Well, I’m beyond blown away by this review of INVAGINIES from Zachary Gillan, a weird horror critic and thinker who I respect tremendously. I gobble up his recommendations about books to read. I really dig his fiction critiques even when I don’t necessarily understand everything he says. If you think I use words like “intersemioticity” in my everyday conversation, I hate to break it to you, but you’re wrong!
My work is smarter than me, in a sense, which is true for a lot of writers and artists. That’s how surrealism works. It’s not about logic and it doesn’t come from a place of study and erudition, although none of those qualities are detrimental to its process. It’s just that surrealism is bigger than that.
I guess the simplest way I can put it is that writing surrealism is like dreaming out loud.
Zach spent so much time with the stories, grasped the connective tissue between them, and compared me to one of my favorite painters, Roberto Matta. (What a delight!) He did a better job explaining the influence of surrealist art on my writing than I ever could:
Koch is a descendent of the surrealists, and for him description itself escapes the bounds of the knowable. Recall that Ercolino linked the maximalist paranoid imagination to a “profound desire to re-enchant the world”; many of Koch’s characters are searching for meaning anticosmically, internally or externally; seeking to escape this capitalist rationality, this Gnostic prison of reality. For the co-founder of surrealism André Breton, beauty was something that must disturb audiences with psychological upheaval or be nothing at all, and Koch’s characters are often looking for that quality in the abject and monstrous. In “Convulsive, or Not At All,” for example—its title itself taken from Breton’s Nadja (1928)—an embodied void is born in an orgasmic convulsion of “the antagonism of negating existence through extreme biology; the love that drives them towards beauty, always beauty, for beauty must be.” For Koch, the search for beauty goes hand-in-objectionable-hand with abjection.
Here’s the rest: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/invaginies-by-joe-koch/
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Horrorsong 