SLY BANG REVIEWED IN INTO THE VOID

Read Charles Rammelkamp's review of Sly Bang, which appears in the current issue of edgy print journal Into the Void.

Sly Bang by Larissa Shmailo

Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Sly Bang”

Novel

Spuyten Duyvil, 2019

$18.00, 198 pages

ISBN: 978-1-947980-98-3

Larissa Shmailo’s novel feels like a mash-up of William Burroughs’s paranoid mind-control fantasies and the kaleidoscopic space fantasies of superhero comic books. Indeed, the “sly bang” in the title alludes to the plot to destroy the universe by the – mad scientist? sui generis bad guy? – Prince Eugene (Genya) Ouspensky that the protagonist, Nora (as in Ibsen’s Doll House), aka, Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayenvna Romanova, is determined to thwart. But this is not a traditional what-happens-next narrative, though by the end it does “feel” like a resolution has been reached.

But people die and come back to life all over the place, so who can tell, and we are often treated to flashbacks to World War II era concentration camps and Soviet gulags. Ouspensky pursues Nora/Larissa through the whole strange space-time warp of this science-ficitiony world. Ouspensky can read Nora’s mind, trying to control her. But “Larissa artfully dodges sex with Ouspensky by role-playing Anna and Vronsky, Lara and Zhivago, and he enjoys this.” Nora is an FBI agent (not necessarily a good thing, more sinister than salubrious) with telepathic, comic book superhero powers of her own.

Speaking of “sly,” Shmailo often makes these amusing, satirical references to the cornerstones of western civilization, from Heidegger and Nietzsche and Tolstoy to John Lennon and Patti Smith. “Hillary Clinton lay on the table wriggling, bound and gagged.” Johnny Depp provides occasional voiceover.

Shmailo uses a variety of literary forms in the construction of her novel. The book opens up, stage drama-like, with stage direction and setting and off-stage voices, as we encounter Nora masturbating on a leather couch.  As in a play, the dialogue is written:

MICHAEL:  Hey there!

NORA: Hello, Michael, are there walls between us, buildings, I hope?

MICHAEL: Yes, and I’ve triple-locked the door and bound my feet…

The writing then moves to a more conventional style of an omniscient narrator voice moving the story along. But don’t get used to any particular style! Shmailo seems to be having fun subverting readers’ expectations.

For just as easily, Shmailo will burst out into poetry, including sublime lyrics like HOW MY FAMILY SURVIVED THE CAMPS, Nora’s poem.

            Was micht nicht umbringt, macht mich starker:

            What does not kill me makes me stronger.

            Nietzsche said this about other things.

            Not this.

            How did my family survive the camps?

            Were they smarter, stronger than the rest?

            Were they lucky?

            Did luck exist in Dora-Nordhausen,

            Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?

This comes from an episode involving Nora’s mother, Leda, in which we read in Nora’s backstory, reminiscent of the “origin story” of so many comic book superheroes. Leda, we learn, conceives Nora in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg in 1946 “with the last sex she will ever have.” Of course, Leda’s resentment about this is a factor later on.

But it’s best not to give away the plot, spoiler-like, especially as the plot, like a dream, is subject to the interpretation of every reader, which may be the ultimate point of Shmailo’s satire.  Still, after so much gore and blood and guts and sexual perversity, it’s hard not to smile at the fairy tale ending when the character Bensinck “dropped to one knee and took her hand” like Prince Charming swooning over Cinderella. Dim the lights. Shine a soft spot on the dude. With what seems the sincerity only an earnest fairy tale prince can display, he says to her, “No more undercover, no more faking it. Just us, and a quarter of the world’s land mass.” Hah!

And Nora, God bless her, having just a moment before read through a story she’s written about killing Ouspensky after he has an orgasm inside her (“ He starts fucking her with his tiny dick and Nora starts fantasizing about killing him and it turns her on.”), smiles sweetly and responds: “And create a world safe for our children, Albert? Or am I going too fast for you?”   

But wait, that’s not all! The story is followed by APPENDIX; NORA’S SLAA SEXUAL HARMS INVENTORY (FRAGMENT). Her sexual ideal? “I have sex with a man  whom I love and respect and trust and am attracted to and who loves and respects and trusts me and is attracted to me as part of a committed relationship and as a byproduct of sharing and partnership. Our sex is creative, playful, imaginative and hot. [following pages illegible]”  There follows a series of fragments about various men and her “reasons for getting involved.”

