- Fiction
- >
- BLOOD FIRE VAPOR SMOKE by Shann Ray
BLOOD FIRE VAPOR SMOKE by Shann Ray
SKU:
$16.00
16
28
$16.00 - $28.00
Unavailable
per item
A cycle akin to the seasons of a life, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2020, asks questions of the ancient struggle between life and death amidst landscapes new and old. Does ultimate forgiveness answer to ultimate violence in the world? What is the nature of grace? Who determines the fates that move us? A collection of stories opening upon the inner world with the abandon and gravity involved in personal and collective responsibility, the book responds to the present age of enragement, and the collapsing binary of two hungers: violence and forgiveness.
Blood Fire Vapor Smoke considers the human myth of regeneration through violence, and the aftermath of loneliness, love, and yearning found in a more merciful expression of human existence. Violence is caught by love, and changed, transcended, and transformed into a yearning for restoration, atonement, and the fusion embodied in the true power of community, humility, and greater humanity. The characters in each of the four sections of this collection of stories and one long poem, pass through thresholds of knowledge and responsibility. Asking not what life owes them, but what they may receive from life, and in the end, just how they are responsible for life, those who people this collection cross into unforeseen places of mystery, mercy, and grace.
In Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, beyond our inevitable compulsions toward violent ends, healing calls, beckoning us toward a crossroads where we turn and face one another, finding the beauty and strength to serve and love one another again.
Details
Genre: Fiction
Hardcover ISBN:978-1-947021-94-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-950730-18-6
Availability: Wherever Books Are Sold.
Blood Fire Vapor Smoke considers the human myth of regeneration through violence, and the aftermath of loneliness, love, and yearning found in a more merciful expression of human existence. Violence is caught by love, and changed, transcended, and transformed into a yearning for restoration, atonement, and the fusion embodied in the true power of community, humility, and greater humanity. The characters in each of the four sections of this collection of stories and one long poem, pass through thresholds of knowledge and responsibility. Asking not what life owes them, but what they may receive from life, and in the end, just how they are responsible for life, those who people this collection cross into unforeseen places of mystery, mercy, and grace.
In Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, beyond our inevitable compulsions toward violent ends, healing calls, beckoning us toward a crossroads where we turn and face one another, finding the beauty and strength to serve and love one another again.
Details
Genre: Fiction
Hardcover ISBN:978-1-947021-94-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-950730-18-6
Availability: Wherever Books Are Sold.
Praise for Shann Ray
Ray’s (Sweetclover, 2019, etc.) tale “Black Kettle” follows the titular, real-life Cheyenne chief, who fights to protect his people. Despite the tribe’s irrefutable surrender, Col. John Chivington leads a massacre at Black Kettle’s village. But the story, notwithstanding the chief’s never-ending pursuit of peace, centers on revenge against Chivington. Characters in several of the tales yearn for retribution. In “Republic of Fear,” a grandfather sends his grandson to avenge the boy’s dead father; in “The World Clean and Bright,” a young tribe member tracks down those responsible for the death of a loved one’s parents. At the same time, individuals are also forgiving. The unnamed woman of the heartrending “The Current Kings,” for example, seems willing to forgive the men who seize her with unmistakably malicious intent. And “The Debt Men” features two characters, Zach Harrelson and Phil Silven, with turmoil in their marriages. Absolution may be in the cards for both, even if only one man is truly deserving. Most of the tales unfold in Montana, including the unorthodox and curious “Love is Blindness.” In it, an affair threatens to separate a married couple, Michael White and Kristina Rosamonde, but a sudden injury will either split them apart or reunite them. A few historical figures, in addition to Black Kettle, make appearances. The protagonists of the collection’s sole poem, “City on the Threshold of Stars,” are Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, Czech soldiers who played a part in the assassination of the Butcher of Prague, Reinhard Heydrich. |
In his new book BLOOD FIRE VAPOR SMOKE, Shann Ray once again proves he is a master at depicting the darkness and light that reside in every human soul. These stories range across time and place, exploring the generational violence that is passed down from grandfather to father to son in a never-ending cycle of violence and revenge. We are dropped in the middle of the killing fields of the Sand Creek Massacre, the bombed-out lands of a war-torn African nation, and the broken homes of families shattered by betrayal and hardened hearts. The overarching question Ray asks is how, among the rubble of human cruelty and violence, do we find the hope and strength to go on? How do we forgive the unforgivable? Is it possible to love someone who gouged out your last good eye? Someone who killed your son? Someone who killed all your people? These stories are relentless in not looking away from the horrors of humanity. There are no easy answers here, but in the bleak theater of blood and despair, we see glimmers of hope in the beauty of the blue sky over a battlefield, in the flight of a flamingo rising from the devastated land, in the tender touch of those we thought we hated. Ultimately, Ray suggests redemption is found in forgiveness and love, and perhaps we would never be able to see the light if we had never known the darkness. These stories will burn you, but you will come out renewed.
