The end of the story comes in the opening paragraphs. The jilted fiancé of the car’s owner knocks the door, asking for the vehicle back. The new convenience closing as quickly as it opened, a thing sealed off to be remembered fondly and perhaps pined for. The pessimist might be resentful of such an experience, but Johal chooses a different direction. As though the situation was proof things are given just as readily as they are taken away.

Echoes of this feeling resonate across Gurnaik Johal’s stories. Characters who have been denied so much—be it the luxury of a car or the immigrant’s sense of belonging—living and hoping in spite of everything. What results are tales less interested in definite statements on identity and history, but more the possibility within circumstances as they have been dealt. Be that making the best of what is present or refusing to accept the present as the only available thing.

A subtle interconnection threads the pieces, allowing Johal to create and then subvert expectations within his own individual characters, to further widen their sense of possibility on the page. We Move might span half the globe and multiple generations, but the same openness to joys both future and past shine through all the same.

We Move is out now via Serpent’s Tail, including a new paperback edition.

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You play as Wade, a computer repairman sent to a job in a vacant office building. Once inside, the door swings shut behind you, and you are forced to navigate empty corridors and deserted rooms in order to find a way out. This seemingly mundane beginning soon gives way to weirdness, as Wylesol wrings every drop of menace from the strange liminal hell-space of an abandoned office block. It’s a landscape of endless repeating corridors and identikit offices plucked from a nightmare, hostile to any form of humanity despite the pretence of water coolers, ergonomic furniture and the bright corporate colours that adorn every corridor.

Such uncanny environs are Wylesol’s forte, both in his graphic novels and work as an illustrator. There’s a weird blur of the physical and digital inherent in his signature style, where vector illustrations are laser printed and then scanned back into the computer. A collision of the real and unreal which ultimately questions any distinction between the two. Previous books have explored haunted hospitals (Ghosts, etc) and a battle with the legions of hell via a demonic computer virus (Internet Crusader), and it is clear from early on that 2120 is a horror story too. The innards of the building are impossibly large and initial attempts to make a quick escape become something of a philosophical quest into its depths. To say more on the plot would be to stray into spoiler territory, but fans of the eeriness of The House of Leaves, Silent Hill or David Lynch at his weirdest will revel in the opportunity to lose themselves within.

2120 is out now via Avery Hill Publishing. Get it from their online shop.

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Rooted in the futility of existence at the end of civilisation, The Doloriad is brave enough to mostly forgo plot in favour of atmosphere, the vibe shifting from unbearably oppressive to almost dream-like. But there is a story to follow. One centring on Dolores, one of the younger offspring, legless and pale and grublike, who is sent away as a marriage offering to a mysterious group of others who may be real, delusion or lie. When Dolores unexpectedly returns alone, the Matriarch’s grip on the community begins to loosen and what little order existed dissolves.

But it is Williams’s intricate prose which stands apart, and the resulting heavy, listless atmosphere which settles over everything. A tone warm, fetid and claustrophobic, embodied by scenes in the makeshift schoolroom where both pupils and teacher drift off to sleep during the latter’s rambling sermons. Even moments of extreme violence elicit little response from this broken family, as if nature’s unthinking cruelty has begun to sprout in their souls in the same manner plants and fungi have reclaimed what were once buildings parcelled off for human existence.

Odd, shocking, sometimes surreal (wait for the sitcom segments) and often beautiful despite itself, The Doloriad is a much needed poisonous antidote to the identikit khaki and rubble of most post-apocalyptic fiction. You won’t find any simple moral arcs here, no Hail Mary hopes of salvation. For Williams’s vision of the end times paints the remaining people as maggots writhing around in the rotten remains of our world.

The Doloriad is out now via Dead Ink Books (UK), and will be released next month in the US via MCD x FSG Originals.

