Endland

March 1, 2020
Thirty-eight surrealistic short fictions about gods and monsters and other neighbors cohabitating at the end of the world. This collection by British multimedia artist and writer Etchells (Vacuum Days, 2012, etc.) may be about, as the author notes on the first page, "Kings, lords, liars, goal-hangers, killers, psychics and prostitutes," but it's also a politically charged and graphic portrait of Western societies hanging on by a thread. With an introduction by Britpop legend Jarvis Cocker, who shares Etchells' roots in Thatcher-era England, this particular work of art demonstrates once more that what goes around comes around. This loosely connected compilation of stories set in the shared universe of "Endland" finds characters both conventional and macabre mingling in a place where adversity is constant and happiness, elusive. The first half resurrects 1990s-era pieces from the long out-of-print Endland Stories (1999). The opener, "About Lisa," concerns a young woman who works in a topless chip shop and whose life is changed by a murder. "Who Would Dream That Truth Was Lies?" introduces one of the book's recurring conceits, a pantheon of gods that includes traditional Greek gods but also outliers like Herpes, Chandelier, and Rent Boy, among others, a conceit that continues in "Arse on Earth." It's easy to go too far, as in "Chaikin/Twins," a nature-nurture experiment that finds a man contrasting twin sisters, one pampered and one sexually brutalized. There are nontraditional morality tales about a fallen starlet, a transient pop star, and a woman disintegrating into the ether of cyberspace. Stories in the collection's back half are less graphic but turn a black mirror to the movies, from crime stories set in Endland to a horror fiction based on found footage to an unexpected take on "scripted reality." They aren't easy to digest, these lurid tales of poverty, parricide, ghosts, and untimely deaths, but they do pose some hard questions about the world outside our windows. A surprisingly incisive rendering of a shattered society--or, just another world gone wrong.

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May 18, 2020
An overriding English sarcasm lends weight and humor to artist and writer Etchells’s rough-hewn collection, which includes tales first published as Endland Stories: Or Bad Lives in 1999 along with newer work, and strikes a sharp critique of Thatcher- and Boris Johnson–era England. Etchells cuts his prose with abbreviated vernacular and misspellings (heroine for heroin, “Lana Dull Rey”) and darkly graceful brutalist poetry (“the trees on the avenues all tangled in their branches with old audio tape and polythene bags hung in tatters”), setting the stage for characters trapped by circumstances beyond their control. In “About Lisa,” a four-page story told in rapid-fire fragments, the title character agrees to a date with her boss at a topless chip shop, blames herself for her sister’s murder, and begins losing sight of her image in CCTV screens. In the end, Lisa changes her name to “something more suited to her age, race, sex, and occupation. She calls herself SILENCE.” Elsewhere, a biker stops aging because “the king passed a decree to decimalise time” and remains “still 25... time stopped and ‘future’ endless.” There are moments of emotional resonance, though it often leaves a bad taste (readers may find uneasy common ground with the crowd in “Eve & Mary,” “as clueless as it was voyeuristic and desensitised to violence”). Etchells’s stories deliver a difficult, darkly funny, sharp critique of modern England, and live up to indie rock veteran Jarvis Cocker’s description in his introduction: “They are frightening, but they’re also necessary.”