Once a vital tool in communicating, it has now become something twee. Something you could imagine being relegated to cardigan wearing twentysomethings who frame overpriced Glen Campbell records in their flat, have a broken typewriter as an ornament in their bedroom and tell the world that they’re bisexual despite exclusively dating members of the opposite sex.
But there is a power in a handwritten letter: seeing the handwriting collated to form words that express a myriad of emotions which you can observe altering the handwriting at various points. Also, the vitriol of a rant is much more pronounced when you’re reading about what a terrible person you are and you realise there are another four pages to go.
Forrest Muelrath understands this and so he builds these little details into The Valeries.
Muelrath recently stated that he has two goals:
…to prevent you from boxing me out of your literary movement…write a few books that will be required reading for your great-grandchildren's education.
They seem like fine goals to aspire to and, with his debut novel, he could get there sooner than he thinks.
Taking the form of an email from an outraged parent (who identifies as a state-appointed grief counsellor), it is quickly established that the Valerie being mentioned is the son of the letter writer and that the person who is the subject of the email seems to have allowed himself to be entangled with Valerie in ways which could be loosely described as ‘career threatening’. Indeed, as the narrator himself writes:
Unfortunately my son’s neuroses have been tightly knotted together with an IV crystal meth addiction, coupled with a prostitution practice, leading to long periods of psychosis, including all-encompassing visual hallucinations, gender dysphoria, delusions of grandeur, followed by a deep melancholia that left him catatonic and unable to speak, being that, at this point, talk therapy has become useless.
As you can see, this plot strand can go in a few different ways: blackmail, redemption, murder/ revenge. So where the novel goes is not only highly original but also highly compelling as it quickly turns into a bizarre letter written at 3 in the morning by an apocalyptic obsessed madman who details how he has been:
. . . assisting his mutant son through a court battle against a man with the type of divisive media spectacle that has been bestowed upon your life . . .
The Valeries is deranged, psychosexual, funny, dark and absorbing. It’s akin to that one acquaintance who always has a story where cats purr his name or talk about their time in prison when they spent one night in a drunk tank: you can’t quite believe the person is telling you all of this with a straight face but you can’t help but find it oddly compelling.
Highly recommended.
Forrest Muelrath, 2024, The Valeries. Expat Press. ISBN-13: Paperback ISBN: 979-8-989718023
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
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