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In his latest novel, Pure Life, Eugene Marten takes us beyond Jelonnek’s tape into the life of Number Nineteen himself. First with an extended prologue which condenses the slow rise and swift fall of an athlete on the cusp of glory into less than fifty pages, then through the aftermath that now represents his life. Like a veteran returned home with no way to communicate what has been taken from him, Nineteen is a man crippled—physically, mentally, spiritually—by the very thing which gave him purpose, losing his fame and family with equally undignified haste. His too-often battered head loses chunks of time to blackness, yet is somehow entirely submerged in the past. As though there exists a threshold inside of a man, be it of triumph, pain or brotherhood, beyond which there are only degrees of mourning.

Alarmed by his deteriorating health, Nineteen heads to the Mosquito Coast of Honduras for non-FDA-approved treatment, a Hail Mary throw which might make him whole again. But as with so many promised miracles, there’s no substance behind the dream, just an empty vacuum which quickly sucks Nineteen toward the brutal truths of existence. There is no rewinding now.

What follows is a journey into the rainforest to rival Heart of Darkness or Paul Bowles’s ‘Distant Episode’, a nightmare told from a curdled concoction of colonialism, capitalism and masculinity that readers familiar with Marten’s work will have been half-expecting all along. But as with his previous novels, Marten is too astute to let any sense of commentary overshadow the immediacy of the writing, foregoing easy moralising in favour rhythm and feel. The essence of Pure Life lies within this reptilian drive of the prose. Because for better or worse, the journey allows Nineteen to rediscover what it means to feel alive in the purest sense. Pure life is the athlete in motion, is violence, is the heat and noise of the jungle itself.

Pure Life is out now via Strange Light.

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Enter one of academia’s favourite buzzwords. The rhizome. Unlike the dichotomous model of trees, rhizomatic plants and fungus grow in all directions with no central point. “A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles,” Deleuze and Guattari explained. An interlinked structure without a central beginning or end. “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.”

Jeff Chon’s debut novel, Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun, applies the rhizomatic model to our conspiratorial age. The narrative takes inspiration from the Comet Ping Pong incident, where a man drove from North Carolina to Washington D.C. armed with a semi-automatic rifle to attack a supposed Democratic Party child-sex ring operating from the basement of a pizzeria, though Chon adds further layers of complexity and irony to delve into the guts of such events. His protagonist Scott Bonneville walks into the Pizza Galley Family Fun Center and foils a would-be shooter—the titular Good Guy With a Gun—but he hadn’t arrived in search of the perfect slice. Bonneville was at the restaurant to carry out his own attack, motivated by a web of conspiracy theories and urban legends which, fertilised by our good friend toxic masculinity, manifest as a violent delusion both highly personal and strangely familiar.

Because in his own mind, Bonneville isn’t a conspiracy theorist. The moon landings certainly occurred, Earth’s roundness is not up for debate. You don’t have to be a card-carrying wacko to care about kids being exploited or kidnapped across the country. A little bit of your own research unveils clear links to law enforcement, schools and religious groups. Is it so wild to care about suffering kids? Then there is shady stuff involving Wall Street and the Carlyle Group, and the Bushes and Clintons, and the CIA and J.D. Salinger and Lee Harvey Oswald and Adrenochrome and and and…

“Conspiracy… is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” wrote Frederic Jameson. “A degraded figure of the total logic of late capital,” or, what he describes elsewhere “a degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” But rather than representing a simplified fairy-tale version of global systems, the contemporary culture of conspiracy theory has morphed into its own impossible totality. In attempting to explain or reject the endless web of information, conspiracy theories come to represent a perfect example of the form. A rhizomatic structure key to their longevity and persistence. When the Pizzagate shooter pleaded guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon, Infowars‘ Alex Jones issued a statement acknowledging Comet Ping Pong was not involved in human trafficking. But the Democrat sex ring story was not demolished by the affirmation. Rather the Pizzagate conspiracy mutated to encompass the new developments, and now looks quaint compared with the scope and influence of QAnon. Take an axe to the trunk of a tree and every branch will wither and die. But sever a fungal rhizome and no such catastrophe occurs. The damage remains entirely local, the wider network no less capable of growth. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari, “but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.”

