The Wingspan of Severed Hands - Abstract and Transcendent Horror
"It was as if she woke from a dream overwhelmed with a sense of its significance, yet had no memory of the content." This quote sums up how I felt when I was done reading this book, which Joe Koch so congenially personalized, signed, and sent to me. My dreams were disturbed, strange, and took me to cold and distant lands when I devoured pieces of this novella each night until completion.
The story relies heavily on the background of An Inhabitant of Carcosa and The King in Yellow for its settings and imagery, so I'd recommend you familiarize yourself with those works for a more deeply-felt experience with this book.
It begins with a concrete start and introduction to a girl whose mother is controlling, monstrous, and terrifying. She discovers that her teenage daughter, Adira, has had sexual relations with a boy and forces her to marry him. Adira is our strange victim and hero of the story, coupled with a constructed, sentient, and organic weapon in a lab, and the scientist behind it named Bennet. These three are separate yet together, flowing in and out of each others' existence in a mercurial way. As such, the story and characters become transcendental and float away from the concrete. This weapon is sleeping, dreaming, dead, yet alive. It is its own inhabitant of Carcosa, trying to find itself and its purpose while feeling everything and eclipsing time and space.
The connected feeling I got with each character and their inability to feel 'right' in their own skin was powerful. The humanity and lack of humanity in each character felt indivisible from one another, liquid and bound together. I loved this quote that speaks to the darker side of the human species, "No species on earth behaved in such a disordered way, practicing gleeful self-annihilation coupled with obscene environmental savagery."
This was a really cool book. You need to read carefully because each description is like picking a tender raspberry from its bush, and you want the morsel to make it to you intact, not crushed from distraction or impatience. I commend Joe Koch for writing this story in a way that plays out in the mind like a dream or nightmare. Its sequence hopping and terrifying and subtle imagery is captured exquisitely. These are the fine details that usually dissipate from one's mind as they wipe the sleep from their eyes.
