Every Moment Sharp, Explosive
From The Monster of Elendhaven, by Jennifer Giesbrecht:
The suite was all gold-flecked floral patterns and low-burning kerosene lamps. Purple drapes with puffy chiffon stuffed between the layers. Silkfur-thread carpeting and ancient oak furniture plundered from the abandoned mansions of ruined nobles long since moved to Mittengelt. The center table had feet carved to look like the hooves of the boars that once roamed the mountainside. A fossil from a different age. Johann wondered if it had once resided in Leickenbloom Manor as well. Fitting that there was detritus of Florian’s family scattered in every corner of the city, like bone and blood when a head is blown open by pistol fire.
Johann waltzed the circumference of the room, tapping all the paintings, just because he could. Florian had said that Ansley likely kept his family’s heirlooms tucked away in the cellar, but Johann found what he was looking for sitting pretty on a mantelpiece: a set of hand-wrought silver dinnerware. Each piece was stamped with the same seal Florian wore on his left hand. Johann picked a plate up and tipped it towards the light. The mural carved into it depicted the mouth of the harbour as a gate and, above it, the sun. He noticed that it was dented near the top, so he set his thumb in the depression and made a gouging motion. It gave way beneath his finger. A high yield of silver, nearly pure.
Jennifer Giesbrecht unleashes the literary elements of The Monster of Elendhaven with the force of gun powder and the shape of pointed bone fragments. The horror she develops throughout her novel seems unable to be contained in anything softer or more rounded.
Her monster, Johann, may be capable of beginning a delicate waltz, but he must tap and sound his way through the space. He slides through the air often unseen, then pounces with a slice or a strike.
This room’s lush drapes should fall stationary apart the wall and its carved table should sit heavy to the floor, but their physical grandeur opposes a societal history smeared with gore. The mansion shows its true form from beneath a deceitful exterior.
In many instances, Giesbrecht fills her descriptions of character and scene with the same sort of pistol fire she describes above. You get near-fragment sentences starting with the name of the object followed by its descriptor. Purple drapes hang puffed. Silkfur-thread carpet rests stolen.
Giesbrecht erases the use of “the drapes” and “the carpet” by forcing you into the places that contain them. There’s simply no time remaining for consideration of where you were or where you might go. You’re here now.
You move forward as quickly as Johann dances his way through the room. He must be in and out to steal back the silver.
You can’t let him pause. You press into the silver with his boney fingers the instant he does.
It’s a pleasure, however unnerving, to read in this way. I feel like I must stay in the moment and face the consequences of never looking backward. It becomes a surprise whenever Johann acts in the ways he will and when the physical spaces reveal their true forms. These people and places have existed forever it seems, but I can only know them in the moment.
Every body comes loaded with enough potential energy to crack the walls that temporarily contain it.
My mind, harried by the quick-paced text, feels every blast as if it’s the first, adding to the scars I don’t recall from all the previous percussions.