Fungal Magic and Mycelial Networks
In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes that, "Mushrooms pull me back to my senses, not just ‘like flowers’ through their riotous colours and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy."
In a miracle of fungal magic, my previously composted first horror novella, The Museum of Atheism, is being reissued by Calamari Archive. Calamari also published my second book, The Luminol Reels, and they took exquisite care of it, and of me. I couldn't think of a safer home for the book than with them.
In The Museum of Atheism, each chapter begins with a description of the fungus that has taken over the town of Rosewood, where the action happens. These descriptions act as field notes about real and imagined fungal forms. In Diarmuid Hester's generous review, he picked up on those fungal qualities:
“At the top of each of the book’s chapters, Joyce names and describes varieties of fungus called things like Slime Cap, Destroying Angel, Disco Cup, Midnight Bolette; the inclusion of fungi invariably portending some dead matter that the reader unearths beneath for [Joyce], fiction writing may be fungal, nourished by the mouldering work of dead and decaying authors, springing up threadlike and dangerous in the dark. Joyce’s work seems to linger longer upon the moment of decomposition – the transgressive moment that dawdles at the boundary between death and life.”
I began this story at a time when I was still working through those narrative themes that I wrote about yesterday: adolescence as a time of great danger, and the talismanic presence of dead girls. But I was also very interested in representing the perverse vitality of the dead. Though I want to leave that work aside for a while, I am grateful for the reissue of this book as part of a mycorrhizal network. A book that had been lost has been composted, and nurtured, into a new fruiting body.
