Naomi Gibson’s first adult novel, Man Muse Monster, is a dark academia horror-romance about zeal, obsession, and the irrepressible hunger to create. [1] Harry is the last in the long line of “Great Alexanders,” a(n) (in)famous family with a history of notable artistic achievements. Orphaned young, he finds himself sharing the decaying ancestral mansion with his heavy-drinking, resentful uncle. At twenty-two, he pursues an MA in Fine Art, but struggles to stand out amongst the wealthy students at the Apollo Academy. Insecure, impoverished, and desperate for success worthy of his grand legacy, he stumbles upon an unfinished painting that literally houses a muse passed through the Alexander bloodline: a young, immortal man who refuses to give his name but offers the inspiration that might bring Harry greatness.
While Vincent Endwell’s Olyoke is presented as a collection of linked stories, it reads more like parables from the scriptures of an Appalachian cult, demonstrating preoccupations with multiple overlapping themes: language and meaning, identity, perception, bodies in transformation, storytelling, inexorable forces overpowering free will. In style and subject, it situates itself firmly in the Lovecraftian tradition of weird fiction, with heavy allusions to Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895). Readers looking for individual stories that tie themselves up with a neat ending should look elsewhere; an Endwell story doesn’t *ahem* end well in the traditional sense. Each story works off the other and, taken as a whole, the collection transmits a satisfying sense of existential dread which will worm around in readers’ minds long after they’ve left the strange town of Olyoke.
