Some Phantom - No Time Flat - Two Novellas - Stephen Beachy

Some Phantom - No Time Flat - Two Novellas by Stephen Beachy / 216-page paperback published by Visible Spectrum / ISBN 9781953835123 *** “Stephen Beachy is a visionary. In these twin novellas, he explores madness and crime with the nocturnal lyricism of empty time and space. Beachy’s dear criminals reach an exquisite isolation and so does his reader, a non place where categories collapse, like freedom and confinement, chaos and lucidity, the angelic and demonic. A harsh dream, and we will never wake.” - Robert Glück In Some Phantom a woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing an abusive relationship. She gets a job teaching disturbed children, explores the city, fears her old life catching up with her. She must decide whether her increasing paranoia is a form of psychosis—or a new lucidity. A bastard offspring of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, it roams the border territory between memory and insanity, fantasy and violence. In No Time Flat, Wade grows up in isolation on the American plains, living mostly in his dreams. Caught between the silences of his elderly parents and the permutations of his own fantasies, his childhood seems to last forever. Haunted by strange encounters and a shooting at his school, he finally escapes and becomes nomadic, wandering across desolate landscapes marked by fleeting connections and unfathomable crimes. “Not since Halldór Laxness have I been so simply surprised by the glamour and skill and darkness of another writer’s art . . . Writer to writer, I thank Stephen Beachy. This is how we live.” - Eileen Myles “Emotional states—loneliness, terror, longing for escape—get blown across these bleak scenes and become entangled, the way the second of the two novellas slips out of the first, like a growth, and turns into something totally unexpected. - Alvin Lu