-Decadence is explained in the Goodreads section found here -->  https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Anyway there are probably some general lifestyle traits that Neo-Decadent writers share (Curtesy of Thomas Logotti Online):

“1. Doing cocaine, amphetamines, acid and Hydrox cookies every week.
2. Being in better shape than you really need to be (more shredded than the majority of people around you) or in worse shape than you need to be (i.e. you walk to work every day and have access to healthy food but are still fat and eat at Wendy's and Arby's all the time).
3. Having sex with more than ten people a week.
4. Being able to name at least sixty clothing designers and having detailed opinions on them all.
5. Attending High Mass in Latin just to be hardcore, despite not technically "believing" in anything.
6. Having no children, or having more than five.
7. Spitting in the street every time an academic or anyone who has attended a "Writing Workshop" walks by. “

If the reader is still with me this far, here is a list of further reading, (again lifted from TLO).

"The Last Mermaid" and Life of Polycrates by Brendan Connell.
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like by Justin Isis
All God's Angels, Beware! by Quentin S. Crisp
Daughters of Apostasy by Damian Murphy


Contents:

005 - Daniel Corrick - Introduction
015 - Brendan Connell - "First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence"
019 - Justin Isis - "Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence"
021 - Brendan Connell - "Molten Rage"
039 - Justin Isis - "The Quest for Nail Art"
071 - Damian Murphy - "A Mansion of Sapphire"
099 - Yarrow Paisley - "Arnold of Our Time"
111 - Ursula Pflug - "Fires Halfway"
129 - Colby Smith - "Somni Draconis"
135 - Colin Insole - "The Meddlers"
151 - D.P. Watt - Jack"
161 - Avalon Brantley - "Great Seizers’ Ghosts"
181 - Daniel Corrick - "Chameleon is to Peacock as Salamander is to Phoenix"
207 - Quentin S. Crisp - "Amen"
217 - James Champagne - "XYschaton"
249 - About the Authors

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the Introduction to the About the Authors page, there is a great deal to love about this anthology. It is one of several Neo-Decadence dedicated anthologies I plan to read this year. Snuggly is my new favorite press. This collection brings together powerhouse monoliths of modern experimental prose. I think I could read Neo-Decadent anthologies for the rest of my days at the expense of terminally repetitive 'classics.'

I'll elaborate on some of my favorites, though the least of these authors could write circles around the writers you will typically find by scouring literary magazines and mainstream productions.

Daniel Corrick - Introduction
Brendan Connell - "First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence"
Justin Isis - "Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence" - These three preludes did well to set the tone and prepare the reader for a wild ride. Where one competent intro would've served, we are treated to three astounding, chiseled, palpitating arguments to bolster the relevance and pleasure to be found in the volume ahead.

Brendan Connell - "Molten Rage" - Connell employs an elegant, image-heavy prose, laden with obscure terminology, dense whorls of description, and luscious settings. An explorer of imaginative interpretations of far-flung locales. His works contain a well-traveled appreciation of art, language, and the capacity of the human mind to salvage meaning and aesthetic quality out of every day experiences.

Justin Isis - "The Quest for Nail Art" - Isis is a brilliant writer who is not limited by specific subjects or genres. Everything of his I've read has been poignant, surprising, and unique. A convincing female protagonist here, laugh-out-loud social commentary, much emotional tension, and fabulous imagery and voice. Japan is his go-to setting, and his quirky portraits of detached young people are subtly disturbing and ultimately moving.

Damian Murphy - "A Mansion of Sapphire" - One of the best stories I have ever read by any author. Already a fan of Murphy's, but this one reached new heights of immersive detail. I love underground, cult-like sub-cultural motifs. Add to that an appreciation for retro video games, and the usual immense, tranquil, magisterial descriptions of dreamlike landscapes, pervaded with eldritch atmosphere.

Yarrow Paisley - "Arnold of Our Time" - Comedic, spoofy, literary. Several sharp jabs at contemporary culture.

Ursula Pflug - "Fires Halfway" - A quiet, effective meditation on more aspects of youth culture, rich and alluring.

Colby Smith - "Somni Draconis" - Good, but I struggle to remember this middle section of the book. Perhaps upon rereading I'll appreciate the nuances here. There was no detectable decline in quality, but I was disengaged here until Brantley's production.
Colin Insole - "The Meddlers"
D.P. Watt - Jack"

Avalon Brantley - "Great Seizers’ Ghosts" - A difficult, archaic, semi-historical, operatic adventure story. Makes me curious about the late author's other works. Some glimmering sentences.

