Dealing With A Gestalt Being

Some Things Drift Apart by Allen Ashley

“I let the words and images sink in and suddenly I understood. Some things drift apart and some join up. We were dealing with a gestalt being.”

This is an ingenious story without being a story at all! It is a tranche of speculation somehow storifying a man not quite ready for the trappings of old age retirement, who has drifted apart from his wife, now fighting a corporate blending of myths, legends, piscine flesh and neo-plastic, in the form of monsters along the east coast where I live and, so, we are fighting them on the beaches! — literally at many places including “Clacton” explicitly! A war against Putin now become a war against PollUTIoN? Even against a new Lidl building as a child’s toy! And featuring an old public computer that bears a handwritten sign not to watch mermaid porn on it!

“Yet how could we fight something that could so easily combine and then disperse?”

***

Full context of this review will be here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/28/theakers-quarterly-fiction-70/

***

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— W.B. Yeats