The twelve stories in this collection are introduced with an epigraph by F.G. Lorca relating to his idea concerning the nature of duende, in a quote by a renowned Flamenco singer who says, “All that has dark sounds has duende.” Lorca concludes that “there’s no deeper truth than that.” His feeling was that “[t]he Duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought … This mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains is, in sum, the spirit of the earth.” In Spanish and Latin American folklore the duende was a fairy or imp-like goblin, and this mythical creature was the source of the artistic and musical term.
The power of duende, rather than being thought of only as a “force of nature” arising from the depths of the earth to inspire and enliven artistic works, can be thought of as well in the more Freudian sense as a signifier of its antithesis—the repressed energy that may be employed as a means of control governing the thoughts and behavior of individuals or societies. The great poet of duende himself became a victim of this repressed energy manifested as fascism in Spanish society in the Twenties and Thirties. The struggle the characters in these stories undergo is most often a conflict between their repressed hopes and desires and the liberating power of duende.
“Chele Kula,” which struck me as one of the most fascinating, as well as dramatically gruesome, stories in the book, is based on a horrific incident in Serbian history, when forces in Nish rebelling against the region’s repression and domination by the Ottoman Empire were defeated in the battle of Chegar Hill in a hideous manner, with the heads of the Serbian dead stripped of their flesh so they could be sent to the Sultan in Istanbul; yet at the instigation of the Turkish commander the skulls were instead embedded in the walls of a tower. The narrative alternates between “The Other Side,” spoken by the literally homeless and bodiless wandering spirit of Milorad, a Serbian farmer fated to be slain in the battle and beheaded by Turkish soldiers; “In Between,” which focuses on the peaceful pastoral setting of Milorad’s home and wife leading up to the brutal massacre that ends in the tower’s construction; and “This Side,” which is the present-day world of an innocent American tourist couple touring the area where Chele Kula, the tower of skulls, stands. The story focuses on the tragic loss of Milorad and his peaceful family life to the Turks, trenchantly depicting the power of patriarchal repression and aggression and the consequences faced by rebels who dare to oppose the power of the empire. For the Turks’ brutal victory leads to the construction of the tower, which stands as a permanent reminder for those who might pose future threats to the ruling powers of the land.
The title story of the book, “Old Man Evil,” counterpoints the values of conventional American society with the liberating power of duende. Vance, the story’s protagonist, has unconsciously and instinctively rebelled against his vapid life on the East Coast by escaping to New Mexico and the desert country toward which his imagination draws him. While pulling out of a self-service gas station he has a fateful encounter with a small, plucky brunette who introduces herself into the tale and onto the passenger seat of Vance’s pickup truck as “Randa Habanera. Part Italian, part Mexican, part Jewish, part desert flower.” After the two have sex in a motel room, Vance confesses to Randa all he remembers about himself and the life he’s led as a successful lawyer until he felt intuitively that he had no choice but to flee it and head off to parts unknown. The two move on to the shambolic array of mostly deserted miners’ shacks where Randa lives, and Randa’s neighbor, Andrea, reputed to be a bruja, or witch, fills Vance in on the annual festival commemorating Old Man Evil, aka Old Man Gloom, or Zozobra, the central figure in a purification rite participated in by these two and other residents of the area, who consign to the flames of Zozobra’s burning effigy mementos of the bad karma they’ve accrued during the previous year. This introduction of Vance to Zozobra leads him finally to cast off the mold of his old life completely as he gains the powers of renewal from meeting these castaways from modern society and from being initiated into the spiritual traditions of the erstwhile inhabitants of the region. For only by sacrificing items closely related to their negative experiences can they collectively appease Old Man Evil, the earth spirit and source of duende energy that allows their creative spirits to reawaken and be regenerated.
Two stories set in Türkiye, “Arif’s Refusal to Bargain” and “The Moon Has Fallen into a Well,” express a point of view that undercuts the common orientalist mystifying of Turks and other Middle-Eastern cultures and attest to the power of Czyz’s insights into the joys and struggles of ordinary Turks in their private lives. The former focuses on the life of a tea shop owner who comes to represent everything that humanity has to offer in both earthly and divine dealings, and much of the story is set in some of the most memorable sites in Türkiye that seem to beg for more imagistic descriptions of scenes in Istanbul markets and the eastern city of Mardin than are provided, while the latter exposes the fatalistic vicissitudes in the life of Erjan, a young man stuck in his dead-end job in a family-run bakery in Istanbul, who is driven by his repressed hopes and dreams into the depths of despair. The latter story recalled for me the film Wings Over Istanbul, in which Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi, a 17th century Turkish Renaissance Man, supposedly took off on homemade wings from Galata Tower across the Bosphorus to land in Asian Üsküdar, although the account of Erjan’s life has a darker and perhaps more realistic resolution given the current social life and hard economic times in today’s Türkiye.
This review offers only a brief glimpse of the wide-ranging subject matter and thematic goals of these stories, which bear strongly on the crises we face as humans on this planet that is being threatened more each day by the growing forces of repression and authoritarian control, and by the decreasing respect for the earth spirit of duende and humanistic values in general. Old Man Evil & Other Stories illustrates Czyz’s skill in conjuring up his own duende to create a collage of narratives that render an artistic vision warranting a wider readership and greater critical attention.
Old Man Evil & Other Stories, by Vincent Czyz. Running Wild Press, September 2025. 286 pages. 21.99, paper.
Mel Kenne has eight books of poetry, the most recent of which are Rites of Passage and All Told, published in 2025 by Atmosphere Press, and Galata’dan / The View from Galata, a bilingual collection in English and Turkish published in 2010 by Yapı Kredi Publishers in Istanbul. His second book, South Wind, won the 1984 Austin Book Award, and in 2010 he was one of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award winners. He lives in Eski Foça, on the Aegean coast of Turkey.
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