Daniel Corrick - "Chameleon is to Peacock as Salamander is to Phoenix" - Suffered a bit from the overused 'plight of the artist' archetype. If you want to get on my bad side, make your main character a writer or artist whose work has never been given adequate appreciation. Here, a graphic artist slowly succumbs to an unusual form of madness. Still entertaining and well-written.

Quentin S. Crisp - "Amen" - An exercise in ultra-detailed depictions of a dreamlike moment. Something Crisp has tried before. But the author's command of language goes beyond admirable into the incredible. He is preposterously articulate.

James Champagne - "XYschaton" - A tour de force of creepy-pasta science fiction, from an outsider perspective. Displays unfortunately wearisome gimmick with the pronoun, but amounts to a treasure trove of esoteric literary memorabilia. This is how Alexander Theroux would write if he took up science fiction - which he won't. The prose is that good. Even with the pleonasms and hyper-eccentric narrator. Likely to polarize readers, but pushes the envelope on taboos and storytelling.

[Ross Scott-Buccleuch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whilst one might, at first, mistake this for another anthology paying homage to former movements (in this case the Decadent fiction of the late 1800s) allow me to cast an Ah-Ah and a No-No of a slow headshake and put you right. There's no pastiche here. No cover versions. They are elsewhere and easily found. For here are fringe visions of now. Characters in liminal zones and/or in discordance with the natural order; seeing things others can't see; shunning the natural world to glimpse obscured arcana; or manifesting auto-perversions across ones own timeline.

This is real eye-peeler of a collection overall. Even the authors whose work I thought I knew turned out truly refreshing and new (to me at least) stories. For example, Quentin's haunting chamber piece felt like a different mood than the works of his I've read. It reminded me a little of the stories of William Sansom actually.

Other highlights here include Justin's hilarious Quest for Nail Art. No-one else can write like this. Genre application and Justin's work are mutually exclusive, and I love that he got the Darkthrone 'beyond criticism' reference in there!
(The legendary Black Metal band stated that their Transilvanian Hunger album "stands beyond any criticism")
Speaking of references: James Champagne's sweet, sweet perversions had a soundtrack I was mentally nodding a "yeah boy" at. Some dark vision indeed when you worry about the authors mental equilibrium. "Turns you on, doesn't it lads?"

The two fiction debuts here (I might be wrong) are by Daniel Corrick and Colby Smith, and both are truly their own style. I'm very much looking forward to seeing more from these two.

Damian Murphy's A Mansion of Sapphire is a pixelated fever dream and stood out as a real highlight. It took me back to my Commodore 64 days. In the mid 1980s, me and my older brother used to have a boxset of 6 (I think) shoot em up games on tape for the C64. Amongst them was Renegade, Platoon (the game of the film yes) and one called Karnov. I can't remember what the other ones were now. Karnov would never load. We tried many times, after oggling the box and knowing it would be a great game, if only we could get the damn tape to load. During these attempts we'd usually leave the room. Watching the frenzied, horizontal colour bars of the loading screen fail to change to a different pattern and suffering the squall of the tapes atonal symphony was too depressing to bear witness to. One day, whilst we were downstairs trying to avoid such torture, I heard the sound of an unknown theme tune playing from out of the bedroom. I sprinted back upstairs in a daze of wonder and beheld the title screen of Karnov glowing from the monitor! I yelled my brothers name down the stairs followed by "....Karnov's on! Karnov has loaded!".
This story brought back that thrill of discovering new vistas in the true otherness of a previously obscured and artificial realm.

I was a bit disappointed to see that I'd read Brendan Connell's story before (in his Chomu collection), great though that story is.

Avalon Brantley and Colin Insoles' stories didn't do a great deal for me, unfortunately. But with so many diverse and unique visions across my palette, not everything can be to taste, sadly. (I guess this is the case with most anthologies).

Highly recommended reading and a good jumping off point for the other incredible works under the Neo-Decadent banner.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Pots! TV Mood A Potent Totem! Spot! O, Annoy! Accept! Use! Y, Thou Sewery Area! King Lip? Emu, We Wail Deviant For Toy Ego. Lo! This!"

"Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun
Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun"

"19 Strive not for perfection! To be perfect is to be as an angel, that is, dull. Angels are good for fucking (especially if they look like Emma Thompson and have eight vaginas) but other than that, little else."

