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REVIEW: SYBIL'S GARAGE 4
Sybil’s Garage No. 4 is an alienating thing—a saturation tank of isolation and the sublime. Like its first three predecessors, Issue 4 aligns the quietly bizarre and the slightly uncanny with nineteenth-century design. That’s not to say that Sybil’s Garage is easily classifiable, either in form or content. Victorian woodcuts share pagespace with postmodern silhouettes and modernist sketches. Fragments of polyglottal marginalia pepper Sybil’s pages—appearing everywhere like cryptic typesetter’s notes. From the first glimpse of the Bladerunneresque cover to the final, stunning woodcut, this issue is its own work of slipstream art.
Featuring an impressive lineup of fiction and a respectable collection of poetry (particularly Kristine Ong Muslim’s “One of the Reasons”), Issue 4 also offers very-readable interviews with Jeffrey Ford and Stephan H. Segal. Gone are the typical sycophantism from most contemporary interviews. These two, particularly editor Matthew Kressel’s interview with Ford, are direct and engaging—at times, even suspenseful.
Noteworthy stories in this issue are Ekaterina Sedia’s “Seas of the World,” which, true to Sedia’s singular mytho-strange voice, metaphorizes change, ruination, and isolation in unexpected ways. It is quiet, paced, and resonant.
It would be too easy to call Rowena Southard’s “Translucence” Kafkaesque, but it is, in a delightfully direct way. Indeed, we should call it “Metamorphosis”-esque. This story, a study of the isolated humanity of a brilliant entomologist, is a delicately phrased stroll through identity, projection, and obsession.
Livia Llewellyn’s “Jetsam” is phantasmagoric, a great “what if” taking contemporary metaphors of self to their logical conclusions. In this story, which draws its force from alienation in commodified society, ruin has learned to eat, and the middenheaps of its kipple-filled gullet are the new reality.
Other stories fill out the issue’s strange presentation-of-self in noteworthy fashion, particularly Richard Bowes’s story of picaresque dislocation in “On Death and the Deuce” and Barbara Krasnoff’s chilling “Means of Communication.” With the strength of the material in Issue 4, Issue 5 will, no doubt, be highly anticipated in the world of small-press weird.
[Sybil’s Garage, edited by Matthew Kressel, is published by Senses Five Press.]
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