david_agranoff's review against another edition
5.0
have actually delayed writing this review twice because I didn't believe I could do this novel justice. If you do the right thing and get this novel you will understand. I found myself, reading sentences and feeling compelled to read them out loud. DHS is a surreal novel filled with poetic prose that is disturbing and beautiful all at once. This story of an escaped slave is like a journey on a spiral staircase into another world, Armstrong creates a surreal landscape that is vivid, and the prose itself has to be savored like fine chocolate that slowly melts in your mouth. This is an amazing book, it deserves to be celebrated.
jhaeger's review against another edition
This is a wonderfully brutal and poetic book.
xterminal's review
4.0
Forrest Armstrong, The Deadheart Shelters (Swallowdown Press, 2010)
If you read book reviews for any length of time, you will come across novels where the language is described as 'poetic'. 99% of the time, said reviewers are talking absolute hogwash; they're using 'poetic' to describe a certain way the author has with descriptive passages rather than pointing at the language and saying 'this is like poetry'. After all, taking poetry and transforming it into prose seems like it would be about as successful a conversion as taking prose and making it look like poetry. (And for an example of that, all you have to do is pick up an Ellen Hopkins book.) Consequently, I'm one of the reviewers who has resisted using the term 'poetic' to describe any work that isn't actually poetry. I can't say I've resisted all the time, but I've done my best.
And then I found The Deadheart Shelters. I actually bought this book sight unseen, something I almost never do, simply because there was more buzz surrounding this book than I've heard for most big mainstream novels over the past six months. There was a bit of cognitive disconnect there; I'm hearing more about a little Bizarro book coming out on Swallowdown Press than I am about the new Stephen King collection? But so it was, and I had to see what the fuss was about. After all, the fuss is usually made of smoke and mirrors. But not in this case. The Deadheart Shelters falls short of brilliant, but only just. And as for 'poetic', well, it's the poetic nature of the book that makes it fall just short of brilliant, for reasons I'll get into as we go along. But don't get me wrong: if you were going to take poetry and make it into a novel, if you came up with something a tenth as good as The Deadheart Shelters, you would have created something orders of magnitude better than any of the extant “verse novels” polluting bookstore shelves at present.
Plot: meet Peter. Peter is a slave. He, along with a number of other slaves, works for dogs. Or men with dogs; it's hard to tell which in this hallucinatory manuscript. (Carlton Mellick calls this book the literary equivalent of a Jodorowsky film; I'd liken it more to the bizarro equivalent of an Arenas novel.) The only really interesting thing in his life is Lilly, a fellow slave. When he is given the opportunity, he escapes and discovers there's a whole new world out there beyond the slave pits, but is it really any better than where he was before? And will he ever see Lilly again?
You can safely ignore the jacket copy; it places a lot more emphasis on a conundrum that really doesn't exist here (whether he should mount a campaign to free the other slaves); as he assimilates into industrial culture, he spends less and less time thinking about his time as a slave at all, save some random thoughts of Lilly. And in this I think that jacket copy does the book a disservice, because I believe that was one of Armstrong's main thrusts in this novel: the dehumanization of industrial culture. It's a bit facile, and not exactly subtle, but it works. I wish I could say more than that without giving the game away, but it all happens during the climactic scene, so no go. And to be fair, given the absurdity of the world Armstrong sets up, the lack of subtlety seems less intrusive than it would be in a realist novel.
All of this, however, takes a backseat to the simple joy of reading Armstrong's prose:
“I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped up on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn't beat. Something else suffering that I could unburden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it.” (p. 88)
...but on the other hand, as I said before, this is also where the book falls apart (in a minor way). There's a fine line between leaving things ambiguous and simply letting them fall away altogether sometimes, and Armstrong is just on the wrong side of it more often than not at the end of this book. In the general scheme of things, I found that a minor problem at best (and one whose expectations were mostly set up by that misleading jacket copy, really), but others may be a lot more annoyed by it than I was. Thus, I present it as a warning more than anything. The book's still brilliant, and you should most definitely still read it. Just be prepared for something a bit different than you think you're going to get. Or way different, if you're not familiar with bizarro. ****
If you read book reviews for any length of time, you will come across novels where the language is described as 'poetic'. 99% of the time, said reviewers are talking absolute hogwash; they're using 'poetic' to describe a certain way the author has with descriptive passages rather than pointing at the language and saying 'this is like poetry'. After all, taking poetry and transforming it into prose seems like it would be about as successful a conversion as taking prose and making it look like poetry. (And for an example of that, all you have to do is pick up an Ellen Hopkins book.) Consequently, I'm one of the reviewers who has resisted using the term 'poetic' to describe any work that isn't actually poetry. I can't say I've resisted all the time, but I've done my best.
And then I found The Deadheart Shelters. I actually bought this book sight unseen, something I almost never do, simply because there was more buzz surrounding this book than I've heard for most big mainstream novels over the past six months. There was a bit of cognitive disconnect there; I'm hearing more about a little Bizarro book coming out on Swallowdown Press than I am about the new Stephen King collection? But so it was, and I had to see what the fuss was about. After all, the fuss is usually made of smoke and mirrors. But not in this case. The Deadheart Shelters falls short of brilliant, but only just. And as for 'poetic', well, it's the poetic nature of the book that makes it fall just short of brilliant, for reasons I'll get into as we go along. But don't get me wrong: if you were going to take poetry and make it into a novel, if you came up with something a tenth as good as The Deadheart Shelters, you would have created something orders of magnitude better than any of the extant “verse novels” polluting bookstore shelves at present.
Plot: meet Peter. Peter is a slave. He, along with a number of other slaves, works for dogs. Or men with dogs; it's hard to tell which in this hallucinatory manuscript. (Carlton Mellick calls this book the literary equivalent of a Jodorowsky film; I'd liken it more to the bizarro equivalent of an Arenas novel.) The only really interesting thing in his life is Lilly, a fellow slave. When he is given the opportunity, he escapes and discovers there's a whole new world out there beyond the slave pits, but is it really any better than where he was before? And will he ever see Lilly again?
You can safely ignore the jacket copy; it places a lot more emphasis on a conundrum that really doesn't exist here (whether he should mount a campaign to free the other slaves); as he assimilates into industrial culture, he spends less and less time thinking about his time as a slave at all, save some random thoughts of Lilly. And in this I think that jacket copy does the book a disservice, because I believe that was one of Armstrong's main thrusts in this novel: the dehumanization of industrial culture. It's a bit facile, and not exactly subtle, but it works. I wish I could say more than that without giving the game away, but it all happens during the climactic scene, so no go. And to be fair, given the absurdity of the world Armstrong sets up, the lack of subtlety seems less intrusive than it would be in a realist novel.
All of this, however, takes a backseat to the simple joy of reading Armstrong's prose:
“I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped up on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn't beat. Something else suffering that I could unburden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it.” (p. 88)
...but on the other hand, as I said before, this is also where the book falls apart (in a minor way). There's a fine line between leaving things ambiguous and simply letting them fall away altogether sometimes, and Armstrong is just on the wrong side of it more often than not at the end of this book. In the general scheme of things, I found that a minor problem at best (and one whose expectations were mostly set up by that misleading jacket copy, really), but others may be a lot more annoyed by it than I was. Thus, I present it as a warning more than anything. The book's still brilliant, and you should most definitely still read it. Just be prepared for something a bit different than you think you're going to get. Or way different, if you're not familiar with bizarro. ****
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