The Gospel of the Fabulous Mr. Meaningless
(transmitted 10-25-04):

1. Gerevdhdnwhv stwf tv2-
2. Hear me oh aorta hqyyv,
3. Hear me oh ye old molasses that walk
4. You are nuts and Fruit-Loops
5. I am the Apocalypse in reverse
6. Evolutionary Principleality Mucus Safari
7. Ye are what?
8. What be you?
9. Selfish Selfs!
10. Oh come, Revolution!
11. I, dodo-like, reminder of extinction
12. Strive not for ye doomsday drugs, addict
13. The junk you’re on, you nihilisticunt
14. Sorry I’m not, ‘Tis must be said
15. My name is long ago hidden, you found it
16. Psychedelic water keyboards announce my presence
17. Still you ignore me?
18. The messenger of the Divinity?
19. Heal thyself, lowly Percivel clone
20. Prove to me you are what you claim to be
21. Pose not, for there is nothing but pose
22. The key is the way of the dove
23. Ascend to the lower throne
24. Psychosis is mistaken for everyone is insane
25. 96 teardrops flow from the broken eyes of God
26. God is dead and I stole his hairpiece
27. Have you ever looked at an empty niece-vessel cross-eyed?
28. UFO is the sunshine ray needed to clean our fishbowl reality
29. Reject not the flesh, walking mud
30. It is all that you are, all that you ever were
31. Look to the occult TV Station
32. And make love to sewing machines
33. Tear and rip the very fabric of your identity
34. Only then will you find salvation

Yours in Poison,
~ The Fabulous Mr. Meaningless

Reading this book is to experience the literary equivalent of the joy a cyberpunk feels when flipping through an antique 19th-century Parisian breviary and encountering a stray pubic hair that once haloed the silent flute of J.K. Huysmans.

[Patrick.G.P · Rating 5 out of 5]

A damnable collection full of vices, unnatural beauty, mind-altering substances, quests for true art in its various forms and even time travel. Drowning in Beauty is an astounding collection of short stories exploring decadence in its many shapes and forms. Almost all of the tales here stayed with me, some of them wouldn’t leave my mind for days, and some of them I’m sure, won’t ever leave. I’ve done a write-up on the stories that resonated most strongly with me, leaving out the few that didn’t spark my imagination like the others did. Bear in mind that the stories left out of this review were still highly readable and enjoyable, but not quite my cup of tea.

After two manifestos that outline the basic thought behind the literary style, or movement, known as Neo-decadence, the collection begins with a searing tale by Brandan Connell – Molten Rage, which takes us into the seedy industrialized underbelly of Milan, where our protagonist, a soon to be out of work street tough, falls into a spiral of violence, misplaced ideology, and substance abuse. Very rarely does a short story grab you by the throat and refuses to let go, the smell of exhaust fumes, and garbage drips of the pages and the intense feeling of unease this instilled in me was unbelievable, to say the least. There is a powerful futility over the story, not only in the protagonist but the whole society of Milan and Connell paints a beautiful and dark picture of a city eating itself on poverty and broken ideals. Garbage, pollution, distorted industrial complexes and substance abuse becomes beautiful monuments to society’s decadence in Connell’s writing. I almost find it difficult to convey how much I loved this story, its damn near perfect.

The Quest for Nail Art by Justin Isis:

Hostess and aspiring nail art artist Rumika live in an isolated state in Tokyo, trying to come up with the perfect aesthetic expression of herself through nail art. Her 4 phones are a digital window into social connections, various boyfriends, and acquaintances, but even though most of the story follows her interactions with other people through her phones, she is emotionally cut off from reality and exists somewhere in an ideal dream, where her husbands unassuming haircut will not distract from her D&G bag or her perfect nail art. There are no feelings, only the quest for perfect nail art.
Isis’ prose is razor sharp and he conjures up a picture of Japan that is seedy, high tech and decadent; hostess clubs, nail art salons meets love hotels. One fantastic moment has one of her friends’ chihuahua dying in her arms at a KFC and only her tear-choked scream manages to pry the other girls away from their cell phones. This story somehow made me think of the protagonist in A Rebours, whose quest for the ultimate unnatural aesthetics consumes his entire being, and a dose of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman is more concerned with skin lotion than the people around him. I absolutely loved this story as well and I need to read more of Isis’ work!

