Crypt(o)spasm

Schism [2] Press rereleases Gary J. Shipley’s first novel

Crypt(o)spasm is a fiendish formula for any vitalist utopia: The elimination of death or the so-called immortality is equal to life as the ceaseless permutation of a ghoulish emptiness. Rather than sensationally portraying this unfortunate utopia in frosty gray, Shipley brilliantly depicts it in a color-frenzy that corresponds with the livor mortis of the worldly flesh, detailing it with a prose that positively degenerates on an exponential decay curve. A monstrous book. I love it.

– Reza Negarestani

CRYPT(O)SPASM explores the idea of the novel as an impossible object. Its themes are myriad and drunken, sprawling and wretched and philosophic — and then the inescapable synonymy of the final two. It gives us death as it takes it away. And there are herds and there are individuals: zeros piled up end on end on top of zeros. Questions are asked of men living out their own thought experiments. Answers are lived in consecutive intervals sucked of death while framed in its disappearance. A coded message is hidden and then revealed. Others are buried, their insides clogged, and they are not found. The book is ill with itself. Its origins and aspirations bleed like sweat stains under its author’s arms. The coast is old, feckless, and dying. The coast is falling into the sea. Its legs have varicose veins and crumbling bones. Its mouth is a grave. There are no teeth left to bite the world. Self-delusion is the only essential art. And there becomes an author — literary snide, paranoid, arsehole, xenophobe, visionary, pissant — and the book is his, and he is eaten up with the words he’s borrowed. And there’s a man whose wife is dead and living inside another woman. And all this to make sense of evil and literature — and literature as evil — as two philosophers squabble over a self they each made from incompatible materials, and murderers murder, and animals suffer (cats and dogs and birds coiled up inside each other like barbed wire), and children die more than once. And there is something to be done, instructions to be carried out, a hole to find and crawl into and through and out the other side, which is the same side, which is no side at all.