The Dregs Trilogy<\/em> is such a breath of foul air \u2014 which is meant as a compliment.<\/p>\nAs the title suggests, Dregs<\/em> began life as a trio of novels \u2014 Shrapnel Apartments<\/em>, Unger House Radicals<\/em>, and Ritual America<\/em> \u2014 but after a messy publication history the Black Shuck Books collation is the only way to read all three. Fortunately, Dregs<\/em> is best treated as a single triptych anyway. A collage of multiple perspectives and tenses, personal reflections, coroners’ reports, letters, answerphone messages, newspaper clippings, ghostly photographs, unnerving black-and-white illustrations, and poetry fragments, Kelso’s work is awash with cannibalism, paedophilia, ritualistic murder, and nihilism. Sally Rooney this isn’t.<\/p>\nThe book (I hesitate to say \u201cstory”) begins in the Effacer le tableau<\/em> stage of the Second Congolese War. For readers unaware of this unlovely moment in our recent history, in 2003 MLC forces ethnically cleansed the Congo’s north-eastern region of between sixty- and seventy-thousand Bambuti pygmies by way of systematic rape, murder, and cannibalism. Kelso’s decision to begin the book here may invite comparisons with Conrad, but it’s William Burroughs \u2014 whose masterly Western Lands Trilogy<\/em> is replete with Conradian segments in which an author surrogate chases down rare giant centipede flesh in South America or dodges AK-47 fire in some other dark place of the Earth \u2014 who serves as Kelso’s true whetstone here and throughout the book. Kathy Acker’s bleak experiments are another forerunner, especially Blood and Guts in High School<\/em>‘s illustrations and appropriations.<\/p>\nThe narrative shifts to the eponymous \u201cShrapnel Apartments” building, which appears to be a kind of Big Brother house for resurrected murder victims. Like Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition<\/em> or Cronenberg’s Videodrome<\/em>, Kelso’s Dregs<\/em> invites us to remote-view into a space of ontological horror and corruption. The Apartment’s most important resident is Florence Coffey, a universal child victim and metaphysical scapegoat Ren \u00e9 Girard would have loved to write about. Beau and Jed Carson, perhaps distant relations of The Western Lands<\/em>‘ Kim, are among her tormentors. The corridors of Shrapnel are also haunted by malevolent entities known as Blackcap and King Misery. The second section, Unger House Radicals<\/em>, deals with the \u201cUltra-Realists,” two murderers who conceive of their crimes as a kind of arthouse film movement extrapolating into an infectious philosophy. Ritual America<\/em> doesn’t so much tie everything together as explode it outwards in multiple dimensions.<\/p>\nWho are Blackcap and King Misery? It’s left deliberately unclear, and I won’t try to explain away the mysteries of Kelso’s mythology, but I propose they are fragments of the same dark deity as Lautr \u00e9amont’s Maldoror, the \u201cugly spirit” that Burroughs called the catalyst for killing Joan Vollmer, and The King in Yellow<\/em> from Robert W. Chambers’ cosmic horror fictions. (The latter perhaps refracted through True Detective<\/em> season one. Kelso’s “You [humans] didn’t ask for sentience, which, I think, is a tragic misstep in your evolution” is a near-quotation of Rust Cohle: \u201cI think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution,” which in turn is a paraphrase of another writer in Chambers’ field, Thomas Ligotti: \u201chuman existence is a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness.”)<\/p>\nI also thought of Judge Holden, which at first seemed a bit fanciful. However, at the end of the Unger House Radicals<\/em> section, a child murderer apparently infected with one of these diseased phantoms quotes Holden directly: \u201cWhatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” The seeming immortality of the character also recalls the haunting, quietly distraught finale of Blood Meridian<\/em>: \u201cHis feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”<\/p>\nThat Dregs<\/em> despite all its dark content boasts nothing so psychologically daunting as McCarthy’s coda merely places it alongside 99% of world literature. A deeper problem is how intertextual allusion bleeds into expropriation, making the work feel derivative and inauthentic. This is, of course, always an outrageous and unfair criticism of fiction. Nobody writes in a vacuum. And an author needn’t be Bill Burroughs, or even a junkie, to write about heroin, or Samuel R. Delany, or even queer, to pen an unconventional gay sex scene. However, when Kelso’s characters shoot smack, like Carson and Alfie McPherson in Ritual America<\/em>, or fuck in public, like Vincent Bittacker and Brandon Swarthy in Unger House Radicals<\/em>, this tastes of artificial flavouring after the integral obsessions of Burroughs’s and Delany’s respective works. (There is, of course, severe and unorthodox homoeroticism in Burroughs, but those scenes are frequently pederastic, uninterested in pleasure, and imagist, concerned with ejaculation and auto-erotica. Where Burroughs is uninterested, Delany and Kelso are disinterested; where he prioritises imagery, they prefer the sensation of taste, smell, and texture. All three are ironic, but Burroughs always coldly so, where Delany and Kelso are warm and even tender.)<\/p>\nAll novel writers are, to different degrees, compelled by their subjects \u2013 it couldn’t be otherwise. Only a few, however, are possessed by them, and fewer of those still are working today.<\/p>\n
