The Official Website of Jason Hrivnak
“Gone Lawn seeks innovative, nontraditional and/or daring works, both narrative and poetic, that walk the difficult landscapes and break up the safe ones, works which incite surprising and unexpected feelings and thoughts.”
Issue 12 (Autumn, 2013) of this online journal features art and writing from the USA, Canada, Australia, Hungary, and South Africa.
I see a man in grey standing on the wing of a decommissioned airplane. A serpent hovers in the air above him. The man tilts back his head, like a drinker of rain, and the serpent strikes him once upon each eye. The man cries out and claws at his face. When next he opens his eyes, his gaze has become luminous like that of an avenging angel. What does this vision mean?
a.) I shall accumulate great wealth but lack the means to enjoy it.
b.) My childhood home has burned to the ground.
c.) I must euthanize my family, for they are infected with plague.
d.) An adversary is worth a thousand muses.
“This book changed me.
What’s so great about it? Well, it left me in tears, and kept me entranced for several hours while I greedily plowed through it. It’s the most unique thing I’ve ever read, and calling it a novel somehow seems wrong. It’s not structured like a novel, it doesn’t start or end like a novel. It starts rather slowly, actually, and when I went to pass on my tattered and tearstained copy to my partner, I almost wanted to tell him not to read the Prologue. Not because it’s poorly written or anything like that, but because it’s ‘normal’, and unlike the rest of the book. It’s written with a voice that’s simple and gentle, just a man talking about a girl he used to know.
Once you’re through the Prologue and start your journey through The Plight House, there’s no turning back. Don’t read this if you have to be somewhere, if you don’t have time to just give it the undivided attention it deserves. It’s like a guided meditation, it’s like a lucid dream primer, and it’s like a nightmare.
And it’s wonderful. Hrivnak has such a beautiful command of the language, and is undeterred in his creation of The Plight House. Some passages cause you to sink, like entering the ocean with your clothes on. Others are hopeful and uplifting, carrying the reader to heights of imagination and love. This book requires your cerebral and spiritual participation. Once you’ve read it, you will want to give it to anyone you love. Simply flawless.”
— THE ONELINE REVIEWS
You are a character in a dream of mine. Together we wander the halls of a crumbling, labyrinthine mansion. In the course of our journey, we discover that we have a common desire to inflict great violence upon the fabric of our times, to distill our lives into a single act of harrowing, eloquent savagery. As we begin to plan out the operational details of a shared offense, we become separated and you find yourself alone in the attic, surrounded by old brushes and half-used cans of paint. Like all dreamers, I have a terrible memory. What can you write or draw upon the walls to recall to me our conversation and the promises made therein?
Walking home from a gathering of friends, I am confronted by a stray dog. The dog is highly agitated and barks madly in all directions, like a thing beset. I speak to it in soothing tones and approach with great caution, but as I reach out to examine its collar, the dog coughs up onto the sidewalk a severed human hand. What is the dog’s name?
a.) Glover.
b.) Vortex.
c.) Butchermouth.
d.) Bathory.
“The writing unlikely & unique, bizarre with soft exposure strangeness, a zenith of literary bliss; Can-Lit is changed.”
— THE ONELINE REVIEWS
Blogger Carrie Carm has included The Plight House in her Monday column, Inspiration for the rest of us.
“This week’s inspiration is grief and strange beauty: Jason Hrivnak’s The Plight House, a stunning, deadly book. It’s just so sad and odd and gorgeous.
It is even pleasing as a physical object, all by itself. Published by Pedlar Press out of Toronto and with cover art by Tom Poirier — the book’s official website banner shows it off — it has high-quality, laid paper (with visible chain lines), and the layout of the book leaves plenty of negative space: a book design success.
The content itself is divine.”
— CARRIE CARM
The ReLit Awards, now in their tenth year, recognize works published by Canada’s independent presses. Winners will be announced on October 20th at the Ottawa International Writers Festival.
Dennis Cooper, author of transgressive classics Closer and Frisk, has included The Plight House (alongside works by Jean-Christophe Valtat and Pascal Quignard) in his recent blog entry “Three books I read recently and loved”.