Many of these protagonists find each other, and unite for a cross-country oddysey from various places headed for Nebraska. BOOK II: "On The Border" In the wake of civilization's destruction via plague, the key individuals are trying to cope with the loss, until they are all united by dreams and visions of a 108-year-old black woman in Nebraska named Mother Abigail. We're introduced to the main characters, and their backstories, and we see the government panic as the superflu spreads as a plague, and we see the collapse of civlization as totalitarian martial law is enforced, thousands are killed to keep the government's lies under wraps, and what the characters on an individual level go through. The novel ties into the Dark Tower universe(s), and is broken down into three parts, or "books": BOOK I: " Captain Trips" In this first 400 pages or so (of the uncut 1142-page book), there is an outbreak of a manmade biological plague, which is spread to Texas, New York, Atlanta, New England and the southwest in a matter of days. It's guaranteed to leave some kind of an impression, otherwise you're a fuckin douchebag. One hell of an epic novel by the great writer Stephen King.
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(Drawn & Quarterly’s website indicates this is a fictional memoir. This mother represents the citys next wave of inhabitants-the artists and young parents who swarm a run-down area for its affordability, inevitably reshaping the neighborhoods they take over. She illustrates Hamilton’s neighborhoods with more detail than the people in it, though she’s able to invest everyone she draws, even when she uses only a few lines, with a lot of character. A new mother takes us on a tour of Hamilton, a Rust Belt city born of the Industrial Revolution and dying a slow death due to globalization. Nickerson’s black, white and gray art suits the setting - it feels a bit hazy, like the pollution from the dead factories is still hanging about. Somehow so does life in the imperfect city. Is she part of the problem? Motherhood isn’t quite the overwhelmingly hopeful, joy-filled time it’s normally presented as in the media, but it tilts toward joy. Even though art is reinvigorating the neighborhood, the artist’s studio used to be cheap, substandard housing. Second place, comic arts for Creation, The. Gentrification is underway, there’s a lot of poverty, people are being displaced and excluded. City of Hamilton, University of Toronto, Canadian Union of Public Employees, Government of Canada. 192pp.Ī new mother (an artist) reflects on living and creating in Hamilton, Ontario - “known as the armpit of Ontario…” - a city struggling through a transition from it’s industrial past. Much like a ventriloquist using his dummy’s flapping lips and blinking eyes to misdirect the audience, so do these non-traditional story forms allow the dread and the uncanny to worm into the consciousness as if it were always a part of us. The titular “The Secret of Ventriloquism” is structured as a play replete with a scrawl of disturbing stage notes. “The Mindfulness of Horror Practice” utilizes the imperative mood written in a hypnotic cadence. “The Indoor Swamp” takes on the rare second person perspective. The story “20 Steps to Ventriloquism” reads as an instruction manual. The story structures themselves lend to this piercing view of humanity as Padgett often dispenses with the traditional first/third person linear narrative. From the first story, Padgett displays a wonderful imagination for human pathology and self-destructive compulsions. The examination of our nature is not the virtuous and noble fabling ( coming of age, self-sacrifice, etc) of what we want ourselves to be, but a penetrating look at man as that morally obliquitous, phenomenally ungrateful biped of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The Secret of Ventriloquism amplifies the surreal and weird to provide not a picture of man, but an x-ray. Jon Padgett’s The Secret of Ventriloquism (Dunhams Manor Press) hits the same nerve as the HBO mini-series Westworld as in its introspective core it asks the basic existential question: what, precisely, is it to be human? |