The title Lord of Chaos sounds like an entry from the metal canon, and then Daniel Beauregard’s online persona, which you can get glimpses of on X, does hint at a kind of metal aesthetic—perhaps that’s the scene in the author’s current home of Buenos Aires? The city sounds like a South American literature mecca, and I imagine this author living a Cortázar-Vallejo-Tool dream, translating Spanish poets and writing novels whilst chomping coca leaves. Bio-textually speaking, this innovative book is a cell containing ribosomes amenable to several mRNA transcriptions. Here experimental horror acid chains pierce lipid membranes to potentially synthesize surrealist proteins. Ecopoetic code, such as those contained in Guattari’s Three Ecologies, will metabolize through certain organelles of Lord of Chaos if so deployed. All this said, the text is so bereft of pretence, so impervious to the manic dust storms of signification, and so far removed from easy cultural categories, that such impositions could very well prove carcinogenic.
The POV is a fascinating and enigmatic “we.” This “we” is a ghostly signifier at once social yet personal, possibly a single narrator in twain, and we hover just behind its collective shoulders. So forth in this manner we are privy to a molecular Bardo-like experience of coming in and out of a nebulous state filled with blobby visions of different zoological scenarios, from the cervid-tribal gestalt of herd animals, then into the Void and out again to be seeded into a world of salmon fry consciousness that bubbles through the text in a breathtaking intervention of concrete poetry, only to veer into the script of an archetypal crone who fecundates the salmon brood with her vomit before launching into an incantatory invocation of nature’s qualities like some Esmeralda Adam: “The Sea is blue … the water is wet … the air is cold … the Grass is Green … the Branch will break … the Air is Cold … The Water is wet … the Sea is Green … the Branch will Break … the Void is Pure … the Branch will Break … the Air is Cold …”
No page numbers sequence the cellular goings on in this pocket-size offering from UK-based Erratum Press: “We have this: there are the voids—together only one—separated for the convenience of our ideas such that one floats above our head, while the other supports our body; in other words, the void once passed and our expansion frontwards, now blocked by the hindrance…” The narrative commences with an exploration of the Chaos state about which religions and sciences have so much to say (take Genesis, or Thermodynamics). Yet there are no head-on literary allusions to a supposed exterior mooring or tradition in this book, no proper nouns, perhaps only one reference to a place name, so Lord of Chaos has an essential, enduring quality, like some tenacious creature slinking through the numinous slime.
“The way we begin about the wolf is through the motion of a story about a wolf,” says the crone, in a line that captures the sense that language here is itself the substance of creation. We access reality through the mimetic trajectory of the language.
The void scenes and sense of collective reincarnation is then complicated as the story moves into human-style horror motifs, preying on our fears of the body unknown and of the doctor gone bad. Meet the terrifying and enigmatic “architect” who stitches the pieces of human cadavers into chimeras constitutive of being itself. Stolen teeth and breasts from a mastectomy become material for the not-so-good doctor’s demonic process: “… he’s sculpting new meaning by warming it into a self-contained, entirely new idea, poised in frame with the ancient bone needle, slowly threading through the sense of things.”
We enter the psychiatric ward where the narrator, the “we,” participates in a tortured interview: The Poet, the Cave, The Missing Limb come into orbit, and the doctor (who may or may not be the architect) is asking a series of questions about the experience of those nonhuman worlds, probing into the hallucinatory state of the patient. This includes being a house fly among the livestock in the hold of a ship (“we just flew around and laid on the piles of shit … there wasn’t much else to do”).
We are called upon to unlock the code. In fact, at a certain stage we are provided with a Psychic Map Attachment: “To facilitate travel through these various realities, we’ve created a psychic map composed of certain sigils…” In each reality break (book section), we are told, is a limb we must rescue (“a fail-safe word, object, or feeling”). Furthermore, “… the objective is to enter each reality, locate its corresponding limb and proceed to the next one without incident. They’re designed to emit a psychic resonance frequency you’ll be programmed to react to.” This moment of guidance was surprising given the freeform context of the book, as was the hypnotist conceit that comes in fleetingly. Any instructional tone is soon unwound and erased, thankfully, by the fading and reformation of the narrative.
It’s a joy to discover a rare novel such as this one. The type of anti-novel that many wouldn’t appreciate. The odds would have been stacked against this novel 20 years ago, but now with these global webs of niche readers and publishers mobilized through social media, video readings, and gatherings, challenging art novels find their ways into hands of readers who dig strange conceits, such as the blue ball hovering under a bed (“A BOX AND A BLUE BALL BELOW THE BED FAR BELOW WHERE THE GROUND GETS SOFTY”).
From a purely craft perspective, Beauregard’s novel is noteworthy for the way it hacks many of the structural problems inherent in the fiction form. What is this book? It’s alien, peculiar, revelatory. You’d begin to call it a long prose poem but then say no, there is too much narrative movement. To call it an epic poem would seem reductive and wildly misleading, though it shares with that classical form the methodological wielding of poetry, story, and vision. Any “character” is simply swept away or part of the flow of the language, and thus we never feel the need to pretend that we’re seeing fully formed individuals. The language, the words, the limbs, and voidlings, and us, collectively form the character though expanding homeostasis: “Spots of Pain, they’re moving, pieces of our parts are bursting open, with life it seems. We feel something squirming. Thousands of tiny eggs spill out of our body onto the ground.”
The plot stretches in the margin, gutter, white space, the confluence of signifiers in the syntagmatic field explored by theorists such as Brian McHale. The text fades as the story becomes liminal and brightens again with immanence at the complex typographical prompts of designer Mike Corrao. It hums at the energy level of the lower organisms, the chain of being collapsed in on itself. William Rueckert’s conception of language as plants and poets as sun played out within a bodily lithosphere.
This is a stellar book for those looking for a poetic-philosophical challenge and a surrealist playdate. It’s the essential myth of this world told as only this author could have done and the last scene lingers. It rises into your mind, a glowing fish-text, a muskellunge swerving to the side of your goggles, until “the lives once lived end in darkness and we are brought back to this place. Thoughts from the place of the living and the dead, receding always back into familiar darkness.”
Lord of Chaos, by Daniel Beauregard. Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England: Erratum Press, September 2023. 290 pages. $13.99, paper.
Josh Massey’s most recent fiction and poetry has been published in ergot., SurVision, Prairie Fire, Don’t Submit, and the anthology Mirrors Reflecting Shadows with Outcast/Roi Faineant/Anxiety presses. In 2022 he presented a paper on the phenomenon of cyberwriting, “Ruthless LA: The Life and Times of Elizabeth V. Aldrich,” for the PAMLA conference at UCLA. He is author of the novels We Will All Be Trees (Conundrum Press, 2009) and The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree (BookHug Press, 2015), and lives in the Kootenays of western Canada where he teaches in the English faculty at Selkirk College.
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