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Fissures in the architecture of the Dreamtime.
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Some Phantom and No Time Flat are two novellas originally published by Suspect Thoughts in 2006. They were reissued by Verse Chorus Press in March of 2013.
"Henry Miller said that the moment you have an original thought, you cease to be an American. These 'fissures in the architecture of the Dreamtime' are great unAmerican novellas." Thorn Kief Hilsbery
"Stephen Beachy is a visionary. In these twin novellas, he explores madness and crime with the nocturnal lyricism of empty time and space. Beachy's dear criminals reach an exquisite isolation and so does his reader, a non-place where categories collapse, like freedom and confinement, chaos and lucidity, the angelic and demonic. A harsh dream, and we will never wake." Robert Gluck
"Not since Halldor Laxness have I been so simply surprised by the glamour and skill and darkness of another writer's art ..." Eileen Myles
"Henry Miller said that the moment you have an original thought, you cease to be an American. These 'fissures in the architecture of the Dreamtime' are great unAmerican novellas." Thorn Kief Hilsbery
"Stephen Beachy is a visionary. In these twin novellas, he explores madness and crime with the nocturnal lyricism of empty time and space. Beachy's dear criminals reach an exquisite isolation and so does his reader, a non-place where categories collapse, like freedom and confinement, chaos and lucidity, the angelic and demonic. A harsh dream, and we will never wake." Robert Gluck
"Not since Halldor Laxness have I been so simply surprised by the glamour and skill and darkness of another writer's art ..." Eileen Myles
The unrooted characters of these novellas find themselves in lives resembling a film, or several films, glimpsed in between fitful dreams. In Some Phantom, an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent incident in her past. As she explores the city, takes a job with disturbed children, and fears her old life catching up with her, she must decide whether her increasing paranoia is a form of madness or lucidity. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between madness and memory, between fantasy and abuse.
These questions are further elaborated in No Time Flat -- a distorted reflection, an evil twin, the puzzle inside the puzzle. Wade is a dreaming boy living an isolated existence on the American plains. Between the silences of his elderly parents and the permutations of his own fantasy life, Wade's childhood becomes a kind of eternity. Haunted by mysterious strangers and by a shooting at his elementary school, he finally escapes into an adult life of aimless wandering. Through these desolate landscapes of fleeting connections, lost children, and unformulated crimes, a nuanced and unsparing vision of contemporary America begins to emerge.
An interview with Stephen about the novellas
and an SF Chronicle piece.
BUY IT FROM:
Indiebound
OR Powell's
OR Amazon
OR Barnes and Nobles
OR The Booksmith
"If the earth is a sphere, then the abyss below the earth is also its heavens; and the difference between them is no more than time, the time of the earth's turning. If the earth is a vast horizontal surface reflecting, invisibly, even for each man his own proper soul, then again, the abyss below the earth is also its heavens, and the difference between them is time, the time of an eye lifting and dropping." Maya Deren
from Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
These questions are further elaborated in No Time Flat -- a distorted reflection, an evil twin, the puzzle inside the puzzle. Wade is a dreaming boy living an isolated existence on the American plains. Between the silences of his elderly parents and the permutations of his own fantasy life, Wade's childhood becomes a kind of eternity. Haunted by mysterious strangers and by a shooting at his elementary school, he finally escapes into an adult life of aimless wandering. Through these desolate landscapes of fleeting connections, lost children, and unformulated crimes, a nuanced and unsparing vision of contemporary America begins to emerge.
An interview with Stephen about the novellas
and an SF Chronicle piece.
BUY IT FROM:
Indiebound
OR Powell's
OR Amazon
OR Barnes and Nobles
OR The Booksmith
"If the earth is a sphere, then the abyss below the earth is also its heavens; and the difference between them is no more than time, the time of the earth's turning. If the earth is a vast horizontal surface reflecting, invisibly, even for each man his own proper soul, then again, the abyss below the earth is also its heavens, and the difference between them is time, the time of an eye lifting and dropping." Maya Deren
from Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
