Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505200023
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY KAREN ADAMS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The dedication page of R.H.W. Dillard's new book, ``Omniphobia,'' features this statement: ``I guess I might as well warn you you won't believe this. It's gospel truth, but you won't believe a word of it.'' Take note, however: after reading this book, you may glance up and wonder where you are.
Dillard, an English professor and chair of the creative writing program at Hollins College, has a knack for making the unbelievable real and the familiar alien. Imagine the following unlikely combination: the characters of Faulkner, the satire of Nabokov, the atmosphere of Poe -- streaked through with an absurdity that is all the author's own. The result is so poignant, terrifying, funny, and just plain strange -- often all at once -- that it is like life itself.
This writer's world is made up of things and people that are seldom what you think they are. Take, for instance, ``Their Wedding Journey,'' a memory-premonition-dream in which a marriage-weary couple, driving through a snowstorm on their way to a wedding, seems to be crossing the surface of a giant wedding cake. And then there's ``That's What I Like (About the South),'' which gives us a woman named Roy who loves a guy named Shirley and who ``knows something very strange is happening in her life, but she doesn't know what it is.''
In ``The Bog: A Naturalist's Notebook,'' a parody of a naturalist's journal, we witness a backward evolution that literally pulls its main character, Cosmo Cotswaldo, down into the slime. Cosmo seeks to impose his will on ``mindless Darwinian nature,'' which proves to be his undoing. When he wills a spider to abandon its prey, the jubilant narrator writes, ``He is the Einstein of spiders now, possessed of an awareness so far beyond that of any other of his tribe that he might as well be a different creature altogether.'' (The book is worth reading for lines like this alone.)
The novella ``The Road,'' both parody and allegory, is set in New Garden, where Klan robes and academic gowns look alike, where the people are caricatures of themselves. The protagonist, Abel, asks the impossible age-old question, ``Why did New Garden come to this sad end?'' From there the book becomes increasingly darker. The title story weaves four terrifying tales of madness to their own sad end, and ends the book by handing the baton to the reader: ``There is no return save in the dreams of others.''
Throughout the book there appears a face, which looks very much like Edvard Munch's ``The Scream.'' Dillard describes this face in ``The Adventures of the Butterfat Boy,'' drawn on a foggy window as ``two arched eyebrows, a pair of questioning eyes, crooked nose, and a mouth open in surprise or wonder.'' Later this face is said to have ``startled eyes and mouth open to scream.'' The motif is a good one for Dillard's work: wondrous from one angle, alarming from another.
To be sure, there are some mighty uncomfortable moments. In ``The Road'' a woman who has been buried alive scratches her eyes out (and who, when exhumed, still has her mouth open from screaming); in ``The Death Eater'' the details of gluttony, rot, and bodily functions figure heavily. Through it all, though, the author never flinches. He still manages to say, in the words of ``Omniphobia's'' self-destructive punk rocker: ``Here, take my hand, I'll help you across the hard parts to help you make the leap into understanding.''
Dillard's fiction is startling and disorienting, like an out-of-body experience. This latest extraordinary assortment will take your breath away--even if you don't believe a word of it.
Karen Adams is a graduate of the creative writing program at Hollins College.
by CNB