Anya Johanna DeNiro

DeNiro cross-breeds the charged ambience of Philip Dick and Bill Burroughs, with Ballard, Pynchon and Cronenberg thrown into the mix. What emerges in Tyrannia is a unique dystopian future that is bleak, surreal, and yet not quite improbable.

The title story is a mobius strip that brings a new meaning to the term “life after death”.

There is a subterranean horror (metaphorically perhaps?) in “A Rendition” — a story about three students kidnapping a professor who helped draft the show more torture memos used in the War on Terror.

America is a radioactive wasteland in ‘The Warp and the Woof” where a writer and his agent play out an historic relationship in a feral new world.

A wild 21st century Dickian mind melter! show less

It is a post-apocalyptic world where modern electrical devices stop working, invaders on horseback wielding swords and axes are invading South, the Empire is fighting North, and large corporations have embraced the new world order by selling their workforce as slave labor. Macy and her family find themselves in the middle of this, and end up traveling south on the Mississippi to try and find a new life.

This world was pretty fascinating, but there was a distinct lack of real plot during the show more first half of the book when the Palmers were traveling on the river. It was interesting but was little more than a montage of all the weird shit that exists in the world now. In Part II, however, I really got sucked into the story and practically read the second half of the book straight through.

Because the story is told from the POV of an ordinary girl, you never really know WHY things are happening, which was mildly frustrating but realistic. DeNiro interjects a short excerpt from a document between each chapter to give more background to the story, which I thought was nicely done (even if the formatting and my Sony Reader did not get along).

I didn't like Macy, the POV character, at the beginning. She felt too passive -- which was symbolized by the river she was traveling on, carrying her wherever. But in Part II, she starts taking actions on her own and having to think for herself and I found myself liking her more. show less

Total Oblivion, More or Less, is just about the strangest fantasy I’ve ever read – and I’ve been reading fantasy and weird fiction for more than 45 years.

Imagine waking up one day to find that Scythian horsemen have invaded your hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. Their sworn enemy, the Empire, has set up shop further down the Mississippi River. They’re in a constant state of war, and you’re in the middle of it. There’s a plague sweeping through the country; the buboes that victims show more get have pictures in them. Wasps are somehow involved with the plague, but it’s not clear whether they’re attracted to plague victims or spreaders of the plague; one thing that is clear is that a victim more or less turns to the papery consistency of a wasp’s nest if stung.

Safe to say that you wouldn’t have the faintest idea what the heck is going on:

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started turning wrong. Bad things were happening in the world, like glaciers melting and terrorists blowing up rail stations, but even though these were areas of concern, we weren’t freaking out on a minute-to-minute basis because of them. We though we were safe for a long time. Everything was normal….

While school was finishing up, we began to hear reports, on the edges of our hearing, about a plague and the armed men following in its wake. Up north, and in the Dakotas. We expected someone to tell us what to do about it. No one did.

And so it begins. An announcement comes across the radio that the post office is closing for inventory. Then the internet stops working, and no one answers at the office of the internet provider. Cell phones gradually stop working. Planes no longer fly over. And then, one day, the history teacher starts speaking in a language that no one understands, harsh and guttural; even she is confused by it.

Change continues to unfold at a tremendous rate. Soon money is useless and food is hard to come by. Macy, the narrator, is sixteen years old when the book opens, and it’s starting to look like the plans she had for her life aren’t going to work out. Soon she and her family – an older sister, Sophia, a younger, rather wild brother, Ciaran, and her parents, Grace and Carson, are aboard the Prairie Chicken, traveling down river to St. Louis, where Carson is expecting to be able to take up a new position as a professor of astronomy at a local university. This doesn’t seem like an entirely realistic plan, but what else are they going to do?

The weirdnesses in the book steadily multiply. One of the oddest things that have changed the most seem nonetheless to have always been in their new configuratons. Nueva Roma, for instance, is made up of stone skyscrapers that are ancient; the New Orleans it seems to have replaced might as well never have been.

The book covers roughly a year of changes, one in which Macy seems to come into her own self, to know how she feels about her family and to have an idea of how she’s going to make it in this new world. DeNiro keeps a tight focus on Macy’s personal story, despite interludes between chapters that sometimes fill in blanks, and sometimes further define non-viewpoint characters. That means we never learn how this change came to be, whether the changes have stopped and this new world is permanent, or where the Scythians and the Empire came from. It’s all a mystery to us as much as it is to Macy, and that seems to be pretty much the point.

As compelling a read as Total Oblivion is, it is not totally successful. DeNiro occasionally pours on the weird just for the sake of puzzling his readers ever further. Not everything meshes as well as it should. People seem to adjust with astonishing ease to the change of everything in their lives, and to find new livelihoods despite it all. And if a reader fails to suspend disbelief for so much as an instant, imagining what would really happen if technology simply failed and people were thrown into a wholly new world like this, without supermarkets, medical insurance and communications systems, everything falls apart. Where is the death and suffering? By no means are they completely absent from this book, but neither are they as present as they ought to be in a post-apocalyptic world.

Perhaps that simply isn’t DeNiro’s project here. He just wants to tell a story about a world where everything and everyone changes, and what life along the Mississippi would be like as a result. And that he does, and does well. Just keep reading to find out what happens to Macy and her family and don’t think about the apocalypse or its likely consequences, and you’ll have a great time. show less

I went into this book having been a big fan of Alan DeNiro's previous short story collection, "Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead." This collection did not disappoint. Many of the details in the stories are a bit ridiculous -- details, whether factual or fictional, frequently are -- but in every story I was able to identify some emotional core that resonated strongly with me. Elements of horror, fantasy, and science fiction mingle freely and enthusiastically, and DeNiro seems to show more cultivate his ambiguous endings like they were a breed of rare flower. Which does tend to give the stories the feeling of a particularly vivid dream, something which, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing. Highlights include the stories "(*_*?)~~~~(-_-):TheWarpandtheWoof" and "The Flowering Ape," the latter being a particularly touching meditation on being different and growing older. This book may not be for everyone, but this is exactly the sort of short story collection that I would like to read more often. show less