Chon brings this concept to life stylistically, circling the incident at the restaurant and providing glimpses into every occurrence and character which played some role in it, no matter how tangential. Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun comes to represent its own interlinked structure. The narrative is not linear. There is no present per se, just a series of scenes before, during and after the precipitating event. Vignettes presented out of order, and themselves prone to flashing back to some previous scene or revealing an as yet unrealised future. A story, for all of its male vanity and violent fervour, with no final villain or point of blame.

“You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything.” Deleuze and Guattari could have been writing about Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun here. “Formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject—anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions.” And seeing as they, like Chon, were writing about this horrible world we have created, in a funny way they were.

Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun is out now via Sagging Meniscus Press. Get it from your local indie bookshop, or failing that Bookshop.org.

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What follows is an odd and haunting novel which holds its intentions close to its chest. With its grey skies and thick mud, the prose is rooted in the Irish land, but this realism is challenged by both the cryptic narrative and the half-deranged characters at its heart. The short chapters accentuate this sense, acting like jump cuts between scenes and lending the feel of a dream. The result is peculiar but stronger for it, addressing the concerns of twenty-first century rural living but evoking a far older relationship to the land and the people who work it. So though Dennis’s style slots in alongside contemporary works like Cynan Jones’s The Dig or Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, it does so while maintaining an unsettling strangeness that is entirely its own.

The Beasts They Turned Away is out via Epoque Press.

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Bestiary is out now via Harvill Secker (UK) and Oneworld (US). Buy it from your local independent bookshop or Bookshop.org.

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The position is manifest in Ant’s main hobby. The attendance, and enjoyment, of funerals.  Any funeral, for anybody. His own fear of death lifted, Ant finds the dread inherent to the ceremonies to have evaporated, becoming a service not of grim mystery but familiarity. The comfort of the mundane. “The whole show,” Shah writes, “the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.”

When the younger cousin of Ant’s childhood friend is killed, he finds himself compelled to return to his hometown in Wisconsin after a prolonged absence. The friend, Vince, is unconvinced by his motives, but still collects Ant from O’Hare, and together the pair set off thorough the snow in order to make the service. Only in returning home, Ant is forced to confront that he has not lost everything—a past, a childhood, a network of relationships from which he could never untangle—and that grief can never be truly defanged.

He tries to deflect by settling into the playful macho bickering of his old friendship. He tries to dissociate and pretend that nothing matters. Vince, caught up in his own neuroses, does the same, and the old friends spark against one another as they hurtle towards the final explosion. The result is a farce in which every emotion and motivation is revealed as slightly pathetic. In other words, a farce most human and male. “He really said this to me,” Shah writes towards the end of the narrative. “I couldn’t help giggling a bit. He did too, just before falling to pieces. Everything, and everyone—ridiculous.”

Whiteout Conditions is out now via Two Dollar Radio.

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Outer Spaces – Gazing Globe

Working under the moniker Outer Spaces, Baltimore-based Cara Beth Satalino creates off-kilter pop songs that shift and shimmer, like arcane messages from some place out of sync with our own—a distinct dimension, an outer space. Released last month on Western Vinyl, new album Gazing Globe suggests that such a place might not be a deviation from reality but a more distilled form, somewhere free of projections and expectations that can shape us beyond our control.

The record is a product of great upheaval, Satalino turning to meditation in the aftermath of a relationship. “I think I was trying to get back to myself and my identity,” she explains, “separate from my relationship.” Perhaps the Outer Space does not concern some external world but something far closer, an interior nonetheless separate from the quote-unquote ‘real’ world, a space where we can find ourselves.

