A Narrative In Flux
Cori H. Spenzich
Adam has been seeking spiritual enlightenment in a remote cabin until an unannounced visitor abruptly walks through his front door. The man says he knows about Adam’s daughter, but won’t give a clear answer why he’s there. What does he know? What does he want?…more.
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Solitude and strange visitors can wreak havoc on the mind, as it does in Cori H. Spenzich’s A Narrative In Flux. Surreally written, the narrative here isn’t as direct as some might look for in a novel, but the story, or stories, lends a hand to initiate internal thought.
Adam is a man seeking enlightenment in a cabin tucked deep in the woods when a stranger, introducing himself as Glenn, appears, asking theoretical questions and posing somewhat inane questions. But the questions he asks start to hit closer to home with Adam, and Glenn might know something about his recent loss. He carries with him a messenger bag and a seemingly unnatural amount of books from which he seeks to aid Adam in seeing the truth. Adding anecdotes, tangents really, from these books, Glenn tells tales that are macabre, dangerous, and introspective.
The chapters titled as ‘Dialogue’ can often get wordy, filled with philosophical questions that stimulate the mind to look deeper, until it becomes all a bit too much. This steady pace of constant questioning theory bogs down the novel at times. Adam’s journey can become one we don’t really care to watch him find a resolve to. The discourse between he and Glenn go on for too long, dive into the repartee of spiritualist arguments. Both are arguing different sides of the light one might say.
However, sticking with the main storyline of Glenn and Adam, secluded in a cabin that mutates and takes on a sinister feel, A Narrative In Flux delivers something chilling. In the other storyline, we follow a peculiar, meandering path of dramas told to us via Glenn’s messenger bag book collection. Each one comes at a moment he believes Adam has learned something, or needs to see the question in a different perspective. In this, the novel is almost a collection of short stories. Each one is interesting. Some are very perfectly encapsulated, delivering pain and horror in a handful of pages.
Overall, Spenzich delivers a twisted, dark and magical sort of tale with A Narrative In Flux. Though the path is a bit winding, and the rhetoric can be tiresome there are moments that are most satisfying, leading to an unsettling and individual resolve.
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