Chimera Lucida
June 23, 2009
David Fiore
David Fiore’s Chimera Lucida is published by iUniverse, a service for writers that will publish and print almost anything. I think it’s wonderful that writers now can bypass the publishing house gateway and move their work straight from the computer to the reader. Hence the broken financial model of print is no barrier to writers, and absolutely terrible pieces of work are available right next to unknown and amazing ones.
Make no mistake, Chimera Lucida (“A Technodiegetic Romance”) is viscerally dire. I am sure some people will find it funny; they are the ones who talk too much at literary criticism seminars. It is bad in a way only the highly educated can achieve; there is so much word play it takes a puzzle solving mind to figure out what even happens. Not much does: somewhere near page one the main character dies, and the remainder stalks a web forum in which the participants, modeled on the most obnoxious people you have ever met at a party full of “subversive” graduate students, talk about it. They also talk about themselves. Endlessly. Which is an incredible achievement given that the whole ordeal, double-spaced, comes to less than eighty pages.
This book has an amazing cover. On it, one falcon, with a bleeding rabbit carcass in its talon, is being attacked, while flying upside-down, by another falcon. Nothing like this happens inside the book, so maybe it is some kind of metaphor. Who cares. It is an amazing cover.
I know this is crossing the line, but I’m going to wonder out loud why the author chose to format this for print. It follows a web forum. He could have put it online as a web forum. But I’m just the reviewer, it’s none of my business.
Listen, if you know David Fiore, you should buy this book. It’s just nine bucks; I mean, it’s less than the price of a pitcher of beer, and if you know David Fiore, maybe he’s bought you a drink or given you some cigarettes or talked you down from some emotional meltdown at some point in your university days together. I don’t know, maybe you don’t even like him. But come on, you aren’t going to miss the nine dollars, and maybe his next work will be better. Guest review by Patrick Edwards-Daugherty, 2009.
