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andrewmerritt00's review
5.0
Strange things are ahoof at the Circle K…
Equal parts darkly funny and humorously bleak, Apastoral envisions a new method of incarceration - that feels less satirical and more terrifyingly possible with each turn of the page - brought to life but the wonderful and imaginative writing of Lee D. Thompson. Special thanks to Nick Voro for bringing this author to my attention, and to Rick Harsch of Corona/Samizdat for publishing him
Equal parts darkly funny and humorously bleak, Apastoral envisions a new method of incarceration - that feels less satirical and more terrifyingly possible with each turn of the page - brought to life but the wonderful and imaginative writing of Lee D. Thompson. Special thanks to Nick Voro for bringing this author to my attention, and to Rick Harsch of Corona/Samizdat for publishing him
nickvoro's review
5.0
Disclaimer: This review is not a true review. It is more of a summary composed of the author’s own words. Call it an enthusiastic proclamation. I leave reviewing to the real reviewers. I am simply sharing my enthusiasm for the work with this summary / prose collage.
*
“Let me clear up a few things before judgement sets in. I say I am a man in a sheep’s body, but is that entirely true? I breathe into a sheep’s lungs, and sheep’s blood flows through my sheep’s heart. I eat sheep food and shit sheep shit. My hormones are a mixture of man and sheep.”
Things are ahoof.
You feel what I felt: shock, terror, denial, sorrow and back to terror.
The Name’s Bones... Bones the Wooly Blue-Eyed Sheep with a Human Brain. There’s a scar on the back of my head. I know it’s there. I feel it throbbing. It never ceases to throb. It’s a crescent moon that I can’t leap as children in their beds count until sleep enshrouds them.
The bastards have done it. Look at how f*cked I am. Pretty fucking funny, isn’t it?
Just a minute Bones, let me tell Your Story for this condensed Review. The full version is yours, of course. They’ve taken your freedom, but they cannot take your story away.
So where did Bones leave off... Ah, yes, the operation. The f*ck-ness of the surgery, dear reader. The throbbing makes more sense now, the persistent headaches, when you are conforming the human brain into the confined space of a sheep. But only criminals get this privilege. The guinea pigs for the program known as Constock.
This is the futuristic world of Lee D. Thompson’s Apastoral. A world where technological advancements have made this possible. Innovating and Frightening. Immoral and Concerning. Ethically and Morally Questionable. A world where Bones becomes part of the program. Bones, with his honest face and troubled past, the unsuccessful insurance fraudster/petty criminal caught up taking the rap for a jewelry store heist gone bad. An Einsteinian in its brilliance, fool proof plan to rob a jewelry store, The Carat Top, and leave no shiny rock unturned. The smoothest heist ever... NOT. Now... abandoned by his petty criminal friends and their plea deals, Bones is alone, and in the hands that are not his own.
He is, in fact, in the hands of the government. The Big Brother. The Prime Minister’s hands. Prime Minister with his Nation’s Joke of the Day, a gag reel slash visionary madman. In the hands of Constock, while Constock Watch televises everything, the righteous television brainwashing the masses, pundits pondering who would be next and trying to match criminal with animal. Bones, the unlikely protagonist, paraded, televised, made an example of, although not the first (No, Sylvester Moll was the first, the accused mass-murderer of children, forever squealing in rage when his brain made its way inside of a pig) but certainly part of the earlier batch, the first waves of test subjects/convicts to face such a punishment. With his rights stripped away, his trial begins. A monkey trial, or in this case, sheep. A trial where the trial chair spins with a push of a button from the presiding Judge, the same controller that controls the lights, guilt meters, and the advertising panels. Court Technicians are stationed everywhere. Attorneys attached to harnesses fly past large monitors displaying Trial Scores, past the jury made up of the audience in attendance and paid subscribers.
Frightening isn’t it? Frightening because this can be our reality. Bones’ only rights are to be fed, housed appropriately and collect a minimal pension which will pay for his yearly medical check-ups and finally his funeral. What a world. A world of woolly trouble. The world which is depicted here is a regressing world. No one wonders if this is ethical. A stolen life. A stolen mind. A stealing of control over oneself. Animal/Human Testing is at hand. Bones is the subject. Will the program succeed? Would it ever be stable? “You can graft an ear onto a potato, you know, but you can’t predict what it will hear.”
