Yes I knew your mother. Why do you ask? I remember she didn’t go out of doors. It was as if when she got settled she shut out.
She was a woman who believed in cliché and stereotype more than her instincts and experiences. She constructed for her inner self a completely imaginary respectability in a radically storied world. And there she lived if she had to kill to do so.
She imagined the life of her children, you and Hank, from the biographies in newspapers of parent murderers. It was all drugs and knives. She imagined the schools and courses you took from TV sitcoms. Things were on your blackboards, dangerous things with arrows and the names of all the well-known neighbours. Shakespeare and Napoleon, Hitler and Einstein.
She knew all about the neighbours, the folks on the street, even though she had never seen them. The foreign lady who had strange visitors. The slut in the housecoat.
She imagined herself the one who respectable people were dying to meet. Some had spoken to her.
She didn’t like me or any of your friends. We were encouraging matricide or at least making fun. We weren’t respectable.
She had been in prison hadn’t she? Or been a collaborator with the occupiers?
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Listen I am tired of these things from you. You structure your Novels like those bad fantasy Video games with all the driving. No-one of any generation can follow what I call your mediaeval mix of talky detail and mindless motion - or even bother to see the silly alternatives you brag about to the narrative. Your characters are completely wooden and unbelievable. Unless you are one. Your metaphors don’t cohere. They are like shoppers in a hardware store. Stunned and boring. I am almost completely finished with all the jagged syntax too. If you read it out loud you sound like you are choking with fright. Is that supposed to keep me away from genre trance?
-The Editor
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