Return to the Midnight School by Attila Veres

“We all sang a song Old Béla had taught us that afternoon. It was a rather odd melody. It reminded me of sunsets I had never seen myself because they were before my time, and of sunsets I never will see, because they’ll happen long after I’m dead.”

Béla Bartók ‘always mentioned the miraculous order of nature with great reverence’, according to his son. This story is the miraculous order, as well as disorder, of literature — at one moment a reader-mocking ‘bull-shit’ panoply of horror goo, the next a beautiful pattern of matchless words expressing numinous and nemonymous ideas beyond such goo, skeining together into a white-filamented infinity of connections towards gestalt within the earthiness of gaia, involving ‘distances’, say, between here and Jerusalem or between here and America, between birthhole and deathpit, and vice versa, the polarity of the ‘noon school’ and the ‘midnight school’, as filtered through this narrator’s life in this countryside of human-skinned crops, a narrator in cahoots with an orphan friend from the city who has daredevil ideas on eating stuff he shouldn’t eat and how to meet his dead mom and dad again. And the narrator’s own later life beyond this place and its processes.
I cannot do justice to this story’s dismemberments and regatherings, an uncle who twists your nose, the land’s ‘legged’ or ‘toothy’ crops, allergy plagues, culinary convulsions, deviant spiders, and a child who hears its own father’s corpse roar in the night. Toxins and nightmares. Rules and superstitions. Zeno’s “zero o’clock” and ‘stamen jelly recycle’. Words and sounds. And that’s my own bull-shit done for, too. Still, I haven’t even scratched this story’s surface, but it certainly gets under mine!

“…a strange, atonal growling, not quite singing or speech. At first it’s a flat sound, then it modulates, shifting pitch occasionally, as if their throat were an instrument someone was tuning up for a performance.”

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More reviews of Veres stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/the-stories-of-attila-veres/