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- Review by: Matthew
Sanderson
- www.rumourmachine.com
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- PUZZLEMAN
By Christopher Alan Broadstone
Visionary film maker Christopher Alan Broadstone, whose
cutting edge shorts MY SKIN, SCREAM FOR ME and HUMAN NO MORE
rank as some of the most unnerving and artistic films of
recent memory, allows his morbid imagination free reign with
the 400 page novel, PUZZLEMAN. Upsetting, enthralling and
charged with visceral energy, it features one of the most
twisted villains of the entire genre, and drags us through
an atmosphere that is bizarre, gruesome and incredible.
Buying an ancient wire-coiled earring whose layered, random
patterns house a terrible secret, Texas sculptress Amanda
Zimmerman falls under the influence of a preternatural
creature. Called the Puzzleman – because of his horribly
mismatched body and lop-sided head – he attempts to lure
Amanda into the grue-filled, gummy hell that is the
pipeworld, so that he can feed off her emotional pain amid a
torrent of perpetually squirming body parts and
“grume-monsters”.
Using one of his former captives, the quite literally
“Legless Man”, as bait, The Puzzleman drowns Amanda in the
vertiginous nightmare of her own personal demons. Playing
off her torment at the death of her infant son, which she
blames on God’s absence and absolute lack of interest, the
unbalanced creature takes possession of Amanda, forcing her
into his terrifying limbo, frozen in the fleshy agony that
exists before one spirals into death.
Meanwhile, a disparate thread of characters, including
Professor John Rainbow, Detective Ben Henfry and wine
merchant Jeanette Orfevre, all find themselves entwined in
the Puzzleman’s sick designs. Linked by their associations
with black, blood-caked Cathedral Fleur du Sang that stands
on the ominous “Hollow Hill” in France, the diverse group
must transcend the barriers of space, time and logic, to put
an end to the primeval freak, when they find the key that
will take them down the dreaded pipes…
From the beginning, when we are introduced to the
aggressive, bitter Amanda, as she argues with a
crack-addicted street vendor, PUZZLEMAN is a hard-edged
piece of work. Concerned with angst, Broadstone uses the
bereaved, insecure young woman as a springboard for his own
rumination on the dread that haunts us all. A tormented
artist, Amanda immediately reminds one of Swedish filmmaker
Ingmar Bergman's complex and brooding protagonists.
Fittingly, Amanda creates sculptures in order to, as it is
put, “recreate life”, to strike one mark against the dreaded
D word.
Despite invoking other works, PUZZLEMAN is committed to
achieving its own ends. Like the best extreme visionaries,
the writer takes a notion and explores it with conviction,
through a myriad of beautifully drawn characters and
otherworldly situations. In an extraordinary sequence,
Amanda flashes back to her childhood, where she agonizes
over the “ultimate truth” of mankind. Pressing her father
why exactly the grass is green, insistent Amanda finds that
meaning constantly slides away, that truth cannot be grafted
onto our questions and that reducing it to God’s will is
just plain lazy.
The Puzzleman himself, or – as he prefers to be called –
Conundrum, is an inspired creation. Instead of the usual
icon in search of a bad punch line, he is truly insidious.
At first cryptically referred to by Erik, who describes his
“goddam ear t’ear grin and stinkin’ pipes” Broadstone builds
Conundrum as a skin crawling presence, until he appears as a
mass of ill matched body parts stripped from a wide range of
victims, of different sexes and age groups. His dialogue
matches his divided body, as it is broken by lengthy “…”
pauses.
Like Amanda, Conundrum has an aversion to death, but his
solution is a twisted parody of the eternal spirit affirmed
in religious doctrines. Obsessed with flesh, his terrifying
pipeworld is a sewer of eternal guts - pulpy body parts
conscious of what they are and damned for eternity. To
sustain this incarnation of evil, the author roots him in
the far past – in an astonishing bit of historical
re-imagining – as an ancient deity playing rival armies off
against one another from Ancient Greece through World War
II, as discovered by bookish John’s studies.
Like the best horror, whether it be literature or film or
whatever, PUZZLEMAN uses style to enhance its meaning.
Hugely atmospheric, it contains some exhilarating images –
such as the sparkling wireballs whose patterns shift in the
light – and cuts to the root of not only emotional pain, but
also the physical agony experienced by its characters. The
sinister cathedral sends a chill into Jeannette’s bowels,
and Amanda’s torment is mirrored by bouts of vomiting and
nausea, and shivers that shoot “up her spine and over her
scalp.”
Packed with incident, wonder, and memorable characters, and
refusing to grant easy answers to questions of mortality and
the afterlife, PUZZLEMAN is a thrilling and
thought-provoking trip through the screaming pipes and into
the churning bowels of hell.
Thanks to Chris for the sending the book.
Visit Black CAB Productions to find out more:
www.blackcabproductions.com
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