Travis Jeppesen’s Victims is an oblique, enigmatic, and strangely beautiful short novel, ostensibly about a religious cult whose members self-immolate in the manner of Heaven’s Gate; but the rhetoric and story of the cult is just one of many strands, or languages, or perspectives, flickering through the book in concisely chiseled passages of minimal prose. The book circles around a basic despair at living, but contains everything from mock-nouveau roman close descriptions of next to nothing, to self-reflexive lyrical meditations upon vacancy and pain. It’s as if crystalline fragments of all the genres of contemporary fiction were somehow melded together. The novel was too delicate, too otherworldly for me to find it altogether compelling, but I find it haunting in its very ephemerality, an ignis fatuus I can never quite grab hold of.
Travis Jeppesen, Victims
Travis Jeppesen’s Victims is an oblique, enigmatic, and strangely beautiful short novel, ostensibly about a religious cult whose members self-immolate in the manner of Heaven’s Gate; but the rhetoric and story of the cult is just one of many strands, or languages, or perspectives, flickering through the book in concisely chiseled passages of minimal prose. The book circles around a basic despair at living, but contains everything from mock-nouveau roman close descriptions of next to nothing, to self-reflexive lyrical meditations upon vacancy and pain. It’s as if crystalline fragments of all the genres of contemporary fiction were somehow melded together. The novel was too delicate, too otherworldly for me to find it altogether compelling, but I find it haunting in its very ephemerality, an ignis fatuus I can never quite grab hold of.