They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson – Review by G. Wells Taylor

D. Harlan Wilson’s collection They Had Goat Heads (© 2010 Atlatl Press) almost explodes in your hands. The author’s deft and rapid-fire writing style reaches critical mass in seconds and a literary event of cosmic magnitude occurs. Then you realize you were standing too close: you’re not in real time or space anymore.

Years ago I was lucky enough to review Wilson’s collection, The Kafka Effekt (© 2001 Eraserhead Press), and that, my first experience with the irreal, was a trial by fire that barely prepared me for exposure to his latest.

The 39 stories in They Had Goat Heads sprint, machine-gun and warp the reader to places where normal rational thinking would never dare go and you begin to wonder, as things progress whether the collection might actually cause brain damage. One thing is certain, you will come away from the experience knowing you have read a cutting-edge piece of literature: the images are stimulating and resonant, in manifold ways unique and strangely familiar.

But I don’t want to hang They Had Goat Heads with the label ‘literature’ because it seems immune to the staid and predictable conventions often associated with the form. Wilson’s collection flies in the face of such simple categorization. Continue reading