The Ironic Skeletons

Colby Smith The Ironic Skeletons (2022)
Colby Smith is a writer associated with the Neo-Decadent movement, and while I remain massively sceptical of any movement which would have me as a member, there's a strong chance of Smith being the one you really need to read. I've occasionally found some of his writing inscrutable, therefore carrying the unfortunate implication that I may not actually be quite so intelligent as I'd hoped, but his meaning is so clear in The Ironic Skeletons as to border on caustic, presenting so ruthlessly efficient a dissection of psychological collapse that it's a mercy, and probably necessary, that the book should be so short in terms of page count. Paleontology, or at least the subject of paleontology, here serves as analogy to the crumbling existence of our protagonist, D.W. Lambert, and even to the crumbling of meaning itself.

People often mistake me for an archaeologist, but I work with the corpses of things that died before the first written word, before the first uttered word, before the first thought.

The Bible erred when it placed Words before the creation of the world. The word is a recent evolutionary invention. The language I write this in will become extinct some day, just like the creatures I have dedicated my life to studying.

Babel was built for naught.

I don't know why I am writing this down, or why anyone writes anything down if their memory is to dissolve with time. I do it anyway, because I must be a narcissist like everyone else.

If the notion that someone has bolted an obsession with prehistoric animals onto a map of a nervous breakdown seems arbitrary, then you really need to read the thing because my description is unlikely to do it justice; which I say having once endured a psychologically adjacent interlude - which I survived, obviously - meaning The Ironic Skeletons taps into a strain of existential horror which, for me, seems fairly fundamental and quite overpowering. References to Hallucigenia or the Permian extinction shouldn't present an obstacle to comprehension given the context and that such details are but one part of the tapestry of D.W. Lambert's struggle for purpose; but if you're alive you should know that shit anyway, quite frankly. My own reading in this field is possibly pitiful, relatively speaking, although I've apparently picked up enough to have yelped out loud at the suggestion that therapsids may have lactated - following a quick butcher's on Google to make sure this isn't one of Lambert's paleontologically themed hallucinations.

As with a few rare pieces of music, it's quite difficult to write about this one because it explores territory which itself is best described by reference to its peripheral sensations - not unlike extinct ecosystems summarised by the skeletons they've left behind, which may or may not be a deliberate parallel. Given that Colby Smith has quite clearly lived at least some of this novel, I pray that there may be many more to come because I don't think I've read anything quite like it.