Sky Filled With Crows, Then Nothing at All —Attila Veres

“I’m not a heavy metal fan. I listen to it because of him, Csaba, but I prefer Handel and Mozart.”

I know what that means, I think. I love the classical greats old and new. And String Quartets, even (or especially?) when screaming and screeching, are preferable for me to electric guitars doing the same thing. Meanwhile, I understand Csaba is the Hungarian name for a son of Attila the Hun. And that this story portrays a demonic synergy, a narrator as a devilish incubus under Csaba’s bed, and adding to and subtracting from Csaba’s life, his loves, his career as a metal musician and as a free spirit, Csaba who is nobody’s slave except perhaps that hidden demon’s, and we hear of the group Steelbird, and the characters who live and die around Csaba. Basically the narrator is a tutelary demon that lurked here even before Csaba was conceived…Csaba who was born “enclosed in the cage of the Hungarian language” and so the universal language of music was the best course to follow. Until the shape-shifting demon’s control of Csaba’s love life, sexually attracted in potentia towards the demon itself and then towards a real woman, eventually resulting in a pretty daughter and a new rival(?) tutelary demon for this daughter. But I must remember that this highly insinuating portrayal of the demon is a gift of its own narration…
sky filLEd WIth crowS …”old demos”, old demons like me.

“To become the sky itself, and not just a passing bird against it.”

***

My other AV reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/the-stories-of-attila-veres/

PS: cf the earlier Caged 4’ 33” in my overall reviews of AV.