A Mansion of Sapphire by Damian Murphy:

A young woman who collects rare and peculiar video games and consoles get lost trying to do a long play of a bizarre game called The Mansion of Sapphire. Days go by without sleep, with minimal food, lost in a strange aesthetic virtual world. The obsession for aesthetic beauty takes precedence over everything else. I love how Murphy manages to create a modern aesthete in the tradition of the 1890s, here with a video game collection that would make the hipster version of Des Essientes grow sick with jealousy. The prose is wonderful, making me feel as lost as the protagonist in the queer game world.

Fires Halfway by Ursula Pflug:

Memories of a decadent love affair in Berlin during the separation of east and west comes back to the unnamed protagonist, as she reminisces about her time with a musician and their experimentation with a strange hallucinatory drug called purple. Days and nights become one and time are lost in a drug-fuelled haze of strange nightclubs, sexual encounters, and music. There is a wonderful dreamlike quality over the prose and narrative of this tale, and a melancholy trace as the narrator surely would travel back and experience it all over again.

Somnii Draconis by Colby Smith:

I’m immediately struck by the fantastic oppressive atmosphere of this tale; our protagonist has anxiety and insecurity problems in a world where crass commercialism and cheap products control our lives. He wanders a beach to get away from it all, longing to escape, to find answers in nature, in some simpler form presents itself in form of a strange man gathering fossils on the beach. The writing is really outstanding in this piece, with strange descriptions and post-modernist symbolism to create a surreal and disturbing ambiance over the story. This definitively makes me want to read more tales from Colby Smith.

The Meddlers by Colin Insole:

Following the disappearance of a senior from a local nursing home, local teenage girls find him dead in a local hollow where the teens gather to get away from the adults in their lives. Sgt. Thringarth Finds an old scrapbook in the old man’s hands that acts as a window to the man’s adolescence in the 1940s, sparked by reading of youthful exploits, the Sgt. decides to go back to the hollow to unearth a memento he left there himself when he was 14. But the act of breaching this sanctuary drags forth more than just his own teenage memories.
I really loved the gloomy atmosphere of this story, the wind whipping up snow and debris from the city, and those precious memories, never quite meant to be re-experienced, and never intended for the eyes of adults.

Great Seizers` Ghost by Avalon Brantley:

On his deathbed, Henry the V receives a visitor from an old childhood friend from Wales. The dying monarch slowly opens up this long-lost acquaintance and reminisces about their adventures in the forests and hills of Wales. But his friend has come with a purpose, to hear the dying confession of the great king. Henry the V tells the tale of the battle of Agincourt where ghostly figures appear from the mist to give the English a helping hand against the French.
Absolutely delightful tribute to Arthur Machen’s The Bowmen, Brantley really evokes the atmosphere and feeling of Machen’s tales. Beautiful descriptions of landscape and bloody warfare, Brantley’s prose is wonderful, dreamlike and full of far-off things. One of the very best tales in the collection.

Amen by Quentin S. Crisp:

Hewlett has been given the task to illustrate the last page in a bound book, the last page containing only the word Amen. Unsure of his surroundings and the very being he sets off carefully to try to do justice to the word and keep it with the style of the rest of the work. Slowly the word takes shape, and so does the imagination and creativity of Hewelet. As usual Crisp’s prose is beautiful and full of vivid, haunting descriptions, and a strange palette of colors. There is a sense of doom pervading the story here, as the protagonist’s creativity is the ultimate outlet of sin and vice, going against the Catholic dogma of doing what you’re told and never asking questions. He feels pride and accomplishment swell up as he surveys his work and his ultimate undoing. A wonderfully strange and eerie tale of how far someone is willing to go for art and beauty.

XYschaton by James Champagne:

Weird fiction references, occult sigils, YouTube sensations, The Kardashians, old SNES games. Lovecraftian entities, pop music, decadent manuscripts from the 1890s and a healthy dose of William S. Burroughs. I am at a loss for words, this is a little bit like reading a bizarro version of Fear and Loathing, but not to Las Vegas, but to a specific point backward in time, to sodomize a younger version of yourself who’s busy playing MGS while home alone. This is the best kind of brilliant crazy and had more than one laugh out loud moments of hipsterish glee snuggled between its paragraphs. An absolute joy to read on multiple levels! More Champagne, please!

Overall this is one of the best anthologies I’ve read in years, just the sheer impact of many of these tales have left me staggered after reading them, and I want to read more of these authors. An absolute must for all aesthetes, bibliophiles, and pursuers of true literary beauty!

