<\/span><\/strong>barely prepared me for exposure to his latest.<\/span><\/p>\nThe 39 stories in They Had Goat Heads<\/em> sprint, machine-gun and warp <\/span><\/strong>the reader <\/span><\/strong>to places where normal rational thinking would never dare go and you begin to wonder, as things progress whether the collection might actually cause <\/span><\/strong>brain damage. One thing is certain, you will<\/em> 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. <\/span><\/p>\nBut I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to hang They Had Goat Heads<\/em> with the label \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcliterature\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 because it seems immune to the staid and predictable conventions often associated with the form. Wilson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s collection flies in the face of such simple categorization.<\/span><\/p>\nFor those unacquainted with Irrealism an expansive explanation can be found at the Irreal Cafe in G. S. Evans\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 <\/span>essay entitled: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What is irrealism?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d More succinctly, essayist Dean Swinford has described Irrealism as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153peculiar mode of postmodern allegory\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that has emerged from the chaos of a deconstructed medieval system of symbol and allegory.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nIn other words, preconceptions need not apply. We limbo under Freud\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cigar: realistic expectations, interactions, fetish and symbols go out the window. These are transformed into something that resembles the intimate and often ambiguous realm of dreams and the unconscious\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut it is more a reflection than resemblance.<\/span><\/p>\nThey Had Goat Heads<\/span><\/em> is breathtaking. The reader is swept from genre to genre as a torrent of provocative images either hurtles past or impacts and bonds at the molecular level. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no escaping once it starts. The stories dodge in and out of reality, touching on persistent themes of repetition, media and technology, all of it interwoven with human DNA and its evolutionary design. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nBy using recurring images of family, destruction, death and recreation, Wilson effortlessly plays with cerebral fun as in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Monster Truck\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or shifts to the rather touching absurdity found in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Whale – with a Surprise Alternate (Happy) Ending!!!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d One comes away feeling as though the flexible word-play represents an ever-plastic quality of the universe and somehow gauges the limitless potential of sentience. <\/span><\/p>\nPerhaps that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why a nagging feeling persists. The stories feel so familiar. Why are they impossible to resist? In hindsight, the first hint of this d\u00c3\u00a9j\u00c3\u00a0 vu came in the second story, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Movie That Wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t There,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in which the narrator is drawn into a movie melodrama that is unfolding around him. Wilson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s collection does a similar thing. There is an inclusive and unavoidable identification that thrums throughout and makes the book impossible to simply read, there is complicity in every line.<\/span><\/p>\nThey Had Goat Heads<\/span><\/em> bombards the reader with exciting ideas and disturbing imagery plucked screaming from life and nightmares. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re drawn in because you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen it somewhere before: in your subconscious.<\/span><\/p>\nThey Had Goat Heads<\/span><\/em> is the equivalent of having dream surgery.<\/span><\/p>\n~
\n<\/span><\/p>\n(Thanks to GWT for the contribution-EBR<\/strong>)
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson – Review by G. Wells Taylor D. Harlan Wilson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s collection They Had Goat Heads (\u00c2\u00a9 2010 Atlatl Press) almost explodes in your hands. The author\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s deft and rapid-fire writing style reaches critical mass in seconds and a literary event of cosmic magnitude occurs. Then you realize you … <\/p>\n
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<\/a>Years ago I was lucky enough to review Wilson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s collection, The Kafka Effekt<\/em> (\u00c2\u00a9 2001 Eraserhead Press), and that, my first experience with the irreal,<\/em>