Roaming, 2017 by Rosa Loy (b. 1958)
He recognizes in all these dislocations, of course, his lonely quest for the impossible mating, the crazy embrace of polarities, as though the distance between the terror and the comedy of the void were somehow erotic—it’s a kind of pornography. No wonder the sailor asked that his eyes be plucked out! He overlays frenzy with freeze frames, the flight of rockets with the staking of the vampire’s heart, Death’s face with thrusting buttocks, cheesecake with chaingangs, and all just to prove to himself over and over again that nothing and everything is true. Slapstick is romance, heroism a dance number. Kisses kill. Back projections are the last adequate measure of freedom and great stars are clocks: no time like the presence. Nothing, like a nun with a switchblade, is happening faster and faster, and cause (that indefinable something) is a happy ending. Or maybe not.
From Robert Coover’s 1987 short story “The Phantom of the Movie Palace.”
My review of Dave Cooper’s new comic Mudbite is up at The Comics Journal. First two paragraphs:
In Mudbite, Dave Cooper conjures a perverse and lurid dreamworld that seethes and wriggles with its own nightmare logic. The erstwhile hero of this world is Eddy Table, an apparent alter-ego for Cooper himself. Mudbite collects two new Eddy Table adventures, “Mud River” and “Bug Bite”, abject fantasias of intense sexual anxiety rendered in Cooper’s compellingly repellent style.
The two tales are bound tête-bêche; after you finish “Bug Bites”, you can flip the book over and read “Mud River.” Or maybe you’ll read the stories in the other order. Mudbite’s playful design invites the reader to participate in ordering the relationship between the stories. Cooper’s inimitable aesthetic unifies the project’s themes of aberrant sexuality and libidinal anxieties.
Virgin of the Shadows II, 2017 by Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967)
Biblioklept 