As I read Isaac Fellman’s Notes From A Regicide, I kept recalling how I felt when I read M. John Harrison’s Viriconium novels. I haven’t read those novels in … oh, I don’t know. Thirty years? Forty? I don’t even really remember the plots. But there is something about Notes From a Regicide, set in a post-post-apocalyptic Earth and telling a disjointed, almost plotless (in the classic, Freytag’s Pyramidesque definition of plot) story about family, about art, about trans life, about drunkenness, about mental instability, about political instability, about gender instability, about revolution, about helplessness, about activism, about figuring out how to live after revolution, that reminded me of how I felt when I was much younger and immersed in the dying Earth genre of weird fiction, my head filled with whirling images of decadent, entropic, trouble-filled cities and jaded, performative, narratively unreliable anti-heroes.
M. John Harrison’s Viriconium … Michael Moorcock’s Melnibone … China Mieville’s New Crobuzon … Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast … I am fascinated by cities described in fractured, almost hallucinogenic prose, forming saudade-infused settings for momentous events only half-understood by the characters and therefore by the reader, as well. Because isn’t that simply the way life works?
Notes From A Regicide is, a little, like that — many characters simply can’t describe what life in Stephensport was like, and the reader is left with vivid flashes of imagery that can’t quite cohere into a stable sense of place. Even this novel’s New York is not really New York as we know it. I’m not going to try to describe the novel’s plot — other reviews do a good job of that. It’s a novel that readers who are trans, gender dysphoric, or gender questioning are likely to find piercingly real … although any adult who has wondered at their aging parents’ eccentricities and mysteries will feel for Griffon as he tries to tell the story of his chosen parents, Etoine and Zaffre Keming. The book is his attempt to reconstruct his parents’ pivotal roles in bringing down the strange, fantastical city of Stephensport and how those experiences brought them to the odd, awkward lives they are living when he meets them, two all-but-forgotten political refugees working as artists and dwelling in bohemian poverty somewhere in New York.
This won’t be a book for every reader; perhaps not even for most readers. But I found it engrossing, in the same disturbing, slightly uneasy way that I remember having found the Viriconium novels engrossing. Most of my fiction reading isn’t challenging — I read copiously, and usually to relax, deliberately choosing simple, escapist, semi-predictable genre fiction to calm my brain after a long day. But I still enjoy running across a book like this that manages to keep my attention while constantly wriggling away from tidy, reductive genre categorization and avoiding the formulaic beats of standard plot structure.
Upon closing the book, I logged into Amazon and purchased the Kindle versions of some of my old favorite dying Earth novels — books I’d once treasured but had gradually let go over the course of many, many moves. I wonder whether, after I read them again decades later, I’ll still feel that disturbing, visceral sense of displacement and uncertainty I remember feeling when I was young, or whether I’ve aged out of them. Either way, I’m grateful to Fellman for giving me such a Proustian moment of distinct, spontaneous recall and for reminding me that while comfortingly predictable fiction is, well, comforting, I also appreciate fiction that moves unsteadily beneath my feet and challenges me to find my way through thorny, often interpellative mazes to a bittersweet, elegiac end.