Frederick Reuss

Frederick Reuss – HORACE AFOOT
The prose fiction construct Horace Afoot portrays a male personal character having willfully located himself in, shall we say, the Midwest: he drinks fine wine, abjures travel by automobile; and means himself to as complete a disaffection as is practicable: vines curl about the hovel. He is a particular swirl of relational facets, by which a reader will and can be admiring and intrigued. In Ohio and Indiana and Illinois souls are nominally grey and have been planed down to a thin verso of negligible expectation, pared to a point where the only move sich pawns have left to make: is to surprise. Naturally and consequently, it is the latter who lend water and soil to the former, an exchange whose explication by sweet narrative materializes by the hand of Reuss with considerable grace of form.
Here, of this we can be sure: billions of persons daily rot in hunger, and several broad patterns of pain fester parts of the earth we can all call jewels. Some of us have been sheltered from the non-feasance of souls by capitalism and lethal greeds of other portly fashions. Those who deliquesce in measures of the unwobbling pivot by reading aloud passages from THE GREAT GATSBY can feel safe bedding down in the cold desert night, or rocked in a lifeboat by bleak waves at sea. We are all, always alone. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis, and Yogananda sees only ourselves being ourselves; no one is ever out of character. So that: but: yet still is there the grand-sky immeasurable in the alchemy of delightful Reuss’s writing; the naturally-decided chemical combinations which produce liquidity and sunrises in language-form.
Walking around Enfield Glen and Lucifer Falls, a five mile CCC path rocked and stepped and carved, glaciology rampante, I imagine that these first Reuss novels came like meteorites, each in its own way perfectly formed, quite like the lyrical reflections in Gatsby: the first few days of a transatlantic voyage by sail. And the future book that he is in fact promising us, and for which we will be duly grateful, will possess that which the first few, shining and amiably composed, did, and will also have the grandeur of telling us how we read.