George Myers Jr.'s illustrated Worlds End (Paycock Press) is a magic carpet ride through history that touches down, finally, on your heart. The genre-bending novel is told episodically through an amateur naturalist's cabinet of curiousities and characters from centuries past, including Mary Shelley, a beekeeper's wife, a World War I ambulance driver, and a woman with a prehensile ponytail. Myers explores the fragility of nature and history, blending the real and remembered in a haunting meditation on all that slips away.
George Myers Jr.'s illustrated Worlds End (Paycock Press) is a magic carpet ride through history that touches down, finally, on your heart. The genre-bending novel is told episodically through an amateur naturalist's cabinet of curiousities and characters from centuries past, including Mary Shelley, a beekeeper's wife, a World War I ambulance driver, and a woman with a prehensile ponytail. Myers explores the fragility of nature and history, blending the real and remembered in a haunting meditation on all that slips away.
George Myersâ Worlds End is more than a novel. It is a one-of-a-kind visual, cerebral, and emotional experience. As the bookâs synopsis states, Worlds End is quite literally a novel built from the collected contents of the cabinet of curiosities of an extremely enigmatic Mr. K. The book opens with a photocopied letter from The Civic Club imploring Mr. K for further proof of a rare arrowhead that he professes to have. And, if possible, would Mr. K consent to having the arrowhead be included in a time capsule The Civic Club is curating.
The remainder of the book is essentially multiple files sent from Mr. K to The Civic Club presented as individual evidence composed of text, postcards, photos, collages, stamps, cards and illustrations (labeled with the specifically numbered drawer they have been housed in). But very little of this âevidenceâ is directly about the arrowhead in question. At one point The Civic Club asks Mr. K, in a second letter, if he has accidentally included some of his personal files.
The way Myers presents these interesting artifacts and asides to form such an intriguing storyline is both aesthetically beautiful and philosophically engaging. Itâs the kind of book that will make you think differently about almost everything. From honeybees to the hidden life of seashells, the intergenerational memory of cephalopods, the adaptability of the Japanese painted fern, the legend of a woman scented of pine and cedar and covered in fur, The Nature Of Tears, the words of a 1917 ambulance corpsman, the history of the letter âCâ, and so much more we are lead to a conclusion zigzagging through wildlife callback trails and shrouded in the shadows of the imagination and limitations of human perception.
Whether you are a fan of best-selling experimental authors like Mark Z. Danielewski or just looking for a more immersive reading experience, this book is a must read.