Without counterbalancing one’s own passions, summoning these individuals into your creative world is unwise. Burroughs, whom Kelso is invoking when he writes dope-addled Americana infected with stygian grotesques, had to write Naked Lunch<\/em>. Delany, who comes to mind when Kelso describes with detachment Bittacker’s sensations upon violently receiving Swarthy’s penis, had to write The Mad Man<\/em>. I never suspect Dregs<\/em> so bedevilled its author. Rather than being incidentally transgressive like its forebears, Dregs<\/em> strikes me as self-consciously so.<\/p>\nThe Congo section, for instance, only seems relevant to the novel in so far as the book seeks to be a compendium of humanity’s horrors, or to establish a continuum between the violence of the developed West and the developing world. As neither are clear objectives, the scene smacks of mood-setting. This is an effective technique, like the opening shot of The Killing of a Sacred Deer<\/em> that shows a live, beating heart to properly discomfort us in ominous preparation. But an image of a cardiac bypass is of a magnitude proportional to Lanthimos’ narrative, which does after all concern a heart surgeon; genocide is of quite another degree, and perhaps not harmonious with anything that does not adopt it as its subject.<\/p>\nOf course, applying Apollonian standards like proportion and harmony to a collage of Plutonian horrors like child abuse and murder may be futile. That’s a problem common to experimental fictions \u2014 by what bar are we to measure them? Dregs<\/em> is full of abstract sketches that achieve wonderfully disturbing effects, but a few \u2014 like the introduction of Jonathan Fulton, a 29 year old child murderer whose father was a jazz drummer until he became a born-again Christian and repented of the Devil’s music \u2014 seem aimless. (When it comes to juvenicidal maniacs, The Dregs Trilogy<\/em> boasts an embarrassment of riches.)<\/p>\nA conventional analysis turns up plenty of good writing in Dregs<\/em>: we can picture the \u201cbeads of spittle” on a character’s \u201cimpotent moustache,” and while \u201ca spindletop of green saliva” took a minute to reach me, I couldn’t quite wash it off once it had. “Darkness sets upon the evening like a silent god snatching hope from one of its disciples,” however, was a little too on-the-nose. But style is less the aim than tone, which Kelso mostly achieves throughout.<\/p>\nAnother word for \u201cdregs” is \u201clees,” the gritty residue left over when the wine glass is all but drained, and I was reminded of a bleak Cioran epistle: \u201cHaving verified all the arguments against life, I have stripped it of its savours, and wallowing in its lees, I have experienced its nakedness. I have known post-sexual metaphysics, the void of the futilely procreated universe, and that dissipation of sweat that plunges you into an age-old chill, anterior to the rages of matter.” Dregs<\/em>‘ objective may be to allow us to experience that nakedness of existence, Burroughs’s \u201cfrozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” If it succeeds less forcefully than its forerunners, that’s perhaps a problem of preoccupation. While the great transgressive authors were haunted by their own caliginous predilections, Kelso seems haunted only by the fictions those predilections produced. The Dregs Trilogy<\/em> is, indeed, what’s left over once literature has been accelerated past its intended purpose by dark visionaries. But there are processes by which pomace may be reconstituted into brandy, or lees might become ripasso. While Kelso seems potentially capable of a comparative literary alchemy, I’m not sure this book was subjected to it.<\/p>\nAn excerpt from The Dregs Trilogy<\/em> appeared in 3:AM Magazine. Read it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER<\/strong>
\nLaurence Thompson<\/strong> is a writer and independent scholar from Merseyside. His essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in Burning House Press, minor literature(s)<\/em>, The Fight City<\/em>, and Paraphilia Magazine<\/em>. He is the co-author of Wilfred Owen biopic The Burying Part<\/em>y (2018), for which he was nominated for Best Screenplay at the London Film Awards, and is the artistic director of the upcoming Liverpool Underground Film Festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another word for \u201cdregs\u201d\u009d is \u201clees,\u201d\u009d the gritty residue left over when the wine glass is all but drained, and I was reminded of a bleak Cioran epistle: \u201cHaving verified all the arguments against life, I have stripped it of its savours, and wallowing in its lees, I have experienced its nakedness. I have known post-sexual metaphysics, the void of the futilely procreated universe, and that dissipation of sweat that plunges you into an age-old chill, anterior to the rages of matter.\u201d\u009d Dregs<\/em>‘ objective may be to allow us to experience that nakedness of existence, Burroughs’s \u201cfrozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\nLaurence Thompson<\/strong> reviews Chris Kelso<\/strong>‘s The Dregs<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100830,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102781"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102789,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102781\/revisions\/102789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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