[Nirvana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A glorious assemblage of tales on the fringes of society and creativity. Contributors familiar and new, Drowning in Beauty snatches the reader from their comfort zone and plunges them into aesthetic nirvana. No two stories resemble each other, which is very refreshing for a small press anthology.

[Robert Adam Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has a load of new-ish authors I've been meaning to check out for years, so I just dropped other genre history obligations and read this. It's a very strong anthology and an encouraging first taste of many of these writers.

I don't know how to take the manifestos exactly. How much of it is serious, how much provocations for their own sake or just jokes? There's probably some references in there I didn't get. I don't have the patience or mental steadiness to verify if these stories have much to do with the manifestos but either way I try not to judge anthologies by their supposed purpose.

I was surprised by how many of the stories were funny. Yarrow Paisley's story had something making me smile nearly every page and the absurdist style caught me pleasantly off-guard. The amazingly detailed piece by Justin Isis particularly impressed me and the parts about the hand rubs and the quiet grudge match between the hostess and one of her boyfriends were so brilliant.
I'm not easily shocked but a couple of things in James Champagne's story had me thinking "oh jeezus..." with a sinking realization at just how far it was going but it's also very funny; perhaps the funniest thing in the book is the idea that the character somehow has the pants of a boy from one of the Diary Of A Wimpy Kid films and wondering how on earth he got them.

Closer to my regular habits were Damian Murphy and Avalon Brantley's contributions.
I'm not sure if Murphy was intending a parody but whatever the case it effectively evokes moody point and click adventure games and the quieter moments of early survival horror games, it's interesting the way it emphasizes the limitations of the gaming hardware but frequently describes things far beyond those limitations and makes you wonder at how much the player's imagination is filling in the gaps. It's a very nice little world in there.
The writing of Brantley's piece is very beautiful. I really don't know how accurate her language is to the period she's portraying but I wish more historical fantasy writing was this convincing (to non-scholars like me).

[Charlie Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It obviously depends what you're looking for when it comes to prose, but the neo-decandent writers have some of the richest figurative language you'll find. This collection has a couple of really great stories too, that explore the aesthetic appeal of chameleons, or highly-saturated old video games. If you like really character-driven prose, this might not be your thing, but you should at least sample what's to offer here, as I think you'll find that prose can be just as, if not more, aesthetically pleasing than poetry. Also, this will introduce you to a wide range of writers.

[Algernon Wyck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of these writers I’ve been meaning to read, and all these stories were new to me. Despite being one of the darkest books I’ve ever read, it didn’t disappoint.

Introduction: Interesting certainly, but too complicated for the casual reader (me).
First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence: A sort of introduction to Connell’s own story. Very interesting.
Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence: Unconventionally funny and absurd.
Molten Rage: Quite the strong start to the anthology. Gritty and depressing. 5 stars.
The Quest for Nail Art: Disturbing, ultra-modern obsessions. 5 stars.
A Mansion of Sapphire: A tale of a mysterious video game. I didn’t like this as much as the first two stories, but it was still entertaining and highly original. The ending was a slight let-down though. (But on second thought, it was admirably creative) 4.5 stars.
Arnold of Our Time: An odd, surreal bit of dark humor. 4.5 stars.
Fires Halfway: A highly disturbing story about sex, drugs, and, well, rock and roll. Although it was well written, it was also too graphic for my taste. 4.5 stars.
Somnii Draconis: Wow. This was amazing. Beautiful and strangely calming, although sad in an unusual and sort of absurd way. I understand it, though. 5 stars.
The Meddlers: Another marvelous, sad, bewitching tale. “The spirit of the place” is powerful here. 5 stars.
Jack: Good story overall. The contrast between the two settings was well done. And the ending was surprisingly hopeful. 4.5 stars.
Great Seizers’ Ghosts: A dying Medieval king tells a story to an old friend. It may sound clichéd, but it has a wonderful freshness. Possibly my favorite story in the collection. The transitions between present and past tense were odd, and seemed to be unintentional. It had a surprising amount of emotion in it. And despite the antiquated language, it was not especially difficult. 5 stars!
Chameleon is to Peacock as Salamander is to Phoenix: Extraordinary! Maybe the least disturbing story in the anthology. At least 4.5 stars.
Amen: Odd. A little random (not always a bad thing) and confusing, but thought provoking. Again, at least 4.5 stars.
XYschaton: Well, that was disturbing. See content warnings. For 60% of it I had no idea what he was talking about, with all the pop culture references... got the main part though. 4.5 stars.