Do you get the uncomfortable feeling that Shmailo is playing the reader, having us on? It’s this discomfort that’s finally at the heart of the writing, masterful satire whose object is constantly shifting and, yes, may be you. You just have to read Sly Bang yourself and come to your own conclusions.  You won’t regret it.

Charles Rammelkamp

GREAT REVIEW OF SLY BANG IN BOOKS FOR READERS

Read Meredith Sue Willis's great review of SLY BANG in Books for Readers #204!

And now for something completely different-- a new novel by Larissa Shmailo, continuing her themes that include feminism, female sexuality, power struggles, and a family that may have collaborated with the Nazis, but also suffered hugely themselves. She writes again about a powerful, debilitating combination of sex addiction and sexual abuse. This time she does it with a rollicking, often comic (and comic book style) fantasy/science fiction story.

Her main character is Nora, a psychologically damaged but uber-resilient hero who spends a lot of time in a coma, drugged, or otherwise disabled-- because the bad guys and the good guys are all and constantly aware of her power and trying to channel it, or kill it, for their own purposes..

The neat psycho-spiritual trip here is that Nora remains through all the abuse and danger and rising one more time to rejoin the battle--a deeply Christian character--that is, not that she particularly practices Christianity or even believes in God, but she is committed to forgiving and loving. Her special bailiwick is vicious serial killers like her sometimes charming. occasional savior Michael, whose idea of a special treat is sex with dead, young vaginas. But he is NOT, he insists, a pedophile. Michael is, like Nora, a multiple personality.

This novel, not surprisingly, has some of the quality of a fever dream, and one could imagine at any moment being awakened and told it was, indeed, all a nightmare, but that is never the point. The point is the ride, the changes, the themes played and dropped and played again. It picks up momentum throughout, and the final section moves into even faster changes, ending with short dispatches from an action packed summary, with more flips and twists. Nora triumphs in the end, offering us a poem in which she entertains Satan himself.

https://www.amazon.com/Sly-Bang-Larissa-Shmailo/…/ref=sr_1_1?

AMAZON.COM

Sly Bang

Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battle....

PRAISE FOR LARISSA SHMAILO’S SLY BANG!

If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of thinking, Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with nonsensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all-out madness, a battle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds who by all means should stay away from a book like this.

—Darryl Wawa

Generously infused throughout with humor, ebullient psychosexualism, and quasi-hypothetical political scenarios, this manic mind-trip, where alternate realities collide full-force culminating in orgasmic fits and fantastical flurries, Sly Bang is a bit like eating chocolate cake on a roller coaster. Crazy. Delicious. Chaos.
—K.R. Copeland

Sly Bang is a whirlwind. And if you are looking for a sedate involvement with linear literature, Sly Bang is not for you. This is the shock of the new in a whirlpool of the past. Just open the book and hang on. This is visceral energy in words. . . In Sly Bang, Larissa Shmailo’s technical skills pop on every page. She is in control of this insanity from the start, and to prove it she floods us with new icons created one after another like stamped plastic ducks. She creates an assembly line of literary riches.
—RW Spryszak

Larissa Shmailo's sci fi thriller Sly Bang is a twisted and compelling thrill ride of a novel that not only transcends the form of that literary genre— it blows it up. It's a novel about an attempt to destroy the universe by reverse engineering the Big Bang. It deals with taboo subjects and is raunchy. funny and brutally intense. I also like that's there's a character named Brave McQ.
—Michael W McHugh aka McQ

Astounding! Will make you recalibrate the word “risk.”
—Maggie Balistreri

Available on Amazon and Spuyten Duyvil at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang.html

Ragazine Review of Sly Bang

Sly Bang / hybrid fiction by Larissa Shmailo

You knew this is what the world really looked like all along,

A review by RW Spryszak
ISBN-13: 978-1947980983
Spuyten Duyvil – New York 2018
198 pages

I have a problem with what is sometimes known as “experimental” writing. To my way of thinking if your writing is still an “experiment” you are saying you don’t know what’s going to happen here and have no control over anything. If doing automatic writing, that’s one thing. Hans Arp would be proud so long as you don’t sit down and edit the “genius of chance.” But unless you’re doing classic surrealism just throwing it out there to see what burns and what remains stone always fails. Always. In over forty years of this my advice is – do your experimenting in the laboratory. Don’t do it in public. Have the concept baked and ready before you release it onto the citizenry.

