Carved Jerky

THE PURBLIND BARDS by Timothy J. Jarvis

“It was telling me not to think too hard about the routes the statues took, the patterns the lights inscribed. That they were significant, but that I’d never know what they meant.”

Valentine’s scrying and readings of our land in the previous story have morphed and now make me become swaddled, even subsumed by them in a foulness that I could never myself describe even adequately but this story managed somehow to go into a gear of utter foulness and flayed pain and pointless endeavour and the state of the nation — a gear that I have never been able to go into before by the means of any literature! This tale, as you follow the bards and the oracles, takes you to that extremest edge and then over it. No exaggeration. Carved jerky, or not.
(Needs to be read aloud, with full articulation and expression, to a listener whose mouth gapes open wide and wider as you read it to them.)

Full context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/06/infra-noir-2020/

….and of above image: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/29/a-monster-calls-patrick-ness/#comment-22084