Kali Malone – The Sacrificial Code

Stockholm’s Kali Malone makes expansive, organ-based ambient music that pleasures in patience and precision. Released by iDEAL Recordings, The Sacrificial Code is a double album where no minute is wasted, working within a self-imposed austerity to achieve a near-hypnotic focus. “By voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind,” Steve Reich once said, “we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind.” Malone operates according to this ideal, stripping back any sense of surroundings, organ music suspended in blank space. The result is a meditative, ascetic lesson in transcendence, where open-ended does not mean nebulous.

Big Joanie – Sistahs

Consisting of Stephanie Phillips (vocals/guitar), Estella Adeyeri (bass) and Chardine Taylor-Stone (drums), London punk trio Big Joanie draw on influences from across the spectrum to form their distinctive style. Owing as much to The Ronettes as to the Riot Grrrls, and borrowing some of the weight of the post-punk movement, the band refuse to settle in any one box. “[We wanted to be] completely ourselves as black women,” they describe, “and discover what was possible to realise in those spaces.” The result is Sistahs, a full-length album released late last year via the The Daydream Library Series of records and tapes, the independent house label of Thurston Moore and Eva Prinz’s publishing imprint Ecstatic Peace Library.

Abe Hollow – Paradise

Abe Hollow is the the recording project of Oakland-based composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Adam Hirsch, and its songs display the full range of his talents. Born of an obsessive interest in family history and his Jewish heritage, debut album A Palace in Time is a collaborative, improvised journey through the many layers of Hirsch’s psyche—“a Yiddish gothic trip” according to one friend.

Single ‘Paradise’ gives some clue as to what such a thing might sound like, a single full of radiant shimmers and ethereal vocals where nothing is quite as it seems. With help from Ryan McGill (aka Ryan Von Gonten on guitar), Andrew Maguire (drums) Doug Stuart (bass) and June Hong (piano), Hirsch weaves a pleasantly surreal soundscape that’s at once forward-facing and reflective, proving that digging into one’s history can lead to discoveries as meaningful and rewarding as any other.

Slow Pulp – Big Day

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Slow Pulp bring to life dreamy soundscapes with a minimalist touch, angular riffs punctuating the gauzy space. Released with our friends at Citrus City Records, Big Day goes a long way in perfecting the style, borrowing from shoegaze and post-punk but maintaining its own unique spirit. Which is fitting, seeing as the EP is concerned with ideas of development and learning, focused on the formative years where everything is strange and new and nothing is set in stone. Slow Pulp take this idea into their music, moving forward without hesitation or preconception, letting the experience speak for itself in the present moment.

Nathalie Joachim – Papa Loko (Interlude: September 24, 1918)

Nathalie Joachim is a Haitian-American composer, flutist and vocalist who draws upon hip hop, indie rock, electronic and classical music to form a sound capable of forging new directions while maintaining an awareness and respect of cultural traditions. Joachim is set to release her debut solo record later this summer via New Amsterdam Records, an album which sees her joined by the Grammy-nominated string ensemble Spektral Quartet.

Fanm d’Ayiti, or “Women of Haiti”, is something of a celebration of Haiti’s female performers and storytellers, featuring recorded interviews with these artists, including Joachim’s grandmother and the the girls choir of her family’s home farming village of Dantan. Opening track gives a view ‘Papa Loko (Interlude: September 24, 1918)’ gives a glimpse into this vivid blend of music and oral history, and hints at what promises to be a special release.

Joyer – Here

Drawing inspiration from slowcore, 90s-era slacker rock and the contemporary bedroom pop movement, New Jersey’s Joyer make richly textured songs that often barely break a murmur. The songs exist in a crepuscular lethargy, favouring a kind of slow dawning rather than any immediacy or confrontation.

The duo are interested in movies and new album Peeled is no different, with Counterzine going into the influences of Harmony Korine and Andrei Tarkovsky on the lyrics. But there is a filmic quality to the sound itself too, with single ‘Here’ showing off the image-based, atmospheric style.

