The world of Matthew M. Bartlett is demonstrably a satanic one, a loose collection of short broadcasts transcribed from the dark woods of Leeds where a witch cult holds sway, waging a war of psychological dimensions against the hapless citizenry of rural Massachusetts. WXXT – the illusive station run by a leering group of occultists, one found far below the bottom of the FM dial, is not a station you can find, but rather one that finds you, one that intercedes when you are at your lowest point of desperation of suggestion, and susceptible to “new information”. This information, “too powerful, too portentous for mere synapse, axon, and dendrite” is the slow, horrific unveiling of another Leeds – the REAL Leeds, a dimension of cosmic horror that would throw both H.P Lovecraft and Jerry Falwell into jittering hysterics – broad vistas of flesh punctuated by weeping mouths, where angels in shit-filled diapers ride wild braying goats. Meanwhile, behind the mask of the stars, something large and grey looks down with six hungry eyes. The broadcasts are absolutely vile, blasphemous incantations, several of which are bellowed into the airwaves by the long-dead local preacher, Ezekiel Shineface – a living corpse furious to find no afterlife, who has now allied with the occultists to bring about their kingdom.
With his self-published collection Gateways to Abomination, Bartlett lurched from out of the ether to indie horror-lit stardom in 2014, but there is something more unsettling to his work – a deeper philosophical and indeed theological vision beyond the rivers of blood and legions of winged leeches masquerading as transistor radios. Bartlett understands ideology buddy, the Satanic dimension of ideology, and if you listen closely to the static you can hear a voice, a prophetic one, pulling at the stitches at the mouth of the world, a writer that would to pull down the stars from sky for a full-blown confrontation with the Real. The collected broadcasts of WXXT thus contain an apocalyptic dimension, and I mean apocalyptic in the fully biblical sense of the word – REVELATION … UNVEILING …. ELUCIDATION…
It is apocalyptic thinking – the mortal enemy of ideology – which is our most ancient form of materialist critique. From the prophets to the gospels, from the political theology of the apostle Paul to the prognostications of John against Rome in Revelation, theological apocalypticism is always interested in the eruption of the symptom, in the register of the Real, in revealing the traumatic core veiled behind ideology and unveiling in full cosmic horror the demonic nature of the superstructure. Unlike the insipid mewling psuedo-apocalypticism of evangelical fundamentalism – in its worship of nothingness and its gnawing hunger for eternal conscious suffering, biblical apocalypticism is on the side of naming what lies below the surface of things, making it a welcome, yet odd bedfellow to Marxism and psychoanalysis.
WXXT’s broadcasts follow a simple formula – bypass the imaginary and confront the symbolic order directly, a formula most directly revealed by one fictional “Abercan Geist” from Gateways, who intones in the fashion of a 1920’s broadcaster: “Don’t startle or scare. Disturb. Upset. Remove the floor and dissolve the walls“. This formula is enacted in nearly every recorded broadcast, which often begin innocently enough – accordion music peppered with muffled violence, anxious orchestral music, crashing thunder and strong winds; just enough to keep the hapless listener unnerved, curious even, but not outright repulsed. Those who happen across the station – teenagers, grieving widows, the mentally unstable, social outcasts and others, find themselves lured deeper into the airwaves by charismatic radio hosts who speak to their deepest desires, promising both spiritual fulfillment alongside “libertine allures”. What follows in the wake of the broadcasts is a combination of missing persons, violent orgies, terrible murder sprees, and sightings at the periphery of Tall Men. Men in Tall Hats. Tall Men in Tall Hats – the long-dead devil-worshippers who hold sway over the town of Leeds.
“Through the tattered flesh of the nearly dead, in a child’s disordered dreams. There are seven and thirty ways (by my count) to get to the Real Leeds”
The Real Leeds, the one revealed as the starry costume of the stars falls away, is a resolutely obscene universe dwarfing any combination of Sodom, Gomorrah, or Washington DC. Bartlett’s descriptions will have the reader howling with laughter in one paragraph and then closing the book in disgust at the next, depictions of an abominable universe bubbling beneath the surface of our own, waiting to spill forth at any moment like a tumour-filled river of blood. Like the book of Revelation, Bartlett names the devil directly, revealing the world, the Real World, in all its horror. Unlike the pornographic gore of splatterpunk or the jump scares of innumerable mainstream horror films and other so-called attempts at “transgressive fiction”, Bartlett uses the blasphemous broadcasts of a woodland radio transmitter to pull back the veneer of an enfeebled world unable now to even name evil – a late capitalist moral greyzone of postmodern nihilism and consumer identity. What he conjures instead is a world that mirrors our own, one marked by the Beast – by the Dragon – by the Goat. A world veering wildly towards fascism and extinction. This is a world where God and Satan (Church and Occult) are revealed to be in league, where we are all so many hapless Job’s plunged into meaningless suffering and catastrophe, the simple turn of a radio dial all that separates us from the horror of the Real, of finally being faced with the raw cruelty within our economic, political, and religious structures, a cosmic maliciousness which festers below the floorboards of our ideology. Bartlett makes no apologies for the damage caused in the wake of such an unveiling, he is merely a rider, an observer, a transistor radio broadcasting the unbearable soundtrack of human-kind’s deathwish.
An element of comic relief throughout the stories is the narration of the pathetic interventions of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), of “the Government Man” – a recurring campaign by the state to crack down on the station after a number of reports of lewd and crude broadcasts begin to come in from rural Massachusetts. Each time the agents or their informers are maimed, consumed, or corrupted by Stockton and Co, we begin to see the the FCC as a stand-in in for any number of failing institutions – the IMF, the liberal pundit, the social democrat, the centrist theologian – each trying to reckon with their myriad symptoms and failing miserably in the process. The psychoanalytic implication of these failed interventions is equally apparent, that being that the unconscious does not respond to rationality, to information. The demons within the static of ideology, of our capitalist and theological fantasies can only be named, weakened or exorcised through the location of short circuits – through jokes, free association, parables, and yes – certain transcriptions of prohibited radio broadcasts.
Beneath the vistas of horror and blasphemy, it is clear that Bartlett is horrified of his own universe – of our own universe. In this way there is a deep ethical dimension across his work. Whether you look to Dead Air, Gateways to Abomination, Creeping Waves, or others, there is a prophetic, and indeed apocalyptic writer at work here, one – who alongside John of Patmos, would have the courage and imagination available to bypass the cynicism and nihilism of our age through the creeping use of horror. In doing so, Bartlett offers the opportunity to confront evil directly, challenging the symbolic order of our blistered and rotten world, a Real World fully enamoured with the Antichrist, with an ideology of death, with the Goat born of flesh.
This is WXXT, the malady in the valley … the creeping thing in the alley … the crucifix within reality. Up next … The HIDDEN BIBLE with your host, Father Ezekiel Shineface. Don’t you fucking touch that dial!
transfigurations 