Switching narratives, plenty of drug ingestion and created dream-like often nightmarish states, planning of a heist that will have you in stitches, the CCC Complex-The Constockade-The Isle of Conquestador where human bodies roam around with animal brains, a watch tower patrolled by wolves with brains of prison guards, a sequence involving a Musca domestica on the drums in a Kafka Metamorphosis fashion and a favorite involving a Colosseum-like gladiator battle between a sheep a goat and a mass murdering pig wearing a cape.
The glorious unpredictability of it all. Whatever you need, you will find it here. The cure for terminal boredom. The book that brightens up any room. Enlivens any conversation. A comedic Tour de force, a novel for our Now Times as we look toward our collective uncertain future, and finally a book packing enough Don DeLillo’s prescience to serve as an astute observer’s commentary and a warning all at once.
They gave Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. In-part for his work dealing with those, “...disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit.” Hope. Not hope-lessness. Hope. Something I’ve felt while reading Lee D. Thompson’s novel. No matter how bad things had gotten, and they sure did escalating’ly get worse, there was always hope.
Before I wrap up this review, I also wanted to say, there is also something to be said about Lee opening the barnyard doors on what we often as individuals want to lock up to make ourselves feel better about, or not think about, at all. Imprisoning animals. Keeping them locked up. Breeding them for food. This book allows us to spend time with them. Walk in their hooves. To literally humanize animals. Animals that know death. Saw death by the billions at the hands of the human. Saw death’s head come flaming from the blackness. Spewing fire. Killing everything it could reach. Turning everything to ash. A wasteland where we are surely heading. And this has nothing to do with the ethics of eating meat but is more of a reminder of how we are contributing to our own extinction through our hunger and greed for the evermore, always more. Perhaps, therefore, the humans having animal names, and the animals having human names makes perfect sense. Because we are One. A reminder. And yet, we imprison. We segregate. Are we not all allowed on the same farm with the gates unlocked, allowed to graze without monitoring by guardians with shotguns and razor-sharp knives? Ah, grass for thought.
So join Bones as he navigates labyrinthian passages while getting used to the foreignness of a body that is not his own. Let deeper into the darkness. Noose tightening, teeth sinking in. He keeps escaping. But he is tired of escaping. Who can escape anything, anyway? One trap to another. Is the answer in the mind? Can the outcome be changed with the power of the mind and the body of a sheep? That’s for you to find out, dear reader. But I can almost hear you screaming now, “Justice? What the hell is justice when you have no control over the placement of your own brain? The storing of that complex organ. When one day you are a man, and the next, a sheep. A man in a sheep’s body and men sheer sheep and eat sheep and imprison sheep...”
And what I have to say is, “Close your eyes, little sheep. And hopefully you won’t dream of wolves. There’s that word again, right… Hope.”
*
“Let me clear up a few things before judgement sets in. I say I am a man in a sheep’s body, but is that entirely true? I breathe into a sheep’s lungs, and sheep’s blood flows through my sheep’s heart. I eat sheep food and shit sheep shit. My hormones are a mixture of man and sheep.”
Things are ahoof.
You feel what I felt: shock, terror, denial, sorrow and back to terror.
The Name’s Bones... Bones the Wooly Blue-Eyed Sheep with a Human Brain. There’s a scar on the back of my head. I know it’s there. I feel it throbbing. It never ceases to throb. It’s a crescent moon that I can’t leap as children in their beds count until sleep enshrouds them.
The bastards have done it. Look at how f*cked I am. Pretty fucking funny, isn’t it?
Just a minute Bones, let me tell Your Story for this condensed Review. The full version is yours, of course. They’ve taken your freedom, but they cannot take your story away.
So where did Bones leave off... Ah, yes, the operation. The f*ck-ness of the surgery, dear reader. The throbbing makes more sense now, the persistent headaches, when you are conforming the human brain into the confined space of a sheep. But only criminals get this privilege. The guinea pigs for the program known as Constock.
This is the futuristic world of Lee D. Thompson’s Apastoral. A world where technological advancements have made this possible. Innovating and Frightening. Immoral and Concerning. Ethically and Morally Questionable. A world where Bones becomes part of the program. Bones, with his honest face and troubled past, the unsuccessful insurance fraudster/petty criminal caught up taking the rap for a jewelry store heist gone bad. An Einsteinian in its brilliance, fool proof plan to rob a jewelry store, The Carat Top, and leave no shiny rock unturned. The smoothest heist ever... NOT. Now... abandoned by his petty criminal friends and their plea deals, Bones is alone, and in the hands that are not his own.
