Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-935738-12-1
Paperback, 206 pages, $14.95
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s sixteenth-century triptych – and the titular inspiration for George Williams’ collection – presents the viewer with a complex, bizarre, and powerful menagerie that depicts the purity of godly creation sullied and manipulated by humanity’s darkest desires and the outlandishly hellish consequences for those who would transgress. Gardens of Earthly Delight perfectly harnesses the painting’s sinister energy and recasts it upon a bruised contemporary landscape where the many-colored serpents have grown bold enough to hawk their tragic fruits with an increasingly blatant brutality and proclivity for deception. These disturbing, funny, and remarkably crafted tales dutifully examine an all-too-familiar world where the unexpected is inevitable, and where a deliciously seductive darkness is always lurking.
The book’s 16 short stories (the longest one, “Miss September,” comes to just over 21 pages) run an impressive visual and spatial gamut that spans such seemingly incongruous locales as the near-apocalyptic ruins of the storm-beaten Gulf Coast, pristine yet foreboding European peaks, and an otherwise inconspicuous suburban neighborhood inhabited by witch covens and an alchemist-turned-criminal mastermind. Armed with a vast knowledge of esoteric and Biblical minutiae, Williams infuses his motley “gardens” with oddly prescient juxtapositions of historical infamy and unnerving manifestations of technological modernity – the Antichrist’s parents travel through Spain and broadcast each step of the diabolical pregnancy via a live web feed, a possible reincarnation of Jeanne D’Arc terrorizes Philly’s infidels with an automatic assault shotgun while decked out in a full suit of medieval body armor, an unfunny Quixotic soldier rides a talking mule on decrepit highways thwarting auto mechanic crackheads and littering SUV drivers. But whether steeped in pseudo-fantasy, dark realism, hardboiled noir, or good old American crime fiction – and Williams is at his best when jumbling elements from several of these modes – the stories and their strange protagonists share an almost perverse elation at the possibilities, both illicit and noble, that these worlds offer.
Perhaps more saliently, there’s also a DeLillo-like sense of impending dread and self-served doom as it pertains to both global and regional culture, the fright of belonging and the numbness that manifests as a natural defense mechanism, to say nothing of the potential for bouts of extreme hostility and near-animalistic frenzy that seem to arise from the land, both organically and mechanically. What one elderly character relates when he describes his younger countrymen: “in reality they were simply caustic and foul-tempered individuals, often sneering at one another in traffic and snarling with laughter at public functions, like dogs infested with the hydrophobia virus.”
The places and themes with which Williams wrestles are undeniably enthralling, but what ultimately makes him so addictive as a writer lies with the prose itself. The sentences bend effortlessly from the simple and descriptive yet subtly pregnant – “The hut, more like a hostel or chalet, smelled like damp woodsmoke” – to the lusciously arcane and Wikipedia-search-worthy – “The next week I spent in the basement at the laboratory furnace, consulting Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnu, et al., on phagadenic water, pomphlix, oil of tartar per deliquim, butter of antimony, calcothar, and material perlata of Kerkringius.” On both a superficial (no quotation marks) and technical level, the completely stripped-naked dialogue captures the essence of what Cormac McCarthy does best, in that Williams uses it as a technique to forward the narrative, to create psychological landscapes and embellish physical landscapes with language that is at once colloquial and deceptively meaningful in its economy. Because the dialogue is so grounded in realism, it also serves to successfully lull the reader into a false sense of predictability in a collection where the unforeseen is as plentiful as it is shocking. An evening at Hooters becomes bloody and suicidal, a surprise birthday party transforms into a deadly shootout, a couple in search of gemstones spends an afternoon mundanely bickering only to be forced into performing a molestation ritual with a Christian cult, all at the turn of a few carefully crafted phrases. Perhaps the best part about reading Gardens is knowing that you have no idea what’s going to happen even when it does, that the directions in which you might be led are as vast as the vapors of time and all the sinners writhing in the gardens they’ve made.
One of the most noteworthy aspects of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is the sheer diversity of human activity and emotion it depicts, from the calm innocence of Eden to the often fantastical acts of joyous rowdiness and brazen sexuality to the ghastly and unpreventable agonies of the hellscape to come. Even for those whose pursuits remain relatively chaste, the only endgame seems to reside in darkness. At its core, Gardens of Earthly Delight is a thorough and impressively crafted study of human relationships and the choices made because of those often tragic encounters. Yes, the world is a truly fucked up place, but if we can take anything from the book, it is that those who embrace the snafus of contemporary life and stay true to whatever impulse guides them – whether revenge, religious purging, self-obliteration, love, or money – will probably be better off for it. Like the co-ed-turned-vigilante protagonist of one of the collection’s most striking stories, “Zermatt,” who learns that she must give up more than a small part of herself in order to possibly free a kidnapping victim she’s crossed continents to save. But she feels no fear or remorse, only a calm satisfaction at staying true to the impulse behind the path she’s chosen, at accepting the tortures of this garden and the next one. Why, even as her body freezes, “in all her life she had never felt so warm.” Delightful indeed.
Chris Vola's reviews, essays, stories, and poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Word Riot, Prick of the Spindle, Verse, Emprise Review, Used Furniture Review, twenty20, Blood Lotus, and Staccato Fiction. Vola is the chapbook reviewer at Deadly Chaps Press and the forthcoming Short, Fast, and Deadly Monthly. He is the author of the chapbook, Recurring Childhood Nightmares.