– Elise Atchison, contributing author of Unearthing Paradise
Ray is a versatile writer, delving into a deeply personal drama in a foreign setting and returning home to Montana, to write about the intimacy of love and marriage. A man of the rugged landscape marries a ballerina and experiences mutual love for the first time. It's a story of the heartbreak of infidelity, complex emotions and healing. Literature is full of similar stories. What's special here is the precision of the writing, the pain on the page. "Before her, he'd loved women, but they had not loved him... he'd always walked with his head bowed, his massive shoulders bent inward as if to protect and shield his heart."
–Mindy Cameron of the Inlander
“Riveting and inventive, Shann Ray’s BLOOD FIRE VAPOR SMOKE is dark and unprecedented. I was whipsawed and lifted up, dazzled and crushed by turns. The collection is a remarkable assembly of language and spirit, difficult to face at times but so important, so powerful in witness. High marks to Shann Ray for the courage and risk and spirit of this book. Blood Fire Vapor Smoke is not a “traditional” set of stories in prose. It’s more like a song cycle or an “installation” of language that spins you into the vortex of great and timeless themes (war, violence, gender, forgiveness) while also requiring you to bear witness to human crimes that are difficult to contemplate. It’s not easy to be on the front row during atrocity. I approached the book as I tend to approach poetry–slowly, intentionally, reading only when I wasn’t likely to be interrupted. My patience paid off. I feel as though Ray has cleaved the comfort of traditional forms asunder and reassembled lyric and narrative in new, urgent ways. I love the “triptych” form, for instance. And I deeply admire how he interrogates the mythology of both European and indigenous cultures. Ray doesn’t pull his punches in this unique volume. Again, he takes risks, perhaps especially with the pieces rooted in the culture of the Northern Cheyenne people. There are moments of wretched cruelty and despair here. And beautiful evocations of redemption. An exercise of imagination and soul like no other I’ve read. Yes the book is dark. So are facets of our world. We need to be aware of what we are capable of in order to become our better selves.”
– Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe
Shann Ray’s work is both grounded and spiritual. He has an eye for minute detail, and while he’s describing an act of love or violence or just panning through a scene to render river and mountain range, he’s also trying to understand how we respond to the often generational brutality of existence without forgetting its beauty. How is it that a single life can hold so many disparate things — love, hatred, trauma, healing, destruction, forgiveness, redemption — without tearing apart? In Blood Fire Vapor Smoke people are often in conflict with nature, but never separate from it. Love is a salve for violence, but also sometimes a kind of violence itself. In Ray’s work, good and evil aren’t moral poles set apart from each other, they’re aspects of a whole held in tension, whether in a single person, in all of humanity, or in the mystery of God. Ray’s leanings will remind readers of Hemmingway, but given the yin and yang oneness of his work, I believe his sensibility is maybe more precisely like Japanese watercolorists: who put just enough paint on the page to render what they want you to see, leaving white space that the viewer is forced to either fill in with her imagination or sit with, contemplating the void. For those watercolorists, who come from cultures rooted in Buddhism and Taoism, the unpainted areas aren’t just a stylistic choice, they’re a recognition that emptiness is not nothingness. In some ways, it is the most powerful form of somethingness: it is potential not yet realized. In painting, as with writing, such potential can manifest in as many ways as there are eyes reading and minds dreaming. The more of Shann Ray’s work you read the more it feels like he’s working to develop a vernacular for describing existence in ways that are both intensely personal and specific but also manifestations of the universal. Not just the nature of humans, but the nature of humanity, and further our oneness with nature. And then, with those gaps he leaves, he invites his readers — all of us — to not just paint with our own emotions, memories, and imaginings. He invites us to join our personal journey to the universal, understanding something new about everything in the process.
– Luke Baumgarten, Terrain, & Treatment/Creative