Wow, I am blown away by this review by David Fitzgerald of the anthology Children of the New Flesh. Aside from taking me on a spiraling neurotic autofiction journey through David’s own psychosexual history and relationship with Cronenberg’s work, I’m delighted by his comments on my contribution “Invaginies.”
Here’s an extensive quote from David’s review:
All my prep pays immediate dividends as the book’s opening piece of fiction, Joe Koch’s “Invaginies,” reads like a tightly compacted ball of Cronenbergian runoff waste rendered ferociously corporeal by the ravages of its own journey toward sentience. Though officially nested under the Transfer section (Cronenberg’s goofy first short about a needy patient stalking his psychiatrist into the wilderness), this seething, first-person inhumanifesto makes at least passing reference to all seven shorts, as well as VIDEODROME and DEAD RINGERS, in taking a mass shooter’s aim at every social, medical, political, and biological system that’s led to its narrator’s incarceration in some harsh, institutional future. The promiscuity of Koch’s source material, and the vehemence of his delivery, conspire to give “Invaginies” the feel of both an honorific preamble to the rest of the book, and a “fuck the assignment” opening salvo against whatever order or logic one might have hoped to find there. Cronenberg, this piece viciously snarls from its feces-smeared psych-ward cell, has no answers for you. He is not here to warn you about the downfall of humanity, or even to commiserate in its dystopian descent. He is here to prepare you. To pop your pustular preconceptions and slurp you up into what’s already begun. To invade, infect, transmute, and rebuild you into something that’s ready. Something that could survive. Something that, someday, just might “fuck this building so hard it falls to the ground.” -David Fitzgerald
What more can I say? Read the full review on Daily Grindhouse. It’s well worth your time.
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