Proximity
Louis Ferdinand Céline, absurdism, Mel Blanc, literary fiction, weird fiction, surrealism, novella, chicago writer, Rudyard Kipling, Milton, jumptheshark, dreamsintheblacksmoke, opium, polar explorers, Chicago authors, romanticism, occult, fountain of youth, Jean-Patrick Manchette, dadaism
Adam Galanski-De León
Dreams in the Black Smoke
Amidst the Great Age of polar exploitation, Captain Blaz Ritter leads a doomed expedition into the Arctic in search of the Fountain of Youth (and a very special banana).
Dreams in the Black Smoke is an experimental novella: part Kipling, part hallucination, part grotesquerie—by turns absurd, poignant, incomprehensible, exquisitely poetic, and unexpectedly hilarious.
Join Captain Blaz on a psychedelic descent where edges and centres fold in on themselves. An expedition that becomes its own distortion, a strange mirror in which exploration turns back upon itself, revealing the beginning of its own end.
Haunting children’s games, secret manuscripts, indiscreet seductions; scenes carved in ivory and street-grime. Characters that cling like a prickle at the back of the neck, or a sudden shudder—Blaz himself like a piece of food between the teeth, sore and insistently present.
At once classic and sickeningly modern, otherworldly and as mundane as a nail through a shoe, the novella builds a growing sense of grim delight that circles back on itself irresistibly. An exploration of the inside of your head as much as the author’s, and a seductive invitation to lose the boundary between the two.
In Dreams in the Black Smoke, Adam Galanski-De León masterfully stretches his hands across fiction, poetry, and diary entries to dissect life, death, and the chaos embedded in how his characters navigate the in-between.
– Justin Finley, Raging Opossum Press
This novel finds the face of Time to be duplicitous. Its intrepid and oneiric research into the temporality of storytelling leads to the unsettling discovery that the in-betweens of individual and cosmic time–undersides of quick animals, decaying skulls in moss-covered forests, the unnamed maggots of history–are, in fact a kind of shimmering Janus. The movement between these two faces devours our insipid belief in free will. A thin veil separates a child lingering in the halls of her unlived life from her death. A wedding dress floats in a fountain. Scissors slipped between two bodies in the act of murder are the secret face of choice. Clouds look like skulls. “We are death’s laundry strung up to dry,” and “[i]t’s a lonely death.” Orbs floating in the night are white gloves marionetting. “Abuse begats abuse.” What exactly is at the intersection of our acts of treachery and our impossibly bitter regrets? “Who are the ones who eat scraps from stray dog’s tables?” Dreams in the Black Smoke is a novel in the way that all writings are fictions, in the way that America is a fiction, in the way that genre is a flimsy container, in the way that Coleridge’s Mariner’s violent and meaningless act destroys the very possibility of looking out at peaceful water and then explodes into necro-theater. Galanski-De León is ruefully saying, “in song we live forever,” while also, thankfully, “this world is just a needle in the hay!”
– Olivia Cronk
DREAMS IN THE BLACK SMOKE is “a feverish language-driven exploration of ruin and wonder,” treading the territory of Moby Dick and Frankenstein with an aesthetic and idiom otherworldly in uniqueness and scope.
Captained by the intrepid Blaz Ritter, the crew of the ironically named Sisters of Mercy propels itself mercilessly through Arctic perils and grotesque hauntings to reach the north pole, while a secret destination is stashed in its captain’s restless mind. de-Leon sets his star-crossed crew on a course bedeviled with memories of ruined childhoods, motifs of white wreathed in black, and Thanatos-fueled dreams of immortality and old-world decadence that persist even as the bodies pile up in their wake.
“May I meet you there in Hell, mark your forehead with lampblack and plunge your guts with sharpened bones,” a doomed crewman curses. Lyrics such as these lie upon each page begging to be set to a sea chantey.
Through the pressure of his sumptuous prose and his avidity for sonder, de-Leon crafts a kaleidoscopic prism, dazzling and horrifying readers with the urban and hyperborean wastes, which reflect his characters’ psyches, gnarled by misfortune and lit by hamartia disguised as hope.
– Shaun Anthony McMichael, author of WHISTLE PUNK FALLS.
Galanski-DeLeon’s storytelling power continues to be unmatched. He is a literary powerhouse, with stories that show the true nature of the human show; both its beauty and the darkness within.
– Samuel Plauche, Raging Opossum Press
