There is an unraveling in the testamental helices of the AJPD which speaks: “A man is a scream, smothered by the avalanche.” And from that strand there breeds this gonadal fiqh: “the blood of those who submit to the squeeze—the breeders, the feeders, the readers corresponding to the serfs, the megalopolis and the monastery—evaporate communally. The Heavens drink and even a man’s massacre lacks individuality.”
The POVs in The Devil’s Library by Joachim Glage do a lot of erudite screaming, whether crying for help or to draw attention to their own eccentricity or the weirdness of those they’ve dedicated their lives to stalk across graveyards, swamps and sinister auction houses. Here, obsessions are the avalanche, a crushing destiny, but Glage is a whimsical God. He amplifies the voices of the doomed briefly, allowing us to comprehend their gibberings however abstruse in blasphemy or specialized in vocabulary. His narrators are theologians, public domain opportunists, or otakus of the defamatory, “investigating” murders for the purpose of ruining the reputations of the victims, publishing allegations of infantile occultism, desecrating libraries to find relics of infamy. Not that they do so without risk. The default mood is hysteria. I was as astonished when I read that “Laertus did not gasp,” as the POVs are to decrypt their private and pending cataclysms from some Satanic manuscript.
The loneliness here is absolute, the seclusion from commonplace objects in space. In most of these stories the secular world, with its mannequins, vanishes entirely. The residual world exists only to justify the perplexities discussed. Textually, there is nothing superfluous except the redundant use of fake bibliographic data. The characters are fanatics and faithful only to the “A” plot and their proprietary circumstances. Without question, Glage’s POVs fuck reluctantly and spawn heirs on the condition that their kids will be be forced to inebriate themselves, via erudite placentas, on their parent’s insane preoccupations. The outlier may be the poet Felix Degrand whose rhapsodies lapse into Glage’s natural style which he suppresses in favor of the rigor and lucidity of an antique orator (brevity may be attributed but frugally).
And be prepared for oratory. This is a book which tells and the first thing we are told, in “A Note on a Note on the Paraclitans,” is that a certain Paraclitus and his followers worship Finitude, employing esoteric jibber jabber as a verbal front organization disguising a commonplace suicide cult. A friend of Plato joins and obediently kills himself. Enraged, the philosopher seeks out Socrates to refute Paraclitus, a Socrates who tolerates our neural meat only because it is somehow linked to Deathless Archetypes (for example the supernal all-cap entities LAPTOP, MENAGERIE, PERVERSITY). I wonder if Glage meant to write that Plato invented Socrates not only to attack the Paraclitans but to defend the words he put into that imagined mouth from:
1)Charges of flatulence. See Aristophanes.
2)Charges of boredom. See that work of Xenophon traditionally called “The Apology,” slanderous because Xenophon never apologizes for his sleep hormone Socrates. Of course these speculations violate chronology. But this is fiction after all, and the pesky calendar dates of history can stand adjusting.
Whether figment or verifiable vesicular POV, what is the author’s intention here? Why does he invent a Plato who refutes himself, disappointing the ghost of a duped and beloved corpse, by inventing a master who annihilates himself, excelling the Paraclitans in glorious suicide? I ask because it illustrates a problem with many of the stories in this collection. The endings don’t end much of anything. I suppose the more intolerant Paraclitans would burn this book whose controversies, disputants, and eschatologies, stretch endlessly past the page. Our reading of the book is a mere intersection with an infinite text. We read, and we comprehend certain truths but those truths may be execrated, eviscerated, shrugged off by lines which cannot be read because it will take an eternity for them to be written by a culpably lazy or inarticulate Oversoul, attributes insuperable for any divine entity lest he violate his own perfection and become imperfectly lazy, etc. If Glage or his publisher chose the story order of his collection carefully, and I suspect one or the other did, you could claim that The Devil’s Library (which on second glance, may be retitled the Devil’s Zesty Propaganda Library as Written Quite Flamboyantly on Human Meat) actually serves as propaganda, not in favor of the devil, but against the cult which inaugurates the book. Throughout, neverness is proved more beautiful than everness. But then I may be misremembering the book. The Devil’s Library, by Joachim Glage. JackLeg Press, September 2024. 234 pages. $18.00, paper. Arreshy Young’s work was recently awarded the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction and has appeared in The Ex-Puritan, Western Humanities Review, Carousel, and Midway Journal. He is also the author of a short story collection CODON, published by Calamari Archive in January 2025. Every story he writes is a kind of parasite expelled from its unbrotherly host. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 