A Rat-King The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (p. 352) My second read showed pretty clearly why I remembered merely the premise and little of the plot: there is little plot to remember, in a

The face was skinny and ruddy. The nose was powerful and beaked; not like that of a bird of prey but like that one of the Roman-nosed water birds. The nose was always peeling, as though it were growing out from the inside and flaking off in those strips. That gnarly ant and aphid image with its glistening drop? Really important for understanding 3A. Nuts and bolts or maybe bolts and nuts. The Three Armageddons can melt one’s brain, so I think it's helpful to have a baseline f

This interactive map links to my work on the angstrom stories. It shows how Lafferty drew on E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds (1932) to shape the sequence before departing from Watkin’s scheme. Watkin uses colors to explain his Bonaventurist account of knowledge and experience; Lafferty builds stories around them, sometimes following Watkin, often arguing with him. Lafferty later transmuted this material when he turned to In a Green Tree. In composing The Men Who Knew Eve

Not long ago, someone I respect asked how to use the blog: what to read, where to begin. Look, I don’t know. This hobby thing now has more than 500 posts, plus other resources, totaling about 700,000 words. It took me a while to learn how to write about Lafferty. Part of that meant dropping academic cant and giving up the urge to write pretty, two habits that annoyed me in other people’s writing. To cover all the territory, the prose would need to be piston-like because Laffe

Two opposite points on the rim of a rolling wheel cannot both be on the top at once: this is taken as an almost reasonable postulate. But they could both be on top at once if one of them were suppressed by Amnesia. —Matthew Woodbine Junior, in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is difficult to discuss, even for those of us who know how magical it is. The difficulty lies in how much Lafferty packs into it. That informational

“I came ashore, swimming and wading through turbulent water. It was early morning. The shore was muddy with engendering mud, and full of promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and entered into the green and burgeoning years of my life. If I remember to do it, I can come back to that same shore, and to that same year, and have another sixty green and burgeoning years to my life.

I’ve needed to update the concepts section of this blog for a while, and I’ve made a first pass that better reflects my current understanding of how Lafferty works. I'll be working on this in the next few weeks. At some point, I want to work what I take to be Lafferty’s own critical language into it. Until then, here are his own key concepts, as I can isolate them at this point:

And there is a sort of unreality-compounded in it, and that simply will not do in a mystery story, and every story at the heart of it is a mystery story. Real things and persons can do things in a real world, and real things and persons can do things in an unreal world: but unreal things and persons can't do things in an unreal world. There is no way that an illusion (and every story is an illusion) can be maintained without clarity in either its setting or its movement. Some

A short post on a few essential works for a Lafferty reader. 1532–1564 — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, five comic novels first published between 1532 and 1564. The Penguin Screech is the one I would recommend. Screech takes a scholarly stance against the view of Bakhtin and others (going back to the early 20th century) that Rabelais was a crypto-atheist. A comic, earthy Renaissance satire centered on the giants Garg

That photo is of Knight with his friends Terry Bisson and R. A. Lafferty. In my office at the college, I keep it pinned to a corkboard. Someone once said, "Is that your dad?" Then I got to talk about Dan and RAL. Dan Knight is one of the heroes of Lafferty's publication history and one of my favorite people. I count him a dear friend. Without him, we would not have Dotty. We would not have More Than Melchisedech. We would not have many important Lafferty pieces. Knight was bu

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will. — "Promantia," The Devil is Dead (1971) This post is meant as a shortcut into the heart of Lafferty's work if you are new to Lafferty. To begin, I want to distinguish between two very different things: canonical Lafferty and your Lafferty. Everyone who reads Lafferty has to assemble their own sense of him. Obviously, all writer

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about how I understand Lafferty’s career as a writer of novels. The best thematic interpretation along developmental lines is Daniel Otto Jack Petersen’s idea that we move from pre-apocalyptic to apocalyptic, then end with post-apocalyptic, but this shades into exceptions. Another view is Andrew Ferguson’s idea that Lafferty gets a second wind after his break following the publication of Annals of Klepsis. He has a dual-track account that e

A while back, I put together a broad programmatic statement for the blog, and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts that help me read Lafferty. The “you” in these thoughts is really me. Lafferty, in interviews and correspondence, said he never meant to confuse readers, but he did so at times while trying to do something difficult. I believe him. This is one of the ways in which Lafferty is not a modernist who throws out contingent difficulty for the aesthetic pleasure of conn

See the interactive map of The Men Who Knew Everything stories.

A Past Master exam for the hardcore Lafferty reader. All gnawing questions I keep going back to. Why does Pottscamp stutter? What is the structural role of the boy with the toy? Who is the false ansel? Why is the Ouden passage dream delayed? What is the relation of Adam to Athens and Jerusalem? Why did Cathead only appear twenty years ago? Who is the stranger at the end of the novel? Who are the time travelers who visited Thomas More before Paul, and why did they do it? What

With this hobby blog approaching three hundred posts, it is time to codify the assumptions that have been guiding it. If you are here mainly for commentary on specific Lafferty stories, this post serves as a blueprint for how the blog approaches his work. Understanding Science Fiction and Lafferty's Unique Perspective A helpful way to define science fiction is as a shared set of expectations—what writers tend to assume is possible in the genre, and what readers have been trai

Over the Christmas break, I have been considering teaching Past Master next summer and posting the lecture recordings. I would probably begin with Heideggerian categories and work backward, letting the novel’s Thomistic and other Christian elements come into clearer focus by contrast. I would also likely assign Paul Kingsnorth’s recent Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity as a supplementary text, given how directly it speaks to the questions Past Master raises for