3 thoughts on “The Saint of Evil & Other Stories – Liam Garriock”

1. Over 110 pages, my copy numbered 5/77.
   A luxurious book, with the Mount Abraxas quality of a beautifully-upholstered and -designed creation, to the nature of which I have long grown accustomed from this publisher. But I never take their books for granted. Each is uniquely beautiful in its own way.

2. anicca

   “An ordinary event a decade ago becomes a sacred event;”

   The repetition of ‘event’ and the naive recurrence of a ‘princess in her tower’ marks out this narrator transcending the nostalgia demon with memories as a teenage boy who speaks instinctive Scotticisms in a coastal Leith, and who ekes out a suspense for the reader as he, this boy, stalks — and then is stalked back — by an older girl or woman, that so-called princess from abroad, whose father keeps her otherwise imprisoned. The expression of a naive wisdom, too, that artfully pulled me along with such suspense, as if I am paradoxically an old but still naive reader turned back into some yearned for past of his own without this story’s sporadic mobile-phones, and, despite or because of a few endearing typos, I reach towards a constructively naive ending of nostalgia transcended by alembic and tantalisingly mystic impermanence.

3. the black trunk

   “‘Get me baby back ribs,’ shouted the husband as his family went inside.”

   This represents a remarkable portrait of modern America as outsiders may see it, seeing its wood for its trees, its darkness in its mock light. I don’t think I have ever felt America for real before. Endless routes amid vastness and roadside diners, giant advertisements, and gas stations as they are called in such an America. All of this as if threaded through the eyes of an American family of four in a car, sensitive, necessarily naive, small girl, and her older brother, and her arguing parents. And, layered on top of this an old man who turns up in the same diner as the family and other customers and waitresses, in many way a naive man, like the girl herself, but one with a transcending wisdom, perhaps like hers, too — in telling synergy with the previous story, an old man toting his black trunk of entertaining marionettes and eventual instructive mayhem. The grisly outcome is madly grotesque, too, in emotional terms, but I was somehow enabled to distil wisdom from the naive horror tropes as well as from the pervading, if magically invisible, subtleties that I myself (also an old man) found were underlying — or perhaps even overlying — such tropes. Making words speak to me in a certain way is a belief that such words had already spoken thus without me.

   “…making toys is a rebuke to the misery and suffering and ridiculousness of everything.”