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Formats
Ebook Details
  • 10/2019
  • 978-1-951196-01-1 B07W5RQPKY
  • 147 pages
  • $3.99
Paperback Details
  • 10/2019
  • 978-1-951196-00-4 1951196007
  • 228 pages
  • $15.00
Cori H. Spenzich
Author
A Narrative in Flux

Adult; Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror; (Market)

Adam has been seeking spiritual enlightenment in a remote cabin until an unannounced visitor abruptly walks through his front door. The man says he knows about Adam’s daughter, but won’t give a clear answer why he’s there.

What does he know?

What does he want?

The man gives tangents without answers, and he refuses to leave. But now the cabin won’t let Adam go, and the very foundations of his home are mutating into something else entirely.

Reviews
IndieReader

Adam entertains a disheveled stranger named Glenn in his home. In return, Glenn entertains Adam with fantastic tales about an investigation into a cult that goes bad, a troop of knights seeking a cure for a plague, a boy bargaining for an angel’s feather and a man being dragged through a singular afterlife. At first, the stories seem to be about separating Adam from his religious faith. But as the night goes on, Adam is left questioning his sanity as much as his spirituality.

Readers going into A NARRATIVE IN FLUX expecting a straight horror story are probably going to be disappointed, as author Cori H. Spenzich seems to be trying for something more surreal, recalling books by Clive Barker and Mark Z. Danielewski. It begins with the structure. A NARRATIVE IN FLUX resembles a collection of short stories more than a novel, with the grounding narrative of Adam and Glenn conversing interrupted up by Glenn’s stories, or “parables” as the book calls them. It’s further broken up by Romanian illustrator Nicolae Negura’s black-and-white line drawings, which complement the stark narrative nicely. Altogether, this gives the novel a brisk pace, welcoming readers into a story that might otherwise be bloated. No idea or scenario Spenzich wants to test out overstays its welcome, and he has a few ideas to test.

The mental meat of the novel is in the parables. While they clearly follow the novel’s overarching theme of spiritual questioning, they make a point of never directly answering any of their own questions, leaving them for both Adam and readers to puzzle out. Meanwhile, the emotional heart is in the conversation between Adam and Glenn. Set beside a crackling fire, it alternates between warmth and chill, familiarity and doubt. As Adam ultimately learns less about his visitor and remembers more about himself, readers are given the opportunity to point some of his questions toward themselves. The primary purpose of A NARRATIVE IN FLUX seems to be sparking inquiry via sparse yet poetically constructed stories–delicate and intricate like toy music boxes–rather than pushing a particular agenda, and that alone makes it worthwhile reading.

Esoteric without being inaccessible, A NARRATIVE IN FLUX provides readers with thoughtful thrills in a smoothly written and intriguingly surreal book.

~Colin Newton for IndieReader

Reedsy Discovery

A twisted, dark and chilling novel that looks leads to an unsettling and individual resolve.

Solitude and strange visitors can wreak havoc on the mind, as it does in Cori H. Spenzich’s A Narrative In Flux.  Surreally written, the narrative here isn’t as direct as some might look for in a novel, but the story, or stories, lends a hand to initiate internal thought.

Adam is a man seeking enlightenment in a cabin tucked deep in the woods when a stranger, introducing himself as Glenn, appears, asking theoretical questions and posing somewhat inane questions. But the questions he asks start to hit closer to home with Adam, and Glenn might know something about his recent loss. He carries with him a messenger bag and a seemingly unnatural amount of books from which he seeks to aid Adam in seeing the truth. Adding anecdotes, tangents really, from these books, Glenn tells tales that are macabre, dangerous, and introspective.

The chapters titled as ‘Dialogue’ can often get wordy, filled with philosophical questions that stimulate the mind to look deeper, until it becomes all a bit too much. This steady pace of constant questioning theory bogs down the novel at times. Adam’s journey can become one we don’t really care to watch him find a resolve to. The discourse between he and Glenn go on for too long, dive into the repartee of spiritualist arguments. Both are arguing different sides of the light one might say.

However, sticking with the main storyline of Glenn and Adam, secluded in a cabin that mutates and takes on a sinister feel, A Narrative In Flux delivers something chilling. In the other storyline, we follow a peculiar, meandering path of dramas told to us via Glenn’s messenger bag book collection. Each one comes at a moment he believes Adam has learned something, or needs to see the question in a different perspective. In this, the novel is almost a collection of short stories. Each one is interesting. Some are very perfectly encapsulated, delivering pain and horror in a handful of pages.

Overall, Spenzich delivers a twisted, dark and magical sort of tale with A Narrative In Flux. Though the path is a bit winding, and the rhetoric can be tiresome there are moments that are most satisfying, leading to an unsettling and individual resolve.

~Charlotte Zang for Reedsy Discovery

Formats
Ebook Details
  • 10/2019
  • 978-1-951196-01-1 B07W5RQPKY
  • 147 pages
  • $3.99
Paperback Details
  • 10/2019
  • 978-1-951196-00-4 1951196007
  • 228 pages
  • $15.00
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