THE DEEP ONES: "The Ouroboros Apocrypha" by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

Talk The Weird Tradition

Join LibraryThing to post.

THE DEEP ONES: "The Ouroboros Apocrypha" by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

2AndreasJ
Mar 22, 3:49 pm

I'll be reading this online.

3gwendetenebre
Edited: Apr 1, 9:47 am

I love unreliable narrators. The title is totally apropos for this tale of hidden assimilation, becoming, returning, and what happens when something from... outside... surreptitiously invades that transformative process. Like a new sound unaccountably interrupting a Space Echo loop, maybe? "Consume, subsume, replace." I also appreciated the odd little disorienting- and unclarified -bits like "summer of _82" or the missing Chapter 8. Nice! Where is the city located? It could be any large city, of course. I tried imagining different locations as I went anyway. Part of the game. I also enjoyed how the "strange person" quickly evolves (devolves?) into "the creature". The narrator surely recognizes something right off the bat. The "ragged figures" at the end physically remind me of both the Robin Williams character in Terry Gilliam's THE FISHER KING and the unsettling, other-dimensional lumberjack-things (whatever they represent!) in David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS, THE RETURN. I very much like the subtle weird/cosmic horror evoked in this story.

4AndreasJ
Apr 2, 8:50 am

I liked the story too.

The "summer of _82" was indeed puzzling - no possible way of filling in that underscore makes much sense if it's the Gregorian calendar. Trying the Islamic calendar doesn't help much.

I vaguely assumed the city was in India, but there wasn't much if anything to tie it to anywhere.

5gwendetenebre
Edited: Apr 4, 5:07 pm

I also REALLY like the Galena Dara illustration for the story over on the Lovecraft Zine page!

I think this tale will go quite nicely with Brite's "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" which we will be getting to later.