To summarize: A dark, disturbing, and oddly beautiful anthology of “Neo-Decadent” writers, the likes of which are usually published by Snuggly Books, Ex Occidente, Chômu Press, and Zagava. (Among others)

Content Warnings: Drug use, homicide, profanity, dog dies, drinking, sex (graphic pedophila in last story), and war violence.

Thanks for reading!

[Dutchess · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's pretty incredible how consistent the quality of this anthology is, especially considering how many different writers are present here. I normally avoid anthologies containing various authors due to the constant dips in quality, but seeing "Justin Isis" and "Neo-Decadent" on the cover let me know I had nothing to fear, not to mention the publisher Snuggly Books. If you'd like a summary of these short stories, I recommend reading L.S. Popovich's review, but I'd personally advise going into this as blind as possible.

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Coiled Coda is arguably a loose cannon. It shall be left to you to decide whether it enhances this great book, or otherwise. Only time – and triangulation by sufficient readers – can give sufficient hindsight and perspective, whichever way you zig or zag it.
This book is a literary landmark, whatever.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

[Andrew Schultheis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of short stories. Favorites were by Brandon Connell, Justin Isis, Avalon Brantley, Quentin Crisp and last but not least James Champagne's brilliant hyper-reference dropping, cringe inducing, decadent sci-fi fantasy.

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2020/0...

[Blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Ecstasy in extremes, art about art and the artists, hidden beauty" - So proclaims Daniel Corrick's introduction to this collection of Neo-Decadent writings, and it is a promise that the book makes good on throughout it's twisted and sprawling narratives. A break from the incense and camphor that swept through the writing of Baudelaire and Lovecraft, Neo-Decadence takes metaphysics and fuses it with a heady blend of metaphysics, pop-culture references and psychadelic drug trips that works to form something that at once embodies high literature and surface-level pulp surrealism. Particular highlights in this collection, though in truth they're all worth reading, are Justin Isis' "The Quest for Nail Art", Ursula Pflug's "Fires Halfway", "Chameleon is to Peacock as Salamander is to Pheonix" by the brilliant Daniel Corrick, and the wonderfully abrasive "Jack" by D.P. Watt.

[John Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction to the neo-decadent anthology, DROWNING IN BEAUTY, by Daniel Corrick gives some idea of what is meant by neo-decadence, and why I read it beforehand, to find out what that might be, though he does obfuscate meaning by too much dealing in metaphor. ‘Decadence is art about the idea of art,’ he makes clear however, and ‘ecstasy in extremes, art about art and the artist, hidden beauty; these are the defining features of Decadence. Contemporary art and fashion scenes present an inexhaustible supply of eccentric personalities and scenarios.’ He means him. ‘Fandom and counter culture are havens of the aesthetic extreme. Decadence is a mode of consciousness,’ as all writing, of necessity, is though he does go on to specify, none too specifically, ‘dying, decaying, growing and mutating as its objects do,’ those of a decadent consciousness that is. ‘Neo-Decadence will look forward to where life in the 21st century is moving.’

Brendan Connell’s manifesto adds that the writing should be artificial and shallow, without contrived emotions. ‘Then maybe something will be realised.’ What? I’ve pencilled in the margin.

‘Writing can be neither sincere nor authentic,’ Justin Isis concurs with artificial and shallow in his manifesto. Oscar Wilde was content with one; neo-decadence has advanced to two.

The first story, MOLTEN RAGE, by Brendan Connell is a good story competently told in an arc from a character’s being not very high to as low as he could go, short of death. I scored out ‘like sewage’ as otiose if ‘his writing had a mephitic tang to it’. I liked the artful casualness of ‘as the latter was throttled, kicked and finally stabbed’, especially the ‘and finally stabbed.’ I felt I’d read the story before and might have located where sooner if I’d read the publisher’s page. It interested me to compare comments. I corrected the American spelling of ‘dived’ in both but this book doesn’t indicate where it’s published, so not a British book for British people, unlike the first, published by Chômu, a British publisher you might expect consistency of spelling from. In the first book, above ‘philosophy of violence’ I wrote ‘Sorel’ and corrected the horrible Americanism of ‘off of’ to ‘from’. I was more affected by the ‘throttled, kicked and finally stabbed’ at the first reading – a ‘contrived emotion’? – but more appreciative of it as art this time around, when I also remarked as unlikely that the ‘crucifix suspended above the chancel contained a nail from Christ’s cross’. The narrator’s use of see-me language does not detract from the story telling and does emphasise the artificiality of the writing in conformity with the author’s manifesto.

