Jeremy Maddux > Recent Status Updates

"I still didn't feel married for 2 and a half years until she divorced me. Then I found a woman who had ants for pets and fed them sugar. I got her pregnant." The only difference between these lines presented as poetry and the same lines presented as fiction prose is the superficial way they look. One of the reasons I despise poetry but tolerate Bukowski: he only called his work poetry to feel a certain way.

Lyla hesitated and then asked as gently as she could, “So are you going to let me leave?” “No.”

Lyla laughed weakly. How could she be laughing after the hell she’d been put through? But, miracle of miracles, she was. She also felt calm and safe, two things she shouldn’t feel unless she was away from the Pyres. “Why did you do that?” “Because you deserve to live your own life. You were content, and Gavin had fucked up. Sometimes you only get one chance, and I wanted him to learn that lesson.”

I must have thought I was buying a book about something else when I got this ages ago. Right now, it reads like new age gobbledygook, one of those soft Breatharian/Raelian type cults where Jesus Christ exists, but only as one god in a pantheon of gods from every culture. Basically, a mishmash of spirituality that borders on incoherence.

This sounds exactly identical to the things I've been pondering.

Next, He dials the Black Mountain Institute and on the television, offscreen, a beast tells the man in the suit that at night, the other beasts, they howl too, only because the sky is made to look like meat.

Kleine, Mike. Kanley Stubrick (p. 45). We Heard You Like Books. Kindle Edition.

'It was known formally as the Global Agreement and Standardization on Barn Agistment Growth, although that was too long to remember. For a time, it was called Noreen’s Agreement, but then it quickly became just the Corner Agreement.'

There we go. I was waiting for the true agenda of this book to unmask. Here it is. Barnyard animals want to be carbon taxed by the UN. What a joke of a story.

'Through hideous means over many years, I maintained the thick shell of the Gallwomb to inhibit the demon-litter from escaping. Likewise, I organized a host of guardians. Armored vagrants, once lost souls turned stout believers in Augury, now stalked the perimeter of the Fountain prepared to attack any creature that may hatch. All had been artisans. I recognized some as descendants of the mystery Picti cult.'

'He glared from deep, sunken sockets beneath a brooding brow, delivering a singular coldness reminiscent of my father’s stares. I yielded to these painful spells, allowing the image to rake the interior of my skull, slowly lacerating and peeling the fragile astral veins that cohered soul and bone.'

'With their images still registering in his mind he came to a limitless cavern. At the center, the Queen’s abdomen floated as an island. Her ballooned mass would dwarf the Gravenstyne Fortress, so large and awesome was the Queen. Bodies of dead elders floated about her, with iron crystals growing from their rusting metallic exoskeletons and the broken shells of a thousand eggs breaching the surface of the black sea.'

Best. Synopsis. Ever. Pug Grumble has got to be a pseudonym, though.