Reviews

Hour of the Wolf by M. Kitchell

naokamiya's review

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4.0

A highly effective experimental volume detailing a dream cycle in five parts, starting as a fairly straightforward work of weird horror in the opening segment and increasingly morphing with each cycle into a chasm of oneiric subconscious writing, before reaching the final section, whose imagery and thematic substance is almost completely inscrutable. Loaded with the kind of typographical screwery I'm always a sucker for, words stretching away and rising and falling over the page in a sort of chaos that gets less and less controlled the longer this continues - much like a long dream. It helped a lot to just latch on to the imagery as this literary river increasingly swept me away, but on first read there's a lot of interesting stuff here that already stuck out to me - dreaming and its relationship to the divine, the continued inability of the human brain to grasp the concept of God, and the relation of God to poetry as a vehicle in which we could potentially begin to understand. Indeed, there's an apparent utilization of poetic techniques throughout, both in writing and composition. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the book's existence as a work of impressive visual art in itself, lined on its margins with evocative abstract black-and-white images and like I said, an abundance of structural eccentricities that are easier to experience than to describe. I read it in PDF format so I perhaps didn't see its full scope in action, but I could tell from that alone that it's beautifully crafted. Definitely a recommend for those who have an interest in the esoteric and the occult, which is an itch this scratches in spades.

"His body has become one with the sphere and the man is no longer worried about losing his breath because he has shed his body and thus needs no longer to breathe. An effervescent sense of fulfillment of all bodily pleasures sensation overtaking the world and removing all sight sound touch smell taste in lieu of something total a totality of perfection something that cannot be accurately depicted with anything short of the new death a new idea of surpassing the body into the impossible.”

mamimitanaka's review

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4.0

A highly effective experimental volume detailing a dream cycle in five parts, starting as a fairly straightforward work of weird horror in the opening segment and increasingly morphing with each cycle into a chasm of oneiric subconscious writing, before reaching the final section, whose imagery and thematic substance is almost completely inscrutable. Loaded with the kind of typographical screwery I'm always a sucker for, words stretching away and rising and falling over the page in a sort of chaos that gets less and less controlled the longer this continues - much like a long dream. It helped a lot to just latch on to the imagery as this literary river increasingly swept me away, but on first read there's a lot of interesting stuff here that already stuck out to me - dreaming and its relationship to the divine, the continued inability of the human brain to grasp the concept of God, and the relation of God to poetry as a vehicle in which we could potentially begin to understand. Indeed, there's an apparent utilization of poetic techniques throughout, both in writing and composition. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the book's existence as a work of impressive visual art in itself, lined on its margins with evocative abstract black-and-white images and like I said, an abundance of structural eccentricities that are easier to experience than to describe. I read it in PDF format so I perhaps didn't see its full scope in action, but I could tell from that alone that it's beautifully crafted. Definitely a recommend for those who have an interest in the esoteric and the occult, which is an itch this scratches in spades.

"His body has become one with the sphere and the man is no longer worried about losing his breath because he has shed his body and thus needs no longer to breathe. An effervescent sense of fulfillment of all bodily pleasures sensation overtaking the world and removing all sight sound touch smell taste in lieu of something total a totality of perfection something that cannot be accurately depicted with anything short of the new death a new idea of surpassing the body into the impossible.”
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