Triggers and Attritions

I’M NOT A TIMID MAN by M.R. Cosby

“….wading through the bullrushes and thistles, ankle-deep in the waterlogged ground –“

…after playing pooh-sticks during one of the most haunting scenes in this substantive work. This story is possibly the most effective in this whole book, teeming, as it does, with such haunting scenes as recounted by someone called Marius, recounted without speech marks for most or any of its dialogue (this being a symbol of ghosts talking in my own story Rosewolf as if I were once a writer now ghosting as a book reviewer?)
Seriously major work, this. And I could recount, alongside Marius, the tenor of some of these haunting scenes as part of its being a companion story to the previous one (“His wife and child were drowned, at their local beach”) with a band of paranormalists actually sussing Marius out as the ghost that they hunt? ‘Ghost hunting’ is an expression used in this work, and it is coincidentally timely as I have just entered a book that mind-squabbles CARNACKI: here. Hunting tantamount to Haunting as Finding. Via Time’s Id, not Ego.
This work is so tantalisingly amorphous, and one wonders even at one point if one could have prevented some of the things happening with knives, or re-parked the car where it was not in the way, or properly rebooted the computer EL-vis in the Ligottian factory-maze of Unlimited Publications alongside the ‘dark satanic mills’, taken more care of the graveyard shift there, appreciated the two women for whom or what they really were, put the right month on the flip up calendar after all, told you other readers how better to get out of this otherwise endless sick building syndrome of a story, while someone else like Aickman freelanced with better glossy photos of sexy coagulants along the canals that surround this story and its factory (“detritus half-buried in the bog which had developed along the centre of the canal.”)…and so much more.
Such as tannery smells, the piles of mail outside my door, and the man in leather overalls who often visits my house to do odd jobs. No point, though, if the building is about to be demolished, I guess. Or was that some other story? Some other life? I even hear someone rattling gently in break-in mode at my front door, even as I write this. “The image portrayed exactly what I thought I could see from the corner of my eye,…” And I wonder who or what, amidst all the triggers and attritions …

“…appeared at my elbow.”

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The full context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/03/06/the-trains-dont-stop-here-m-r-cosby/#comment-24489