Uncover The Life Of Polycrates And Other Stories For Antiquated Children Presented By Brendan Connell Format Ebook

Disclosure: I cowrote the story "The Search for Savino," which appears in this collection, with Brendan.
I will refrain from any comments regarding the story,

Connell's collection, The Life of Polycrates amp Other stories for Antiquated Children has strong roots in the decadent French writings and Symbolist writings of theth Century.
These stories are biographical sketchescumstories of individuals who descend into decadence, They all start off with differing degrees of affluence, social acceptability, and sanity, but every one of them seems to dive headlong into the most banal lows of moral turpitude.


Brilliantly written, each story is a lesson in the writer's craft, At turns languid and shocking, Connell clearly has a deft hand for wordpainting, with a special talent for understatement and the perfect turnofphrase.


Intentionally or not, some of the stories come off as emotionally suppressed, while others show an almost manic expression of emotion.
Perhaps the occasional feelings of emotional flatness result from the work required on the part of the reader to dig the plot from underneath the documents, letters, conversations, and narrations that compose each story.
This is not casual reading, but it is absolutely immersive, if the reader takes the time to slow down and absorb the litany of information inferred by context and the subtle nuances of dialogue that hide meaning between the lines.


To me, the most satisfying story was "The Chymical Wedding of Des Esseintes," perhaps because it struck me with the most direct terror, whereas the other stories festered "under the skin," so to speak.
Overall, this is a brilliant collection, but not an easy read, Recommended to those for whom plot is secondary and the careful crafting of language is a spectator sport not to be missed.
This story collection might well have been titled “Meeting with Hideous Men,” since the number of characters possessing any kind of redeeming qualities hovers just above zero.
This is clearly author Brendan Connells intent in these bizarre experimental tales populated by repulsive figures who revel in their depravity.
But it leaves the reader with a dilemma: how to understand or react to stories in overripe prose depicting characters that, for the most part, are walking nightmares.


The most successful story is the title novella, in large part because of the distancing

effect of a story set in ancient Greece.
Polycrates was the tyrant of Samos, and Connell, with creative embellishments, tracks the main events of his life, from his rise to power to his very bad end.
Polycrates also has creativity, energy, and a set of impressive military and cultural accomplishments before he falls to dissipation and depravity, all told in lush, almost fairytalelike prose.


Polycrates at least represents the downfall of a powerful man with undeniable virtues, Its difficult to say the same for any other Connell protagonists, who largely occupy a more recent past in theth or earlyth centuries.
The exaggerations of decadence and depravity can sometimes be funny parodies, Still, it becomes hard to relate to Claude, who desires only humiliation at the hands of a cruel obese woman or Allen, wearing “a violet jacket and avocado tie,” who perceives his guests as a “a woman with the head of a sheep plugged on the neck of a turtle, talks to a gentleman resembling, to a startling degree, a well groomed summer sausage.
” Slick writing, but how much do we really care about Claude and Allen as characters

And we havent even gotten the delightful Captain Gareth Caernarvon, who not only shoots every living thing that moves, from rats to crocodiles, but eats them as well, human flesh not excluded.
I enjoyed the bluff British mensclub storytelling style, but Caernarvon is an acquired taste, even if he ends up quite deliberately, we suspect in a bubbling cannibals pot.
When youve eaten everything else, whats left but yourself

Several stories skip humor altogether for exercises in using language to explore the depths to which humanity can sink.
“Molten Rage” depicts an Italian industrial hell that wouldnt be out of place in Dante, and “The Slug” is an exercise in selfwilled degradation.
In “Peter Payne,” the true horror is not the prospect of an accident by an Evel Knievelstyle motorcycle daredevil, but the terrible fates in store for his wife, son, and daughter.


I found myself often admiring the web woven by Connells electric prose, but also holding the book at arms length to avoid the blood, viscera, and human suffering that he describes with such relish.


I love Brendan Connell's prose, with its lists and insertions of strange syntax which resembles a buggy chat bot, and I love the small presses he publishes through.


The title story of this collection is an expansion of an anecdote from Herodotus, filled out in such a way peremptory and yet lush as to make the ancient Greek world even more alien than in the Historiesa realm of invasionprone island paradises peppered with random geniuses, where all on the same day Echoiax invents fish sauce, Pythagoras writes his theorem, and the Spartans, while telling terse inscrutable jokes, might attack.


The other stories are quite fine tooI found particularly memorable the portrait of an obsessive hunter and carnivore in "The Life of Gareth Caernarvon", and the Futurismesque horror / paintsniffing in "Molten Rage".
Honest labour, honest graft, albeit in sudden spectacular daredevil bouts then amortised over several years of hindsight attrition.
As the author of this book did it for us, As Christ did it, too, with His body still hybridising upon or into the grain of His cross and still no hope of Heaven.
A dying fall for the perfect fiction collection in its own terms,

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.

