Bedlam - A Dance of Mental Illness and Existential Dread
Charlene Elsby sent me a signed ARC copy of this book (because she is incredible), and I had to read it right away.
Elsby is a dark magician with words. This collection of stories casts a spell that flips between making the reader an engaged psychologist, and a depleted victim, depending on the reader's mental state at the time. Although the stories are all different, they seemed to be connected through a narrator who has been bullied into apathy by her life's circumstances, mental illness, and the men surrounding her. Some of the responses to her mental bruises were extremely brutal, and others were cynically sarcastic enough to draw out a chuckle. Either way, it plucked emotions from me like pulling my teeth out with its hard writing and sense of despair that ran beneath everything like a silk scarf.
I want to draw attention to a quote from the story Another Man's Bruises that had me simultaneously laughing at my own tendency towards pareidolia (auditory or visual), and falling into a pit of existentialism about how nothing really matters or means anything:
"I would always soon give up and put my earphones in, lean my head against the window and listen for the music to tell me something I didn't know or had forgotten or needed to get by. This song came on about how she didn't know I was one of the people who'd hurt her, and I thought it meant something."
I also continued to return to the title Bedlam because so many of the stories pertain to situations that damaged the narrator through the use of a bed (literally and in the sense of sex in general), or situations where she has to go on the lam (running away from herself, her abusers, and existence). Bedlam also plays into the now-archaic meaning of the word: an institution for the care of mentally ill people. The book is like a tiny institution in your hand that offers a window of observation into the narrator's experience.
Putting all of this together, this book hammers down on the senses and emotions until they ring like a bell inside of you. It made me angry at men, angry for myself as a woman, and angry at the brain's tendency to chemically imbalance. By the end of it, I was desperately clawing my way back out of the void that Elsby bewitched me into entering.
