PLOT FATALE: A POST-MORTEM
.png)
This blog post includes both the Preface and the Postface of my latest work, Plot Fatale: The Rest Is [Not Just] Silence. Hopefully, it will help you decide whether or not this is a book you might enjoy reading.
Plot Fatale: The Rest Is [Not Just] Silence
“Who am I?”
André Breton, Nadja (1928)
PREFACE
Sometimes a book must die so that another may be born.
“The Rest Is Silence: A Jazz Age Noir by Ellis Delmar” was a novel set in 1929. It was published online in 2026 and lived on a blog for several months. Then it was pulled down and deleted.
PLOT FATALE is the work that emerged from that decision.
The poetic architecture you are about to encounter is unusual [to say the least]. It employs pronominal constraint, typographic warfare, surrealist allusions, and the injection of prose into poetry. These are not tricks, though. They are the narrator’s defense mechanisms – and they will fail. They will keep failing until there is nothing left but the inevitable: the immolation of a previous work.
My suggestion to anyone intrigued by this book would be: Don’t read this work if you’re looking for a comfortable story or a collection of well-behaved poems. Read it if you’d like to witness the exact moment a voice, backed into a corner by its own cowardice, chooses to kill a novel to break free.
◽◽◽
POSTFACE [POST-MORTEM]
PLOT FATALE: THE REST IS [NOT JUST] SILENCE is a hybrid metafictional artifact that maps the intentional destruction of a book to liberate its creator’s voice, told through a structural war between poetic constraint and hard-boiled prose.
The work is divided into three distinct zones of formal conflict:
- Book One [Strange Weather] introduces a neon-drenched, surreal cityscape under a strict pronominal constraint. By banishing all third-person gendered pronouns (he/she) in favor of the metronomic, rhythmic repetition of the proper noun “Morris,” the narrative transforms the human subject into a reified object, building a linguistic shield against an intrusive plot.
- Book Two [Picture in a Frame] fractures into an adversarial second-person POV (“You”), igniting a typographic war between the poetic text and an invasive, bracketed editorial voice […] that functions as an aggressive internal censor. As externalized phantoms like “The Foghorn” and a spectral author-double named Ellis Delmar emerge, the text collapses into an overt metafictional struggle over who controls the narrative.
- Book Three [The Part You Throw Away] drops the defensive armor of brackets and constraints, collapsing into a raw first-person voice (“My”). The poetic syntax is violently disrupted by the injection of two dense, traditional prose blocks salvaged from a real, now deleted, jazz-age noir pastiche. In this final movement, the author confronts and metaphorically executes the novel and its protagonist, leaving behind a clean slate built on André Breton’s concept of convulsive beauty and the lingering presence of Fernando Pessoa’s fatalism.
◽
Strange Weather, Picture In A Frame, and The Part You Throw Away are a tribute to Tom Waits and the three songs that became part of my soundscape while I was writing PLOT FATALE.
This book was written as an uncompromising experiment in form, poetics, and metafictional survival. I did kill a novel. That wasn’t easy. [Necessary? Yes. Definitely not easy.] But the act of creation remains immensely joyful and I’m glad that you’ve witnessed the result of that decision.
Sometimes a book must die so that another may be born.
◽◽◽
PLAYLIST
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOOK ONE [STRANGE WEATHER]
BOOK TWO [PICTURE IN A FRAME]
BOOK THREE [THE PART YOU THROW AWAY]
PLOT FATALE: THE REST IS [NOT JUST] SILENCE is available on Amazon and Heyzine Flipbooks.
CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED.
Comments
Post a Comment