Reviews: Notes on the Investigative Novel

 

Notes on the Investigative Novel

A review by Mike Corrao

 

Mike Kleine and Dan Hoy, Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don’t Make a Sound
Trnsfr Books, 2021
136 pages, softcover, $18.00

 

cover of the book Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don’t Make a SoundFollowing non-clues through the esoteric planescape of their dreams and wielding unknowable tools and interrogating otherworldly beings, Detectives Michael and Daniel investigate the mysterious death of Jane from Yesterday. Their prime suspect is the Man of One Thousand Years—although he is not a particularly easy person to find. In the process of solving (or at least moving through) this mystery, the detectives’ real-world counterparts, Mike Kleine and Dan Hoy, assemble a novel titled Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don’t Make a Sound (WHERE THE SKY …). The novel documents their encounters, interrogations, leads, etc.

The most immediate detail of note is the shared names between the characters and the writers—projecting the authorial body into the text itself. The role of the detective and the author are not wholly unrelated. With both looking to navigate the text and gain insight into its construction / progression. Although it seems this role is more often fit to the reader—with their entrance into a space created (for the most part) by this authorial body. Thinking of the latter as the murder, as the creator of clues to be found. However, that does not seem to be the case here. The world that Kleine and Hoy / Michael and Daniel occupy feels as if it had already been formed before their arrival. It is a narrative that precedes the authorial body and its gaze.

By translating themselves within the confines of the book, the two manage to create a certain spontaneity throughout the work. As if the lines read and spoken by the detectives are occurring in real time. With both writers entering imagined conversations, or with one acting and the other reacting to it. The collaborative process feels unpredictable. The nonlinear modes of their investigation subverting the genre-typical inclinations of the reader to “outsmart” their protagonists. We are in a uni-verse (a collection of universes) built from unfamiliar logics and normalized cosmic horrors.

“Where they stand, the pheromone trail is disrupted and ant life turns to chaos and despair.”

All knowledge is hearsay. All objects are not as they seem: “This flashlight is designed to hurt you.” An irreality is conveyed two-fold. First, it appears in the oddness of certain phrases and actions, and second in the straightforward manner their oddness is presented: “They drive out to Mansion VI.”

There is this sense that reality is falling apart, or if not falling apart, that certain realities / planes of existence are starting to bleed into one another. This world is unstable (as the book’s title suggests), accumulating figures from various mythologies, referencing a wide flux of work from experimental hip-hop group Death Grips to videogames like Caves of Qud to Bioshock. Readers are navigating an interzone, a zone between zones, suffering the radiation that is emitted from each neighboring reality.

And the detectives / authors thus don’t feel fully in control of the situation: “Daniel is furiously writing words down on a notepad.” There is a blasé attitude that permeates throughout the text, but not due to the proficiencies of our protagonists, but rather in their acceptance of this unknowability. They are notably passive figures in the “solving” of the crime. The investigation takes them where it desires them to go, and they do not fight it. They bend to the whims of this progression. An end will come eventually, and it is not their place to change or combat that.

The earlier mentioned Bioshock reference appears through the simple statement “A man chooses, a slave obeys,” featured in the original game to highlight the lack of control the player has in the interactive setting, this false sense of freedom that the medium can create. When it appears in WHERE THE SKY … it instead feels like a reminder or a resignation rather than a revelation. Michael and Daniel submit to the investigation fatalistically, as if it has already been charted out before them. Each stop along the way is obligatory, and their actions within that scene will not affect the scenes to come. They are free in a microscopic sense, able to say or do whatever they want within these moments, but they lack any autonomy in the macroscopic, unable to choose where they will go next.

All of this is conveyed as well through a hyper-minimalist style. Simple syntaxes housing strange terminology: “Michael says, I think my orb is shrinking.” The straightforward nature of the writing brings to mind old text-adventure games or esoteric RPGs. It is utilitarian in its prioritization of delivering information, even if that information is completely unfamiliar to us. The transmission does not create confusion. The words are clear and easy to hear. But what they mean or imply, I do not know.

“(You are supremegenius, catfish René-oof)”

WHERE THE SKY … has this undeniable connection to videogames. Reading the text, I was never particularly reminded of other books or writers, but of various games: Caves of Qud, Paradise Killer, Disco Elysium, World of Horror. There is this way that recent indie developers have created works that are literary in their presentation (either through the widespread use of text within the work, or its focus on traditionally literary aesthetics) which is somehow reminiscent of Kleine and Hoy’s book. These works tend to take on more absurd or irreal qualities—focusing on nonexistent places, philosophical exploration, metaphysical instability. The mixture of these and other concepts creates the tone that seems to permeate throughout these works, but it surfaces in WHERE THE SKY … as well.

The writing almost feels like readers are interpreting directions, playing with the idea of the “procedural” as following a literal procedure. Each conversation / interrogation is a dialogue tree to be navigated. Not all options will be selected and explained, but those that are allude to a reality vastly complex and wholly outside of our understanding.

In the moments that do feel familiar, readers see the brief humanity and uncertainty of the detectives. In moments like Michael’s encounter with the Man of One Thousand Years, where readers can feel the author / character reacting in real pain and fear—suddenly confronted with the fragile nature of his existence: “Michael screams.” In its minimalism, the prose appears more potent, not weighed down by any kind of specificity. A scream is the core essence of screaming. It is guttural and instinctual.

“I think I’ve 100% d’stroyed my inner self”

Time moves in an unstable fashion. There is this sense that any scene could be moved elsewhere, or swapped with another and not feel out of place. There is no progression. Instead, the book is built as a network of moments, packets of duration, all occurring at once. Pocket dimensions arranged in the likeness of a narrative.

Accentuating this is the title page, which sits around the center of the text. Preceded by the image of a car driving through the countryside and followed by the copyright information. At first this appears as a printing error, as if the machine accidentally shifted these pages towards the gutter. But once that thought passes, it instead feels like an invitation to move through the text in whatever order readers please. This uncertainty draws attention to the instability of the narrative’s teleology. Time moves in a spiraling fashion. It does not follow a straight line from past to present to future. It is not that simple. And thus, there are an endless number of potential ways through which we might traverse the text, each with its own implications and insights into the detectives and their investigation. What if they come to meet the Man of One Thousand Years before Jane from Yesterday’s death? Perhaps readers are looking at the junction of many universes, all diverging from the gutter, from the nodal point of the title page.

WHERE THE SKY … articulates an esoteric potential for all that could be. Summoning upon the reader, a network of doors, all leading into different cavernous spaces, all looping back onto one another. There is the sense that this world (wherever Michael and Daniel may be) is simultaneously infinite and only the size of the place where they stand. It is unstable yet indestructible. Readers witness an investigation of the highest priority and of the least importance: “The universe is a piece of something even worse,” and readers are only able to access it in the brief moments between one scene and the next.

 

Reviewer Mike CorraoMike Corrao is the author of numerous works, most recently Cephalonegativity (Apocalypse Party) and Desert Tiles (Equus Press). Along with earning multiple Best of the Net nominations, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Collagist, Always Crashing, and Denver Quarterly. He lives in Minneapolis.