By COLIN RAFF (MaasMedia; 1999)
An impressively wrought exercise in surreal delirium that has yet to receive its proper due. Issued by an obscure German based publisher in 1999, THE PREMISES OF OTTO GAST never had a chance to reach a significant audience, and is largely forgotten today. Had it appeared a decade later it might well have attracted a more favorable reception in the neo-decadent and new weird movements, but back in ’99, obviously, there were no such things.
Colin Raff is an artist and comic book scripter. His author bio in the Vertigo anthology series STRANGE ADVENTURES gives a good indication of his literary orientation, describing how he “once woke to find a fist-sized, grenade-shaped insect lodged in his mouth,” apparently a “Goliath beetle lion larva (Myrmeleon elegantulus), which had chosen the slumbering writer’s open mouth as a hiding place to lie in wait for a lethal Slovakian sniper scarab…” He’s also an accomplished photographer, as evinced by the black and white photographic illustrations contained in this book, which include depictions of superimposed cogwheels and surgical incisions that provide an appropriate tonal accompaniment to the verbiage on display.
Reading like an unholy cross between Raymond Roussel and E.B. (THE RESURRECTIONIST) Hudspeth, the eighty page PREMISES OF OTTO GAST combines a sense of proto-surrealistic bizarrie with a very up-to-date affinity for the aberrant and grotesque. The setting is 1946 Berlin, where a woman has been mutilated in a singularly bizarre, symmetrical manner, as if “a chimerical effort had been made to re-create her from her basic parts.” The poet Otto Gast is implicated, and admits to the crime, but insists that a woman named Rose Clephane assisted in it. In the complete absence of any trace of this personage Gast writes a 700 page manuscript entitled SEVEN PREMISES TO SUBSTANTIATE THE EXISTENCE OF ROSE CLEPHANE, consisting of self-contained stories inspired, allegedly, by dialogue spoken by Rose while in a trance. Summaries of the manuscript’s contents make up the bulk of this book.
In the first “premise” a young woman in Imperial Russia cheats on her wealthy husband, who wreaks a post mortem vengeance. In the second a 1900s whaling vessel captures a bizarre sea creature whose effects on the tale’s narrator extend far beyond the whaling expedition. The third consists of a “contemporized perversion of the Tannhäuser legend” involving a destructive love affair, a secret elevator and a vegetation-sprouting riding crop. Part four details the horrific abuse heaped upon a woman by her debauched lover, while the fifth describes a “dreamlike film without dialogue” in which the inhabitants of a castle are subjected to disruptions that include unearthly insects and “Ovidian” mutations. The sixth part is set aboard a 19th century steam ship lorded over by plaster heads with arms and legs sprouting from the ears and chins. The final premise consists of seven vignettes done up in the style and attitude we’ve come to expect, with oddities that include headless hair, an exhibition of chained-up creatures and a vast tomb containing the only remaining traces of a long-forgotten, but still powerful, deity.
The upshot of all this is that Rose Clephane is nonexistent, and Otto Gast a complete lunatic. A somewhat regressive premise, I will admit, but Colin Raff’s endlessly fecund imagination and irrepressible linguistic invention (sample sentence: “Your love of empty rituals has finally taken you too far; led you to your spirit’s barren core, the prototype of silent nightmares”) make for a multi-pronged narrative that’s obviously not for everyone, but for those receptive to unfettered weirdness raised to a high art this is an—perhaps even the—ideal acquisition.