This week we review Millennium by Marty Phillips — four stories that add up to one novel, from Jackalope Hill, the fiction imprint of Antelope Hill.
“Never call anyone about this again, or I will make it even worse for you. I will put insects under your skin. I will rape you in your dreams forever. I will Prometheus your ass and rip your guts out every day until the end of time.”
Tom Falwell jumps from the south tower, and relives the morning of September 11th over and over until he can tell us what it means. A new college graduate rides a motorcycle into South America and winds up in a parallel dimension as a mute wretch. A dollar-store man buys a Victorian to flip in a dying California town and hears a voice that says “Hello? Please, help me.” The estranged heir of a dead financier gets pulled off the Appalachian Trail into a boardroom fight for his father’s company. Each of these men inherits a wreck, and the people in charge have gone insane.
Science fiction explains miracles away, but Phillips, good Lovecraftian that he is, tells you the mechanism isn’t point. We can know all about how come these calamities came to pass, but that doesn’t tell us what they’re for.
Then he heard a voice behind him, the same hateful voice he had heard over the phone. “Men are so quick to blame the gods, but they themselves, in their depravity, design griefs far greater than what fate assigns.”
Join us next time for Once Upon A Time in Argentina by Frank Kidd.
