WITH MOM AND DAD, IN HELL

Stray Son

A novel

by Richard Slota

Rainbowdash Publishers

A review by Christopher Bernard

Not every writer exploring the family drama in its more harrowing manifestations—in this case, one so horrendous it might seem like a morbid delusion yet may reflect the experiences of more families than one would like to believe—has invented an ingenious way to handle it that makes it endurable, human and even funny without softening its awfulness. But, in his first novel, poet and playwright Richard Slota has achieved this very remarkable thing.

Tales so terrible must often be cloaked in deep fantasy to be faced at all; their starkness is too hard to look at directly—like staring directly at the sun, it can make you unable to see anything else again.

Slota’s solution has been to concoct, amid a crew of intriguing eccentrics, a brilliantly imaginative fantasy, blended with a dash of dark humor and unexpected displays of lyricism, to explore his gothic family horrors.

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Christopher Bernard’s novel Amor I Kaos: Installment 4

—But they are. Even beyond the last hope of imagining. For example: ecstatic redemption. Love given, love received, in mutual rhythms of thrill and calm. Freedom without despair. Youthfulness without stupidity or disintegration. A quiet doom. Those fledglings out of the pocket of whatever had been lost without any hope of being found. Though it seems to be too much to ask for. In its own demented and almost criminal heat.             —Well. One always lives several lives in parallel, you slip between them, one to the other, fragments that never quite bind into a completely satisfying whole. So we lie to ourselves via the cerebral cortex, medulla, amygdala, brain stem, the requirements of grammar, and our various talents, such as they are, for story-telling, until the whole thing seems to hang together, More or less.

—Like Lincoln’s assassins.

—The truth (ignoring the cocky provocation) being too much of an appalling and humiliating mess to be borne, it’s quite beneath our dignity. Lincoln indeed.

—So I take what I can use and …?

—… and lock the rest in a back cupboard. Never throw any of it away, of course, you never know when it will become handy. But for heaven’s sake, don’t take it seriously, it will make you suicidally depressed, and what is depression but a pointless sorrow, one that does not even let you weep. And tears are sorrow’s gift, its peculiar pleasure. No. Keep truth under a strong hand and never let it forget who is the boss. You . . .

—Me?

—No. Let me repeat. Keep truth, etc., never let it, etc., who is the boss. Full stop. This side transcendence.

—And what is that, Herr Professor, she asked innocently. Not truth?

He looked at her evasively.

—Again, no. An old and terrifying yet reassuring dream of what might be if only we could shape the world’s anarchy into something like the heart’s enchantment.             Though that was not what you had said.

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