Talk:All is Calm; All is Bright/@comment-28266772-20170123164925

Sorry if this review is a bit late, it’s been a busy time for me. Ever since I emerged from the womb I’ve just been swamped. It’s been a terrible thousand weeks or so; just the worst. Still, I’ve managed to find some time to put this review together.

It took me a while to piece this story together. It was a little slow for me at first and it pretty much remained at ‘slow’ all the way through. Every scene was put together impeccably, and paced impeccably, but for a good ten minutes after reading this I just hadn’t put the individual segments together. The penny hadn’t dropped, so to speak.

And then it did. I think they call this kind of experience a moment of ‘fridge logic’ and it’s not something that a lot of stories can pull off. I was making a cup of coffee when it started coming together; the emotional core of the whole thing felt quite raw and when I twigged that the poor girl had probably performed a home abortion on the second-coming of Christ I was left a little shocked. I didn’t really know how to put it all together, but I certainly a pang of guilt and fear and uncertainty. More than anything this moment of putting it all together was a near-perfect narrative experience. I don’t have a lot to say on it. It’s the cohesive whole of the entire piece; I can’t even say why it unsettles me so much. I’m not particularly religious, nor am I particularly atheistic. I think more than anything it’s that idea of regret, and of that childish urge to put things right again. It touches on the loss of innocence and that moment when we all wish we could hit rewind, and how our adolescent attempts to fix things only make things worse. And how awful it is that the poor girl did nothing wrong; her guilt is misplaced. The whole thing is like some giant farce and the unnecessary nature of it all makes it even more tragic. (On a re-read I’d also like to draw attention to the way that by trapping the girl in between innocence, and adulthood, you perfectly capture that shitty ‘in-between’ feeling of adolescence; a time of life defined almost exclusively by a total lack of common sense and guidance, combined with the hopeless loss of all innocence.)

The sheer amount of what is implied is phenomenal, and that you manage to keep so much hidden and still keep the story functional is remarkable. For me this story—what’s actually on the page—is sad, and tragic. But the second you start thinking about how God’s going to react to his son ending up smeared on the floor of a high-school gym you start feeling the fear.

There’s a lot of physicality to this story (e.g. “She sits against the sink, stripped naked and shaking un-naturally as the blood leaks from in-between her thighs”/also, the miasma of poor Herold; “Herold smells his armpit”) and some clever use of language that emphasises the tangibility (e.g. the alliteration of “bulging baby bump”) of the characters. Elizabeth is initially just a ghost but is then revealed to be flesh and blood; I think there’s a lot here I could dig into about the Holy Ghost and The Son, but the gist of it, I think, is to emphasise the relationship between the body and the spirit. And you cast this relationship in a bit of an uncanny light—again, bleeding vaginas and smelly armpits—and it makes me feel a little uneasy. The revelation of just what it means to see something spiritual made flesh, as in this girl’s child, is actually kind of odd. It reminds me less of the Abrahamic faiths I studied as a child, and more of Lovecraft and Dunsany. In a weird way, you made Yahweh weird (as in the literary sense of weird).

I’m still not quite sure how you did that, or even if others felt the same. But you really left me with the sense that God poking his head into our reality to create something flesh and blood is not a ‘miracle’ but is instead an existential crisis in the same vein as Cthulhu or Hastur. And the idea that the whole situation could turn into a giblet-covered coat-hanger of a shitshow because of some good ol’ fashioned homebrew guilt and adolescent anxiety; it’s just fucking freaky. As Bobby observes it sure is easy to go to hell! And if God really has stuck his head into our reality, only to be rewarded with a damned poke in the eye, it leaves me wondering what that actually means for us as an entire species. Have we just stumbled into spiritual damnation? Would God understand? What limitations are there on saviours? Can we get a replacement (he clearly has more than one)? Or does it not really work like that?

Who knows. That’s what you leave up to us, expertly at that. Between your story and the other two winners I was at a total loss of how to rank these tales. For a period I was tempted to have a three-way tie but I thought that was an absolute cop-out. I thought I’d take the time out now to clarify, at least, that the difference between the top three stories was as close to minimal as possible. But that I did have some reticence in reviewing this story since the entire structure is a risky move. I showed this story to a good friend and she reached the same conclusion with the ambiguous narrative (and loved your story, at that) but I was still unsure of whether others would ever have the penny drop. To that extent I can’t say with 100% certainty that your structure, and ambiguity, actually paid off on the whole, even if it worked out well for my specific case.

Normally I’d like to see how others have responded but uh, looking around, there’s not much in the way of comment traffic (a feeling I share)! I’ll try to plug this story in my next curation blog to see if that’ll help.