this man well and truly gets it: Blacker Against the Deep Dark, by Alexander Zelenyj

9781908125767
Eibonvale Press, 2019
375 pp

hardcover

"It was the world that got inside me. I want to be cured of the world."   


Reading the work of Alexander Zelenyj is not only a personal pleasure, but it is an experience never to be forgotten.  While immersed in this author's newest book, Blacker Against the Deep Dark, as was the case with his previous collections, Experiments at 3 Billion A.M.  and Songs for the Lost,  time collapsed and the outer world just melted away.   Like the "indelible mark upon the future" left by "the horrors of the past" in the title story of this collection (as noted by Trevor Denyer in the introduction to this book),  Blacker Against the Deep Dark leaves an "indelible mark" on the souls of its readers, one that never goes away long after the last page is turned and the book goes back on its shelf.  This man well and truly gets it.  

The blurb offers the barest of clues as to what will be found here,

"From a man having a conversation with the shadow of a human being blasted into a wall by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, to a pastor giving shelter to the most bizarre individual to ever walk the Earth; from a secret group at war with the physical manifestations of disease that have run rampant for ages, to a pair of detectives trying to solve the mystery of a deadly otherworldly drug that legend says holds the power to open the gates to Paradise. These, and other dark and weird tales..." 

 but at the same time, it doesn't tell you that once you start reading you are undeniably in the hands of a master of his craft. These stories are dark indeed, weird yes, but at the same they are  beautiful, raw, and overwhelmingly powerful; they also hit the deepest (and sometimes bottomless) depths of unsettling, as they should.   There's a method to this author's madness here, as the stories reflect a particular theme that continues throughout the course of this book which I'll leave for others to discover, just briefly hinting at it in the quotation from one of the ultimate best stories in this book, "Journey to the End of a Burning Girl," with which I opened this post.

from the cover

Speaking of the stories in this book, I won't go into any of them, but they all take place in worlds not unlike our own, in which people live with loneliness and isolation, pain, depravity, gut-punching cruelty that takes many of them to the outer boundaries of extreme, some looking for cures and others looking for their own means of escape. It is a book that drives you into the darkest zones of humanity, but at the same time, the author recognizes that there is good in people, leaving just the tiniest opening of hope that all may not be lost.

Another highly, highly, highly recommended book that should be on the shelves of anyone who reads modern dark fiction/weird/strange tales; it's also a lesson for aspiring writers as to how it should be done.  I seriously don't know what can possibly top this book over the next eleven months.
Anyone who has read Mr. Zelenyj's previous books will find much that is familiar here, but in Blacker Against the Deep Dark, he takes contemporary concerns, anxieties and worldly ills to their absolute edge, and then goes even further.  I'm not a reviewer by any stretch, so in real-world reader speak, I'll end here by saying that  it's a thought-provoking, tough book to read on an emotional level at times (and I admit that the tears flowed more than once), but Jesus H., it's damn good.

 Then again, I knew it would be. 

My many, many thanks to Alice at Eibonvale, for reasons only she knows.