Where Angels Fear
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read

Literary PTSD

I’ve been meaning to recommend Jack Womack’s ‘Ambient series’ / ‘Dryco chronicles’ books ¹ for a very long time indeed but, somehow, don’t seem to have got around to it.

So, I’m remedying that situation now.

They’re ‘alternate reality’ stories in which the powers that be have dropped the pretence.

Even today we live in the world of the Medici and the Borgia and these books describe that reality in unpleasant detail rather than broad sweeps … the proclivities and activities of the elite portrayed in ways that stick in your mind forever after.

Even the more fantastical stuff, like in Elvissy for instance … which is very reminiscent of Michael Marshall Smith’s sudden twists into brutally juxtaposed non-sequitur parallelism … maintains the coherency of the insanity and degeneracy present in the others; those themes being at the core of the whole series.

They’re best summed up in a line from a review of Ambient.

“It contains a lot of violence, both physical and moral.”

I think that’s a great description: moral violence. They’re full of casual, and equally as casually accepted, abuse; the world they describe morally repugnant — it’s what sticks with you after reading them.

“His future pulses with dangerous clubs, underground labs, biogenetic adaptations, privilege’s war upon the helpless in profit’s name. He stretches the present and takes the worst of it and you’re mindreeled at the way things could be. Futurewise shock awaits doorway crouched, loaded and menaced. This is the world of hungry street rats, public gang rapes and murders, firebombing and torture burnings, social chaos and an environment of decay and destruction that makes old Beirut look like a holiday camp. The Church of `E’ (Elvis) is the only socially binding philosophy. Interspersed amongst this heaving shameful world are the circus-like communities of the Ambient.”

— Philip Solo“

“Womack is at his best when he writes casually about the atrocities that are an everyday event on the streets”

— A. Customer

“If you dropped the characters from ‘Neuromancer’ into Womack’s Manhattan, they’d fall down screaming and have nervous breakdowns”

— William Gibson (author of ‘Neuromancer’)

No, they wouldn’t, Bill — they wouldn’t live long enough.

They make for uncomfortable, unpleasant but, I think, significant reading … and are, in my opinion, well worth the effort ².

I often wish I could get bits of them (preferably all of them) out of my head and undo the damage they did me — go back in Time to before they raped my mind and then, afterwards … just for kicks … brutally crippled it for life before leaving it to bleed to death in the street.

More than any other book(s) I have read, they have left me cringing, with a feeling of being contaminated by an acquired degeneracy in the marrow of my very being; my mind, my soul, my very essence defiled and corrupted, invaded by an untreatable spiritual infection … by an AIDS of the psyche.

There’s a resonance with Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein and Ennis/Dillon Preacher: Salvation, but Womack’s stuff is much darker … seeping into your psyche like Lovecraft’s horror; the sense of disease … dis-ease … stemming from the fact that the only reason we don’t know for sure that the real world isn’t already like the one in the books is that the elite still bothers to pretend that it isn’t — as soon as you read the nastier material ³ you instantly know that, yes … never mind could happen … these things have surely already happened.

If you wanna understand what I mean properly, read them yourself … especially the first three.

They’re exceptionally unpleasant — I can’t recommend them highly enough.

¹ Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissy, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Going, Going, Gone.

² And they are an effort to read.

³ And saying that there are nastier parts: a) is putting it mildly and b) beggars belief.

)
Where Angels Fear

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There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live and too rare to die.

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