Title: Divine in Essence
Author: Yarrow Paisley
Publisher: Whiskey Tit
ISBN: 978-1-952600-55-5
Genre: Short Stories
Pages: 216
Reviewer: Allison Walker
Hollywood Book Reviews
In his short story collection, Divine in Essence, wordsmith Yarrow Paisley pens a collection of ten surreal and disquieting tales too gnarled and unruly to fit neatly into any genre’s box. Blending the uncanny with the poetic, the grotesque with the sublime, Paisley’s stories are each a twisted trail through worlds unanchored from reality. When the boundaries between the real and the metaphysical dissolve, Paisley’s readers are left suspended in a space which is as thought-provoking as it is unsettling.
Paisley’s protagonists embark on strange and harrowing quests, their struggles mirroring our own restless search for meaning in a world that often feels completely foreign and random. The stories balance eerie, otherworldly scenarios with deeply human emotions, creating a strange familiarity amidst the weirdness. Each story is so fabulous that every reader, upon reading the same pages as the next, will have read a different story. There’s magic in a book like that.
Paisley’s stylistic flair is on full display in the story of Icarus, not melted by the sun and drowned in the sea but stranded airborne and afraid to land. This story exemplifies the collection’s tenuous grasp on reality, blending mythology with sensibility, mixed with vivid hallucinations. On one hand, you want to grab Paisley by the shoulders and shake him, asking, “What did you mean by this? What did you mean that Icarus dives into the silver sphere of a woman’s mind and is held captive by its denizens for years?” The narrative is so richly layered and symbolically charged that it feels like peeling back the onion layers of a collective subconscious.
Divine in Essence eschews the prison of reality and tests the constraints of the human condition, challenging the reader’s comprehension. In addition, Paisley’s language is as intricate and immersive as his plots. His sentences overflow with inventive metaphors and symbolically charged descriptions, creating a reading experience that is richly textured and demands careful attention from the reader. After each dazzling story, readers will find themselves panting and bewildered, yet waiting eagerly, as did Helen, Paisley’s first protagonist and the mother of “the eternal dream of life and death and all between,” eager with anticipation for the Great Event we know is coming.
For those attuned to the avant-garde and willing to embrace the disorienting, Divine in Essence is a transformative journey. Paisley defies genre, delights in linguistic experimentation, and challenges his reader to question the nature of reality. This collection is not just a series of stories but an invitation to escape the mundane and expose your mind to the strange, the beautiful, and the ethereal. Divine in Essence is a masterwork of slipstream fiction that will intrigue fans of the surreal, horrific and mind-bending metaphysical.