McAllister's Mates Seven
Apologies for how late this one is! IT Meltdowns, a book launch and an invitation to work with an exciting art gallery (detailed here) put me a little behind schedule.
An ongoing series of reviews of some of the wonderful articles, poems, and stories I’ve discovered on Substack (and other places) and more importantly the beautiful souls behind the works.
Please take a few moments to read the works of these authors and if you find their work as life-affirming and life changing as I do, then please let them know. We need to support and cherish these voices.
You can meet some of my other friends in the previous instalments: 6 5 4 3 2 1
If you want to keep me in caffeine (and keep the ghostly voices whispering for the poetry side of things) - consider clicking below. For any who do so, you have my deepest gratitude.
While I’m more of a poet than a novelist, I feel a great deal of empathy with the point of this article- (I’ve published excerpts from my epic poem “Hypnos Hermes” on Substack). I’m fairly confident in saying that we’re all in the BUSINESS of writing here (or at least have aspirations to be).
However, ours is a strange meandering business that doesn’t always correlate to a graph or numbers. It sometimes can, (NOT ALWAYS) be useful to think of our work as “products” and take an objective step back to think about how we’re meeting customers/potential customer’s expectations.
The danger (as Daniel wisely points out) is that worrying too much about numbers can sap your enthusiasm and imagination, stagnating the work, or even worse lead to a calculated approach of chasing topics and buzzwords. These forces are more dangerous to your craft than any (temporary) viewer slump. Stories haunt us, chase us, and demand to have their way. The novel or series you’re working on started life because there was something about yourself or the world around you that you’re seeking to understand or even transform. This is your work’s true value to yourself and others, and you should never abandon it to chase some transitory trend or “upping the numbers”.
Writing is a long game - chasing inspiration, researching those ideas, and the long long hours of editing. Finding your audience (or perhaps revealing yourself to them) is a long part of the journey. Have faith in the work, have faith in yourself, and faith in them. In the meantime, let Daniel’s gentle encouragement and wicked sense of humour cheer you up.
Untitled Virtual Gallery
I was VERY excited to be invited to show work in this gallery. Some readers may remember the prehistoric days of the internet - the search engine wars (alta vista, AOL keywords, ask Jeeves et al) and the exciting sound of the 56k modem. We were all fascinated by the possibilities of the internet and envisioned an immersive virtual world with huge libraries containing exquisite culture-shifting works of art and literature that we could wander around in a virtual body.
Fast-forward a few decades and the culture-shifting works (which do exist) are buried deep beneath mounds of adverts, petty bickering, and automated AI horrors all delivered by bland identikit webpages that run together after a few clicks.
This is something Mathieu Decodts’ Untitled Virtual Gallery seeks to remedy. The gallery is created as an immersive 3D space where you can wander at your leisure and soak in some of the most beautiful and intriguing art and poetry from the underground Northern Ireland art scene.
Mathieu has put enormous work into the gallery - crafting the digital space itself, curating wonderful works, and being a huge motivating force for the artists themselves (as I can testify).
The quality of the work is only equalled by the variety with a wide selection of photography, paintings, pencil sketches, and digital illustration on display covering a multitude of themes. Online resources like this one are an invaluable refuge and stand in stark contrast to an ever more stressful, noisy, and frankly negative internet sphere.
A pretty poem musing on a delightful summer meadow with Keats-lite lyrics it is not. A dramatic gothic inversion of a summer scene, it very much is. The uncomfortable stickiness of a particularly hot summer’s day takes on a malevolence that seems to drive the earth itself to vengeful irritation, maybe even anger. There are wonderfully unsettling descriptions of brambles and vines twisting and reaching, driven by some dreadful centralised intelligence.
The narrative turns from fear and awe to reverence and even tenderness as the narrator takes a new view of the scene (or perhaps even turns their soul). The menacing trees become angelic silhouettes and sunlight becomes illuminating rather than oppressive. Despite showing a gentler aspect, the poem retains its sense of gothic drama, and the theme of our insignificance in the face of nature’s omnipotent grandeur loses none of its power.
While this piece resembles HP Lovecraft’s writing or even Philip K Dick’s more supernaturally themed works (“The Cosmic Puppets” or the latter chapters of “Eye in the Sky”). The poem shows restraint and stays grounded in the natural world. Where it refers to angelic and alien forces, this is just to describe the narrator’s state of being rather than presenting a cheap or obvious ghostly creature. I enjoyed this poem and I can highly recommend wandering through its meandering paths of deep shadows and dazzling sunbeams.
This one reminds me of two of my favourite “world-building” books (yes THAT word) - namely “Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C Clarke and “The Tombs of Atuan” by Urusla Le Guin. While those works concentrated on grander (and arguably easier to dramatise) locations of cathedral-like alien spacecraft or vast caverns where darkness almost breathes and whispers, here we get vivid depictions of domestic objects becoming ever more unsettling.
The writing is vivid and incredibly visual. Objects in the room take on a life of their own, combining to form the internal organs of a giant monster. The atmosphere becomes ever more paranoid, claustrophobic and darkly mystical.
The mystery is the beating heart of this piece, so I’m reaching the point where I’m getting reluctant to type more details for fear of spoiling. What I can say is that we meet a very interesting character. The tense, atmospheric description, and captivating dialogue reach fever pitch. The ending is mind bending, and yet a perfectly logical conclusion to events….
Enough from me! Get reading, but you will need to sleep with the lights on after….
I hope you enjoy these beautiful works as much as I enjoyed reading them and writing about them.
You can meet some of my other friends in the previous instalments: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Substack has proven to be a treasure trove and I already have a few more gifted writers lined up for my next review newsletter.
I've shamelessly stolen three of these for DREAD 12. I mean, good is good!
My phone's ringtone is the sound of a dialup modem connecting. Anytime she's around my wife reminds me how much she hates that sound, I've never told her what it is.