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Review Date: 8/24/2008
Helpful Score: 1
Whoa.
The choice of title is interesting in this famous early, career-starting and DVD-spawning novella in which the characters and the reader, all at different speeds, descend into an unspeakable abyss, word by word ... word by word. The blurb on the book goes on about all the aspects of the heart captured by the work, and this is fair enough, especially given the last paragraph or so, where "other" inter-dimensional artifacts are optimistically imagined by a character, as these would lead to paradise, and not the realm of the Cenobites, the Order of the Gash, which does not lend itself to a direct analogy with the judeo-christian concept of "hell", although the Cenobites out-horrify even the medieval Christian hell paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
There are characters, and they do what characters do in these horror novellas. But the most fascinating, and least-explained, concept in the story is: what about these Cenobites? This Order of the Gash? Obviously Frank Cotton misunderstood them, crucially (and incorrectly) assuming, that their concept of "pleasure" was in any way related to his own, basically human concept of pleasure. As in the Law, it all comes down to definitions. We get glimpses of these fascinating Cenobite characters, we know they are alien to the concept of empathy, that they are polite, that they are (in their way) fair, that they appear dedicated to eternal torture of themselves and others, and that there is an "Engineer" who designs torments and mysteriously appears at the end of the novella.
All in all, a shudder-inducing, sinking experience of a read, which whets one's appetite for more knowledge about the Cenobites (and the same time, an instinctive urge to purge them from one's mind and never remember them again).
The choice of title is interesting in this famous early, career-starting and DVD-spawning novella in which the characters and the reader, all at different speeds, descend into an unspeakable abyss, word by word ... word by word. The blurb on the book goes on about all the aspects of the heart captured by the work, and this is fair enough, especially given the last paragraph or so, where "other" inter-dimensional artifacts are optimistically imagined by a character, as these would lead to paradise, and not the realm of the Cenobites, the Order of the Gash, which does not lend itself to a direct analogy with the judeo-christian concept of "hell", although the Cenobites out-horrify even the medieval Christian hell paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
There are characters, and they do what characters do in these horror novellas. But the most fascinating, and least-explained, concept in the story is: what about these Cenobites? This Order of the Gash? Obviously Frank Cotton misunderstood them, crucially (and incorrectly) assuming, that their concept of "pleasure" was in any way related to his own, basically human concept of pleasure. As in the Law, it all comes down to definitions. We get glimpses of these fascinating Cenobite characters, we know they are alien to the concept of empathy, that they are polite, that they are (in their way) fair, that they appear dedicated to eternal torture of themselves and others, and that there is an "Engineer" who designs torments and mysteriously appears at the end of the novella.
All in all, a shudder-inducing, sinking experience of a read, which whets one's appetite for more knowledge about the Cenobites (and the same time, an instinctive urge to purge them from one's mind and never remember them again).
Review Date: 7/7/2006
Mark Helprin is the Greatest Living Author, and this is the second of his two pre-eminent Masterworks, the other being Winter's Tale. Helprin elevates our experience and understanding of life, in all its paradoxical coarseness and beauty, to a higher plane.
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