He is, in fact, in the hands of the government. The Big Brother. The Prime Minister’s hands. Prime Minister with his Nation’s Joke of the Day, a gag reel slash visionary madman. In the hands of Constock, while Constock Watch televises everything, the righteous television brainwashing the masses, pundits pondering who would be next and trying to match criminal with animal. Bones, the unlikely protagonist, paraded, televised, made an example of, although not the first (No, Sylvester Moll was the first, the accused mass-murderer of children, forever squealing in rage when his brain made its way inside of a pig) but certainly part of the earlier batch, the first waves of test subjects/convicts to face such a punishment. With his rights stripped away, his trial begins. A monkey trial, or in this case, sheep. A trial where the trial chair spins with a push of a button from the presiding Judge, the same controller that controls the lights, guilt meters, and the advertising panels. Court Technicians are stationed everywhere. Attorneys attached to harnesses fly past large monitors displaying Trial Scores, past the jury made up of the audience in attendance and paid subscribers.
Frightening isn’t it? Frightening because this can be our reality. Bones’ only rights are to be fed, housed appropriately and collect a minimal pension which will pay for his yearly medical check-ups and finally his funeral. What a world. A world of woolly trouble. The world which is depicted here is a regressing world. No one wonders if this is ethical. A stolen life. A stolen mind. A stealing of control over oneself. Animal/Human Testing is at hand. Bones is the subject. Will the program succeed? Would it ever be stable? “You can graft an ear onto a potato, you know, but you can’t predict what it will hear.”
Switching narratives, plenty of drug ingestion and created dream-like often nightmarish states, planning of a heist that will have you in stitches, the CCC Complex-The Constockade-The Isle of Conquestador where human bodies roam around with animal brains, a watch tower patrolled by wolves with brains of prison guards, a sequence involving a Musca domestica on the drums in a Kafka Metamorphosis fashion and a favorite involving a Colosseum-like gladiator battle between a sheep a goat and a mass murdering pig wearing a cape.
The glorious unpredictability of it all. Whatever you need, you will find it here. The cure for terminal boredom. The book that brightens up any room. Enlivens any conversation. A comedic Tour de force, a novel for our Now Times as we look toward our collective uncertain future, and finally a book packing enough Don DeLillo’s prescience to serve as an astute observer’s commentary and a warning all at once.
They gave Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. In-part for his work dealing with those, “...disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit.” Hope. Not hope-lessness. Hope. Something I’ve felt while reading Lee D. Thompson’s novel. No matter how bad things had gotten, and they sure did escalating’ly get worse, there was always hope.
Before I wrap up this review, I also wanted to say, there is also something to be said about Lee opening the barnyard doors on what we often as individuals want to lock up to make ourselves feel better about, or not think about, at all. Imprisoning animals. Keeping them locked up. Breeding them for food. This book allows us to spend time with them. Walk in their hooves. To literally humanize animals. Animals that know death. Saw death by the billions at the hands of the human. Saw death’s head come flaming from the blackness. Spewing fire. Killing everything it could reach. Turning everything to ash. A wasteland where we are surely heading. And this has nothing to do with the ethics of eating meat but is more of a reminder of how we are contributing to our own extinction through our hunger and greed for the evermore, always more. Perhaps, therefore, the humans having animal names, and the animals having human names makes perfect sense. Because we are One. A reminder. And yet, we imprison. We segregate. Are we not all allowed on the same farm with the gates unlocked, allowed to graze without monitoring by guardians with shotguns and razor-sharp knives? Ah, grass for thought.
So join Bones as he navigates labyrinthian passages while getting used to the foreignness of a body that is not his own. Let deeper into the darkness. Noose tightening, teeth sinking in. He keeps escaping. But he is tired of escaping. Who can escape anything, anyway? One trap to another. Is the answer in the mind? Can the outcome be changed with the power of the mind and the body of a sheep? That’s for you to find out, dear reader. But I can almost hear you screaming now, “Justice? What the hell is justice when you have no control over the placement of your own brain? The storing of that complex organ. When one day you are a man, and the next, a sheep. A man in a sheep’s body and men sheer sheep and eat sheep and imprison sheep...”
And what I have to say is, “Close your eyes, little sheep. And hopefully you won’t dream of wolves. There’s that word again, right… Hope.”
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