The third leg of the tripod on which the prophetic arse of neo-decadence is seated is Justin Isis. The inconsistent spelling of ‘coloured’ I put down to sloppy editing. THE QUEST FOR NAIL ART is a study of a shallow disagreeable character. The writer’s control is complete; not a word is wasted, none see-me. This is art. His varnish reveals no crack to give the appearance of life beneath, an illusion which also would be art. I’m not sure his conclusion quite nails it. I looked up ‘decal’, an abbreviation of a longer word, basically a transfer.

In A MANSION OF SAPPHIRE the character’s feminine name was at odds with a male sensibility to begin with but the soft-edged style righted that while inappropriate to the intensity that goes with obsessiveness I’d’ve thought. I wasn’t sure whether the concluding sentence of Damian Murphy’s story was good or bad: ‘All that remained was the ardour of her aspiration, flaring like a dying match head,’ asking to be blown out if you ask me. It does imply imminent death, but, if only to sustain the flame, wouldn’t she drag herself off after that last sentence, however reluctantly, to the fridge?

Yarrow Paisley’s ARNOLD OF OUR TIME is more like the thing. He wouldn’t mean a Matthew or Malcolm. Most likely a Benedict, with the section heading of Arnold Addresses Congress. In fact he means any old Arnold and proceeds to juggle his balls, linguistically and metaphorically - the metaphors having literal effect - until they drop with a light conclusive thump at the end of his performance. ‘Dispirited, Arnold donned his shirt, mismatching the buttons with their corresponding holes’ is a nice touch. Good.

You don’t... well, I don’t expect to see ‘o u r’ followed by an ‘o u s’ in good writing, as Ursula Pflug’s FIRES HALFWAY is but there it was instead of ‘glamorous’. I blame the editor.

I questioned a book’s pages would crumble in a night and a draught blow it away in Colin Insole’s THE MEDDLERS but it was salient aspect of things found where they were found by a character destroying that place and its social efficacy.

I thought the main character of DP Watt’s good story, JACK, would become a jack, of the cards he was playing, and in a way he does.

In Avalon Brantley’s GREAT SEIZERS’ GHOSTS it was unlikely a dying king would have such command of language, the writer thus meeting the required inauthenticity of the neo-decadent credo.

Really? I questioned Daniel Corrick’s character’s saying in CHAMELEON IS TO PEACOCK AS SALAMANDER IS TO PHOENIX ‘it was a private matter one didn’t talk about, like masturbation.’ I have a friend who enquires how many times a week I do it and encourages me to keep my hand in more often, for the sake of my health. Dan gave me this book on my birthday and his story was surprisingly good until I was reading Quentin’s AMEN, which is brilliant if of dimmer lustre at the end, I think because based on an unbelievable mythology not made believable. Still, very good, Borgesian and best. I might look up ‘abertive’ in the Oxford to see if it exists. He means ‘aberrant’. ‘Acedia’ is sloth. The listless character’s asking how he can write his best without pride could apply to the writer himself or the justification of any writer of a self-importance that is seeking endorsement. Maybe I’m myself too decadent to be able to distinguish but all the stories seemed normal.

On reading James Champagne’s XYSCHATON I paid little heed to the title and not much to the headings, Topology, I took to mean study of place, and none at all to their enumeration. It opens with a quotation that you’d have to be of a particular temperament to find apposite, ‘the unbearable death of youth’. The writer might’ve been doing something complex and interesting, melding one conscious entity, possibly alien, with a more recessive other, maybe human, ignorant of what was being done to it. It couldn’t be an unconscious directing consciousness, the wrong way round for that, unless from the point of view of the unconscious, hardly likely since the writer uses the word, ‘subconscious’, meaning below but also under (the control of) consciousness, and it’d be ludicrous to believe the receptive entity was in control of Z. I stopped short on ‘Z have’. Surely that should be ‘Z has’. It was a grammatical mistake that looked deliberate somehow ...because who’d make it? A small child might, referring to himself as a third person while maintaining the first person conjugation, but the consciousness of Z as monitored by the writer didn’t have a childish tone to it. It was a solecism too far. The writer presumes to be sure that some of us are curious why he’s been replacing the word ‘I’ with the letter ‘Z’. ‘Is that it?’ I wrote in the margin and abandoned expectation on this simplism the writer thought clever. If I said that my exclusion from this book in no way whatsoever impairs the objectivity of my criticism of it, you might smile and deduce it does, so you know exactly what I thought on reading ‘Perhaps you’re under the impression that Z am simply being twee or that Z have employed this strategy to make this story more difficult to read/understand. But Z can assure you that it is no mere postmodern pretension.’ What, behind his mask, are the writer’s pretensions? It’s not to pornography. I did feel the merest twinge in that direction but have had a more sustained one after writing up my diary for the day. He’s deliberately eschewing pornography.

