Songs for The Lost

Three Billion and Six. Introduction

THREE BILLION AND SIXAn Introduction by David Rix

Emotions are there to sing about . . .

It is now the best part of six years since the clock first struck 3 Billion A.M. That seems a long time, for a writer, for a publisher and purely for human beings living their lives. For myself, my own 3 Billion A.M. ghosting of the roads still continues but it is the far stranger London streets that I am ghosting, not the Thanet Way. The press has developed from 5 titles to 25, yet still remains what it has always been – the delicate art of sitting at a computer trying to coax the world to leave me alone sufficiently to make a few books. Out there, many many more of you will have learned just what a ghosted road at 3 Billion A.M. is – and many many more of you will have learned to sing, whatever your singing language.

So at 3 Billion + 5.5 years (to be precise), plenty has changed – yet plenty more also remains the same. Perhaps indeed, the most crucial things. The pain and chaos of the world never seems to fade – the shattered glass that is the human soul never seems to heal – and just may be our companion for eternity. That’s the depressing thought with which I shall launch this entire massive volume.

But bear with me . . .

If you have read Alexander Zelenyj’s previous book, Experiments At 3 Billion A.M., then you will have some idea what to expect. In terms of styles and affiliation, this new collection if anything only spreads wider. The list of genres that Songs For The Lost touches upon is a large one:

• surrealism

• magical realism

• literary

• gritty realism

• subtle to extreme horror

• science fiction

• weird western

• weird war fiction

• children’s fiction

• urban fantasy

• fabulism

• weird erotica

• Bizarro

• psychedelia

• modern fairy tale/fable

• pulp

• noir

• superhero fiction

• poetry

• as well as other less defined things

This suggests a diverse range of styles, which is true, but you will find more here that is common than different, I think. The author is using these familiar genre trappings to perform a seduction – to give you a comforting wash of something familiar while at the same time acting as a guide beyond that familiarity to somewhere else. To a literary area that fits very well with the ‘genre’ that Eibonvale Press has embraced – slipstream. The literary writing that exists between the cracks, the parasitic fiction that draws on all yet is enslaved to none.

The result is that, as you read these stories, you will find them unexpectedly profound, challenging, harsh, painful and thoughtprovoking. Indeed, more than once you might find yourself shaken to the core – summoned to think and feel, or deal with events on levels that are rare for this or any kind of writing. And the reason for this is simple: the true main theme of these stories is not any kind of alien or apocalypse, god or phantasm, the main theme is very distinctly human emotion and human nature at its most extreme. Human pain on a level that is very real.

In many books, films and TV, the approach to pain and emotion are something that might be called casual and theatrical – a puppet show or pantomime, a spectacle rather than an immersive or actual experience. The action hero punched in the face, the tormented heroine wandering dreamily through the stage of a story, the ironic and jaded horrors of the slasher or torture porn genres . . . Often it is dismissed, and at the very least understated and unreal – even in much horror writing, where the basic mandate is to explore extreme experience. Meanwhile though, back in reality, pains and fears and horrors of all types tend to be squashed and smothered, censored and veiled, politely kept out of the way or hidden under a cloth. It suddenly turns out that fears are something we are frightened of, horrors are horrifying, and pains are painful. Who knew? And so we try to sanitize them from this world. But the result of that is a weird dichotomy, with the fake and fantasy world more immediate to many than the reality. This is something that may prove problematic since one can assume that such horrors, so deeply involved in reality, our natural instincts and what we are as a species, are something that need to be faced not forgotten. One cannot hide from horror without leaving oneself open to horror.

And the questions come . . .

How different are we at heart from a bloody and cruel nature? How do our capacities for nurturing and aggression fit together? What exactly is our role in the world? Are we then an entity seeking to rise above our natural roots or an animal with delusions of morality? Why is it that both of those options feel like a betrayal?

I am not sure that there are any answers to these questions yet – at least ones that attempt to acknowledge the inherent contradictions within us and the fuzzy non-absolute nature of all reality. However, by writing straight from the heart and with unflinching honesty, Zelenyj manages to do what many writers fail at and really takes some deep wading steps into the pains and despairs of reality and humanity, far far removed from the fantasy land of action heroes or space operas. It was this that made the stories stand out 6 years ago when the clock struck 3 Billion A.M. – and this only slightly smaller yet considerably more focussed volume certainly follows down that same ghosted road.

It’s not that the ‘message’ of Songs For The Lost is one of universal despair though, by any means. This needs to be clarified. Just as in reality, our own darkest emotions and experiences rarely come with total blackness.

The dark emotions – desperation, despair, regret, repression, pain, fury – engender a parallel need for escape, and with it a kind hope. In a way, one could even see this as the formation of a bizarre form of spirituality, though not in a particularly religious sense – and it is this rather desperate and illuminating hint of spirituality that forms the singing heart of the book. In spite of the hardship and horror and maddening, soul-destroying sense of futility that sometimes seem to fill the world, people still persevere, still go on living and hoping – even if that hope may be transmuted into a craving for some kind of paradise or redemption from without. And just as the concept of Utopia never really exists, so the concepts of paradise or redemption can shift and change – they may be positive, negative or illusory. And as with many quests for either escape or illusion, the costs can sometimes be high.

Beyond even this though is the effect it has on the reader, which is also far more complicated than mere black and white. My own first encounter with this kind of deeply emotional horror was the very complex film Suicide Circle (Jisatsu Sākuru) by Sion Sono – a film many regard as impenetrably murky, dark and even dangerous. But the first and greatest impression that film left was astonishment that having been dragged through such a wasteland, the end result was so life-affirming. After you pass through those valleys, it only leaves you with a realisation of just how beautiful beauty can be – how incredibly warm the human can be – and how precious and powerful life itself actually is.

Like Experiments, this is a big book – a big container full of a very strong and heady wine, intended to be dipped into and savoured. It will be a companion for a long time, maybe on those nights when you need a fix of human emotion in your quiet bed . . . or need to sing a song again, for the world or yourself to make sense.

Even one without either words or music, for the language of songs is infinite . . .