Mauno – Vampire

Montreal experimental pop duo Mauno have a new record on the way. Out later this summer, Really Well sees the band delve into high weirdness in order to explore the absurdity of life under late capitalism, where everything from art, love and even the self are assaulted by the drive for productivity and growth. With its playful tone and metaphorically ripe title, single ‘Vampire’ is the perfect example of Mauno’s style, fiercely critical yet grounded in humour, as though in wit lies a truly subversive power.

The song comes complete with a video directed by Max Taeuschel which further layers the critique, Mauno made to exercise non-stop for an hour during recording as a comment on the reality of creating and promoting music today. The duo can barely sing at times, exhausted and visibly sweating upon bikes stripped of their purpose, going nowhere.

Really Well is out on the 2nd August and you can pre-order it from the Mauno Bandcamp page.

Kate Tempest – Holy Elixir

If performance poetry and spoken word artists are experiencing something of a boom, then Kate Tempest can stake some claim for instigating a new urgency in the movement. While the form gets co-opted from all angles, popping up on every other advert as banks try to mimic a human face, Tempest stands resolute as an example of the true power of words. Recorded with Rick Rubin, her latest album The Book of Traps and Lessons builds on what has come before, its tracks alive with some electrical frisson, something related to both love and dread.

Lead single ‘Holy Elixir’ serves as a fine example, its force conjured from the unfurling sentences, as though within the correct sequence of syllables an energy can form. This energy lies at the heart of all things, both good and bad, though Tempest seeks to harness it, channel it in the right direction. “I hope that people feel connected,” Tempest explains. “I hope they connect with the work, and that this connection enables them to connect with themselves, and that this connection encourages a deeper connection to others. It might sound like high hopes. At this stage in the game, you have to know your motives. Otherwise, why even try?”

The Book of Traps and Lessons is out now via Fiction and you can get it from the usual places.

Daughter of Swords – Dawnbreaker

Daughter of Swords is the moniker of Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, who you might know as part of folk trio Mountain Man. Setting out solo, Sauser-Monnig uses Daughter of Swords to explore a break-up before it even happened, both pre-empting the sadness to come and dreaming of the things that couldn’t happen on her current course. As the title track highlights, the result is something elegiac and warmly hopeful, as though only through some great, earth-shaking catastrophe can the new shoots of life break through the topsoil.

Dawnbreaker is out now via Bella Union and Nonesuch, and you can get it from the Daughter of Swords website.

High Sunn – Our Perception

High Sunn is the recording project of San Francisco’s Justin Cheromiah, who makes an upbeat and glimmering brand of bedroom pop. New record Our Perception was released earlier this year, with Tristin Souvannarath joining to lend drums, as well as mixing and mastering duties, leading to the most vivid and immersive High Sunn tracks to date.

Indeed, the process of creating the record was the most involved too. “Never have I ever spent months on a release,” Cheromiah explains. “I’ve ached, cried, stressed, and felt joy writing these songs of love, real life experiences, struggles, and pure gratitude.” Lead single ‘Grateful’ shows off the care and attention that constitutes the release, a jangle pop so lush you can fall back into it and not hit the ground.

Our Perception is out now via Spirit Goth Records and you can buy it now.

Briston Maroney – Fool’s Gold

After a nomadic childhood strung between Florida and Tennessee, Briston Maroney eventually settled back in Nashville, laying down roots and cutting his teeth in the DIY music scene. Winning fans one living room at a time, Maroney built up a reputation and has now released an EP, Indiana, with Parlophone Records. Despite the big label, single ‘Fool’s Gold’ shows off Maroney’s grounded and intimate style. There’s a tenderness to the sound, a gilded nostalgia that drives a hope for the future, kicks of reverb hinting at the dissatisfaction with the present.  Check out the video directed by Joey Brodnax below:

Indiana is out now on Parlophone Records and available from all the usual places.