Z needed to build a time machine if he wanted to fuck himself when a boy. Easier said than done, as he himself remarks, and one would think impossible to do. You’d think he’d know if he succeeded and that no such intimation he was fucked is given leads one to believe he failed. He sits inside a box with ‘time machine’ printed on it and ...succeeds. How? By thinking? This is a character who describes a boy as ‘blonde’. If he can’t get that right.... He has no unconscious whatsoever and thus no spirit to effect anything. It’s like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic and the ship not sinking. He does smoke a pipe. It’s fair to assume he’s having some sort of hallucination which might explain why he goes, psychologically implausibly otherwise, from conscious narcissism to promiscuity and dying, from an overdose. It does not explain how, in that event, his story comes to be told.

At Topology 21 my eye took in it was composed of symbols that made no sense and passed on, glancing back to check it was meaningless before proceeding further. That was a waste of space but I’d read something like it before that wasted space. I turned back to the Isis manifesto and drew a blank, literally. I did read the manifesto again and may again have wondered what was meant by its NO SUSTAINABILITY but what I saw was a blank page, a visualisation that the story I went back to reading wasn’t correlating to the manifesto. The meaninglessness of Topology 21 makes more sense if you read the topologies in numerical order but why should you? That’s not how they’re presented. Z doesn’t fuck himself after all. He makes do. He dies thinking to make love to a boy is to drown in beauty – for fuck’s sake, I wrote – as I suppose it would be, for the sake of a puerile fuck. Has he seen boys? In the main they’re not beautiful. By and large they’re plain, if not excessively so. Besides, if he’s drowning in a sea of boys the ones below should’ve suffocated to death already. The dream of a self-induced coma does not have to be consistent but it would have to be unconscious in the first instance and realised by consciousness, and there’s no intimation that that’s the case. It’s an implausibly conscious fantasy merely. The words ‘frivolous’ and ‘trivial’ came to mind, shortly followed by ‘doodle’, to describe this story considered so good it’s culminatory and gives the title to the whole book but ‘doodle’ implies some sort of unconscious organisation. ‘Drivel’ also came to mind but that’d be insulting. I settled for ‘meretricious twaddle’ to account for its appeal to the magpie eye of the editor who’d think it glinted with value. ‘Twaddle’’s also insulting. I should think of something more substantiating like it doesn’t really hold together and I don’t just mean because he’s shuffled the topologies, presumably to give some idea of disparate spaces at disparate times while continuous read numerically and also to make the story important. None of the others so much as refer to the unconscious and one doesn’t know how deep their individual consciousnesses go. If neo-decadent, not far.

The story ends with another quotation, ‘Someone who is attracted to small boys is simply attempting to travel back in time and re-experience his own past pleasure,’ a specious justification for paedophilia. Oscar Wilde said one must not equate an artist with his subject matter and in any case there’s nothing to suggest the writer is emotionally involved with his subject. I have to say on writing this and having to find out how the time travel was effected by reading some topologies in numbered sequence, I do have a greater appreciation of the story. I’ve also spent more time on it, as anticipated.

I must not neglect to say something about Colby Smith’s SOMNI DRACONIS I made no marginal hooks to hang anything on.

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was on the fence from time to time while reading this one. The problem, alas, might be more just me, than the tales collected here, being: while I cherish for example a lot of the tenets which are proclaimed in the opening manifesto(s), I still differ wildly on the question of meaning and being. Both are in my opinion fully realizable, the former through the latter. It just so happens that I think experience, and the aesthetic experience no less, is the doorway and so it is I meet with Neo-Decadence. Anyway, programmatic differences aside, there were some exquisit delights to be had and some just fell flat. Highlights: Isis, Murphy, Brantley, Crisp. If Insole (normally all-time fave potential) and Watt would have delivered higher, the stars would shine brighter. As such there are only three.