Red Pyramid is a corrupting book. Red Pyramid is also one of the all-time great collections. Containing stories ranging from sexual deliriums to satirical attacks on family and country, this is a book that purposely tries to assault the reader. But this is also a book of beautiful prose, poetic verse, and mind-blowing creativity. Vladimir Sorokin’s writing is like a black pearl, beautiful and contaminated, shining a black light in the depths of the human experience. His stories are dangerous in their freedom of expression and their flaunting of social taboos.
Vladimir Sorokin is a writer who can shift from a standard short story narrative to prose poetry to abstraction all in the same work. Some of his stories will change mid-telling, changing setting, characters, and plot, leaving his readers lost in a labyrinth, trying to pierce together meaning and purpose in the dark. There is a delicious unpredictability in his work. What manner of surrealist set piece, decent into abstraction, or taboo-shattering perversity are we walking into when we start reading one of his works?
Sorokin seeks to corrupt his readers. He follows in the great tradition of de Sade, Lautreamon, and Genet. Writers who seek to dirty their readers. Who takes their faces and shoves them into the dirt and worms. He says, isn't the world dirty even in its innocence? Isn't the world hungering flesh and lies? Towers of concrete built on the bones of countless generations? Is this not the world we live in? Why do we lie and pretend? Sorokin implicates the reader. Why is it you want to read about family members destroying each other? About government officials shitting on their citizens? About all manner of vice and degradation?
A quick look at some of my favorite pieces in the collection, works that pierced deep into my subconscious, stories that disturbed and delighted me in equal measure:
Obelisk - A savage attack on Russian ideals: family, the military, respecting the dead, and religion. What his homeland finds to be sacred all here comes under Sorokin’s pitch-black mockery. Exposing the falseness and hypocrisy of traditional values, this story is hilarious and bleak at the exact same time.
A Month in Dachau -If William Burroughs wrote a homage to the Marquis de Sade. A delirious mix of alternate history, science fiction, surrealism, and sadism. Avant-garde in its style and a wonderful homage to writers like Bataille and de Sade. What if Nazi Germany and Russia remained allies throughout World War 2 and found themselves victorious? How deep would their sadism and cruelty become?
The Black Horse with the White Eye - A subtle tale of strange creatures and childhood myths become a dark reality. Showing a delicate touch from Sorokin, this is a masterwork of suggested terrors and unease. A whisper of a horror story, worthy of Aickman.
Hiroshima - A short prose poem that shatters the reader with its sharp imagery and mind-blowing premise. Somehow both subtle and explosive, this may be the greatest work in the collection. Minimalist and expressionistic horror are surgically combined into a strange chimera of a story. Hiroshiman ends the collection and makes sure you do not leave unscared.
I think that also Sorokin can show a way forward for a stagnant American genre literature scene. American literature has become safe boring and increasingly irrelevant. Feel-good narratives, fake transgressive fiction that is sterile and non-threatening, and the almost complete absence of cutting-edge science fiction. Genre fiction after a very fruitful start at the beginning of the turn of the century has become mired down, too self-congratulating on its past accomplishments and with no feeling of attack or purpose. Good stories well told that are hollow and harmless. Horror fiction has almost completely abandoned its purpose as the genre that deals with taboos and exploring the secret thoughts of society and has become a circle jerk of banality. So reading Sorokin at this time just feels so refreshing. A reminder of what transgressive fiction can be. Sorokin explores the limits and then goes far beyond them, into the darkness of night. Like I said, I feel his work is a shining black pearl in a sea of darkness. Such beautiful corruptions await in Red Pyramid. Put this one on your shelf between Ligotti’s Teatro Grotessco and Bataille’s The Story of the Eye where it belongs.
