Book Review: Creeping
Waves by Matthew Bartlett
Muzzleland Press 2016
Got a story for ya.
When I was a kid there was a small convenience store about a
mile or so from my tiny little white house on Miami Street in McAlester, Oklahoma. It was actually more like a general
store, not unlike the joint run by Sam Drucker on Green Acres. Scuffed wood
floors, sticks of candy in Mason jars next to rows of out of date moon pies and
Cherry Mashes. It always smelled like a combination of coffee, smoked meat, and
oldness. Earthen. Musty. Flavorful. It was an establishment where a boy could
buy a bottle of Orange Crush pulled out of a deep freeze tomb and buy your
goodies "on tab" if you were a bit short of pocket money. Homey and
comfortable to a fault, it was a favorite stop of my friends and myself on our walks home from school. But there something about the place that always felt a
bit...off. Often, when we would go inside, the place would be empty. Even when
someone was working, shelving goodies or mopping the floors, it would still
feel empty. I always felt kind of like I was sneaking into some place I shouldn't have been nosing about in. This feeling gave me an odd thrill. I sometimes
visited without buying anything just to soak up that feeling.
I was never sure who owned the place. I always assumed it
was the wizened old guy working at the butcher's table behind the counter,
close to the back of the store, behind a curtain of red spattered plastic. He would ring us
up from time to time, smiling coldly and rarely speaking. He had the ugliest
hands I had ever seen. Nails yellowed and too long, jagged about the edges and
stained with nicotine. Knuckles were the size of lugnuts on a tractor. Shot
through with a network of red and blue vein-work. Looking at them gave me the
same feeling I encountered while walking about the store. That emptiness. That
thrill. That sense of the haunted.
I get that same feeling diving into Matt's work.
Creeping Waves is
the follow-up to MB's deliciously perverse Gateways
to Abomination, and it's an astounding achievement in not only the realm of
weird fiction, but in the artistry of fiction as a whole. Believe me, you ain't
never ate up anything like what Bartlett cooks up, and the casual
consumer might have a hard time embracing his brand of crazy-ass genius. MB
requires a brave reader, an adventurer, a rebel.
Bartlett's fiction is set in a cursed pocket of decadent
cosmic hell called Leeds. Although, for all of the vivid, often strikingly
beautiful New England trappings and cultural pinpoints, it might as well be a
fragmented shard of insanity culled straight from Stygian Shores. A domain
of damnation populated with misshapen, cursed beings who seem to be caught up
half in the real, partly in an oblivious hexed state, and often both at once.
This is a realm where the dead never really die all the way and madness is the
daily special. Nothing in Bartlett’s world is normal, not even close. Yet,
everything is somehow unnervingly familiar. Cozy. You’ve been here. You’ve broken
bread with these folks. They’ve prayed for you and slept with you and borne
witness to your confessions. Yet hiding beneath the mask of familiarity is often
an inhuman, godless horror. All of it bound and gagged together by the
otherworldly broadcast of an infernal radio station.
Many of the tales encrypted within Creeping Waves fall into the category of flash fiction. Hot, dark
bursts of ugly brilliance bruised with a tinge of perverse sexuality, broken up
by longer, more thoughtful efforts, interspersed with cryptic entries from the pages
of an eldritch catalogue of rare grimoires and daily news broadcasts delivered
from a being known only as “Uncle Red”. It’s a brilliant exercise in
unstructured structure, and provides the entire work a profound sense of
cohesion. Of place. And that’s the
real star of Bartlett’s cinema of atrocity. Leeds. His home base. His Hades.
His delectable bad place. A Hell I might not mind paying a visit to when I'm of a mood.
Again, this is a work designed for the fearless reader. A
seeker in the dark. Cringing pussies need not apply. Fans of weird fiction will
lap this up with a spoon and threaten violence for second helpings.
Myself, I’ll
be waiting at the supper table, bowl in hand, awaiting Matt’s next meal.
WXXT forever, baby.
Buy Matt’s goodies here:
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