That’s all folks. Check the tag for previous editions of Bright Sparks.

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The collection opens with ‘The Finkelstein 5’, a story that immediately sets out Adjei-Brenyah’s distinctive style—a blend of horror and farce that’s loaded with haunting truth. A white father is on trial for decapitating five black children, The Finkelstein Five, with a chainsaw, though gets acquitted (and deified) due to his appeal to the wholesome family values of the all-American jury. “I did what I had to do,” he says. “And you know what—I loved protecting my kids.”

The story’s narrator Emmanuel Gyan must negotiate this world, his Blackness carefully managed on a scale from 1-10, spiking should he ever swear or shout or wear his cap backwards. A pressed suit and reserved attitude might get him down to a 2.9, while too-baggy jeans might see the needle creep past 5.0 and into dangerous territory. Despite turning the other cheek in the face of racism for the sake of self-preservation, Emmanuel finds himself miss out on a job because of the colour of his skin. “Well, thing is, we have this guy Jamaal here already,” the boss says. “And then there’s also Ty, who’s half-Egyptian. So I mean, it’d be overkill. We aren’t an urban brand.”

Which is how he finds himself dragged into The Naming, a movement quickly labelled a terrorist organisation that sees black people attack whites while chanting the names of the Finkelstein victims. However reluctant Emmanuel might be, the process seems inevitable—violence is coming for him, and he for it, no matter how hard he fights the pull. No amount of Blackness manipulation can save him in the end, and through the act of retribution he realises a perfect 10.0 in the story’s conclusion, before sharply falling to “an absolute nothing point nothing.”

In keeping with the tone of contemporary society, realism and surrealism are intertwined throughout Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah managing to present a heightened, often speculative world as the perfect representation of our own. The crazed capitalism of Black Friday is taken to its violent extreme, like Dawn of the Dead without the need for Zombie-virus allegory. A man and his father get lost in the Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze of an unfamiliar hospital, a matter complicated by his dealings with a mysterious “Twelve-tongued God” that has placed a magical brand on his back. Aborted fetuses return to talk with their father, riding in his pocket as they visit their mother’s fortune teller. Post-apocalyptic teachers discuss the Big Long War and the Big Quick War and swear to complete sincerity to avoid any repeat, even if it involves telling ugly kids they are ugly and stupid kids they are stupid. Adjei-Brenyah keeps going and going, his imagination outdoing itself in conjuring unbelievable situations that carry portentous weight, or else a sense of déjà vu.

The George Saunders vibes are at the forefront of ‘Zimmer Land’, a story that sees all of Adjei-Brenyah’s key themes intersect. It imagines a commercial role-play experience which allows people to experience danger and violence without any actual danger and violence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this allows users to act out their base desires, exposing the racial hatred that has existed at the core of the Western World for time immemorial (the title doesn’t take a lot of parsing in this context). Isaiah gets shot for a living by sanctimonious white men; men addicted to the rush and the blood and the moralising of their crimes, men making victims of themselves with Godly certainty, covered in the blood of other men.

The final story is like Groundhog Day meets Threads meets Battle Royale, taking the bloodthirsty insanity of living the same day over and over at the culmination of nuclear war and somehow giving it a quiet humanity. The feat is something of an Adjei-Brenyah trademark, his ability to breathe souls into his characters despite their darkly ridiculous surroundings quite possibly his greatest strength.

Through its peculiar blend of horror, sci-fi and satire, Friday Black presents America as caught in a funhouse mirror—fear and fury and fully-righteous greed brought into relief and magnified into hideous detail. Still, no matter how exaggerated and distorted the reflection, its eyes are always staring back, as cold and star-spangled as ever. Adjei-Brenyah is undeterred, staring right back with an unflinching gaze, all the while grasping for anything that might represent a human heart that still exists within the monster ahead of him.

Friday Black is out now via Houghton Mifflin Harcourt imprint, Mariner Books.

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