Above is one of its observations at the time of the review, The main story in this compilation is an intriguing novella exposing the life of the great leader, Polycrates, in a manner that most histories do not its interesting.
It reads very much like the aside stories in high school textbooksyou know, the ones set apart from the textbook by the boxes the editors rope it off in, the ones that further explain an event that is actually captivating, unlike the rest of the book.
. . I remember being in history class and, instead of listening to the lecture or following along in the textbook, I would turn the pages in my textbook and read all the “stories” about great people instead.
It always held my attention, and that is what The Life of Polycrates was like for me when I read it an interesting history that I actually enjoyed reading.
Seriously, why cant all textbooks be like this story instead of droning on and on

The rest of the short stories within the compilation were interesting, though.
. .

To read my full review/:

sitelink wordpress. com/ Superb writing, so far he is my greatest discovery this year! mind blown
A book I should surely have hated, and yet

Here's my full review:

sitelink openlettersmonthly. com/boo

Well, this my first win and first read for First Reads, . .

The trouble with a book of short stories is that the review rolls around in your head in fragments the whole time you are reading it.
And, where you might be quite impressed with one story or indifferent to another you might actively dislike yet a third.
In all there were eleven stories in this book, a work of fiction according to the back and everything I read online.
However two were based on actual historical accounts The Life of Polycrates and Brother of the Holy Ghost based on the election of Pope Saint Celestine V in.
The Author clearly took some liberties with these two stories, but they were for the most part true.


The Life of Polycrates, pronounced Puhlickruhteeze Think "Socrates" and you're halfway there, Unless of course like Bill amp Ted you pronounce "Socrates" Socrates, in which case please identify yourself below so that I can immediately remove you from my friends list!, is about an ancient Greek ruler of the island of Samos.
Polycrates is told like a story more than a historical account, despite the footnotes expounding on the various historical figures as they enter the scene.
He cites no historians or other works on the subject, I would say that I half enjoyed this portion, Being Greek and a fan of history in general this should have been right in my lane.
But, whenever I began to enjoy myself just as the story started to flow the author would pull me to a halt with an extraordinarily short chapter containing nothing but a list of makeup and face creams some guy had in his ditty bag or the ancient Greek equivelant of a ditty bag.
I believe he was reinforcing his point regarding the man's effeminance, However, I had not doubted him when he stated it boldly earlier on, This list and similar such road blocks along the way kept it all a bit choppy for my tastes.


Now, with Polycrates over and moving on to story numero dos I received a rather more violent shock.
The second story Collapsing Claude I had no trouble believing as fiction, disturbing, dark and frankly disgusting fiction.
Unfortunately for me I read this story over my lunch hour and it actually put me off my food! The author is gifted at painting a picture with words.
his descriptive language is incredibly effective, I felt as though I could see, hear and virtually SMELL his words, While I cannot say that I actually "liked" this story, for it was too repulsive to "like", I felt that Connell did an amazing job in the telling of it.


From here on I think I can just group the remaining stories, Some I liked better than others, some were a bit more rambling, Sometimes the descriptive language got a little over the top for me, As a result I felt more as if I were reading some really dark and disturbing poetry rather than a short story and got a bit lost in the author's verse.


It was not bad, I have no fault with the writing itself or the editing, It just wasn't really my thing, If you like dark and disturbing tales full of sexual perversion or obsession there was a guy in one story with a fetish for high heeled shoes and another with a big game hunter/tranny those being two of the milder afflictions, then this might be a book you would love.
For me, it only got three, because I felt that Connell's mastery of description was so well done at times, or it probably would have been two.
To someone who enjoys this type of work I'm sure it would be astar book, Brendan Connell: Master of the Bizarre

THE LIFE OF POLYCRATES AND OTHER STORIES FOR ANTIQUATED CHILDREN even as a title gives a preview of the strange, intelligent, well crafted moments of written entertainment contained between the covers of this collection of the writings of Brendan Connell.
The author, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico but now a resident of Switzerland, has had many of his stories published in a wide variety of literary journals The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fantastic Metropolis, Flesh amp Blood, Leviathan, Album Zutique, and Strange Tales: Tartarus Press for example.


Here he offers courtesy of Chomu Press the publication of a romp of a historical fiction novella, THE LIFE OF POLYCRATES, based on the tale of Polycrates, 'powerful tyrant of Samos betweenandBCE.
His downfall shocked the Greek world, ' For the first few pages of this story the reader may feel overwhelmed by the plethora of Greek names and relationships of the sons and kith and kin and lovers of the Polycrates realm, but persistence in remembering the characters is quickly rewarded by following the rise and fall of a family a fascinatingly dysfunctional brothers whose antics are related as though they were true except with Connell telling the tale we know he is leading us on for a funfilled ride.
It borders on no, surpasses the wildest antics imaginable,

Connell fills this book with bizarre short stories: 'Collapsing Claude' is the story ofyear old Claude who lives in Torino and begins an affair with a grossly distorted, maxibosomed Mirta whose strange physical lusts include the proposal of a three way with one Egon 'in the form of a great ox', a tale that has a surprise ending.
Another story, 'The Slug', appears to take us on a test drive of tolerance for things unattractive, some 'chapters' of which are single lines such as 'Everyone is vulgar'.


Brendan Connell's works may be an acquired taste, but from delving into the wealth of writings in this book, he could just become addicting.
Weird and terrific fun.

Grady Harp.