This is the very standard that made me fall for Sly Bang. Because that thing – a wild, idiosyncratic, frizzle-haired thing – is put before us fully formed. Guesses gone. Thing triumphant. In Sly Bang, Larissa Shmailo’s technical skills pop on every page. She is in control of this insanity from the start, and to prove it she floods us with new icons created one after another like stamped plastic ducks. She creates an assembly line of literary riches. Genres and forms bend in and out with ease.

Now hold on for one second right here. In the first place, what I’d really like to know is, how did Larissa Shmailo actually present the idea of Sly Bang to a publisher? As a writer myself, I have enough trouble fitting things into a digestible capsule meant as an explanation to a stranger who wasn’t there when all the work was going down, sweat and all. It would seem impossible to summarize this book into a typical 150-word synopsis that fits the standard query form.

What? Dear Editor, in Sly Bang Nora is conducting an investigation under the auspices of a very high-level intelligence agency heretofore unconvincingly named. Probably. You may think she’s dead by page 50 or thereabouts but not so fast. And it may sound, for a moment as if she only exists as a mutual experience shared by a wild array of characters who help her or try to stand in her way, depending. You see, once in a while Nora’s thoughts become visible holograms that drift through the room. Time warps between the now and the past to the maybe-never-happened at all for her. Nora talks with and interchanges between herself and her “alters” – alter egos that range from the insensible to the predatory.

Yeah, probably not.

I would have no clue on how to write a query for Sly Bang. All I know is I have never read anything like it, and never stopped being carried along by its peculiar madness, my head full of pictures, my ears full of voices.

“Michael regresses, or un-regresses, and becomes a danger to Nora again. Nora is too old to breed using even the most interstellar ovarian technologies…”

In looking over the book while rewriting this review I am, however, quite sure I fully understand how Sly Bang came to be. I wasn’t there when it happened but, having studied Nora’s detectivizing techniques I can trace it back.

First, Shmailo ate the world. The eating helped her soak up every aspect of the popular culture, every nuance and sham of the American Empire. Then, she chewed it all up. This is important. Because Jackson Pollock did the same thing with the visual. Check it. Pollock ate the world and spat it back out again in all kinds of wild colors and shapes. Shmailo did the same, but with words. So, if you look for details, you lose the “Bang.” If you step back, you get it. Other than this I can’t do the standard “this book is like that book.” Or “this work is similar to this author’s oeuvre.” It can’t be done.

Enough speculation. Let’s simplify. Sly Bang is a book about a detective / agent / victim / lover / investigator / spy / psychic target named Nora. How much Larissa Shmailo is one of Nora’s “alters” is a matter of conjecture. Best left to biographers, or the ponderings of those who make picklocks out of metaphors.

“She distracts Ouspensky. She praises his derivative poetry. She writes poetry to him in French and Russian. She flatters him and draws him out to learn his plans, a Scheherazade now, and keeps him from the cavern and its barbaric rituals and her children.”

It’s a simple formula, really. Nora is what a female James Bond trapped in a harsher dystopian version of Blade Runner would be, only six times as promiscuous, with a handful of different personalities who pop up from time to time at the worst times, a serial killer for a sidekick, born of a family that had to pick between Hitler and Stalin, and very susceptible to obvious persuasion when under the influence of that serum she was warned about but allowed them to give to her anyway because a little sweet talk got right through her armor just like it would for anybody else. In the meantime, we slip in and out of realities, personas, get transported from prose to poetry without the need for a bridge until what we discover is a form that has no precedent I can think of.

There will be readers wanting the linear, formulaic prose (there are always such creatures lurking about, just like those who want to destroy and deny our Nora). There will be readers who will be completely thrown off the scent. Too bad they will lose the trail, because here’s the secret;

What Larissa Shmailo is recording here is exactly how the brain works. Shards and bits of memory-pictures. Images flowing into one another like REM sleep but without ever admitting to the dream. And yet? In the heart of it – or perhaps near the spleen of it – there comes a subjective cohesion that tells a story about an agent for good with a penchant for bad in a world of sunlight, gray areas, and things that are just downright disgusting.

If you are used to writers who talk down to or dumb it down for you, you will probably hate this book. If you like writing where the author figures you are in on the same joke because you live in the same world, you’re ready.

Sly Bang is “Rollerball” on a mixture of cocaine and acid. A sex binge that eats men alive. It’s the parts of “The Matrix” they had to edit out because it was just too much to take. Once you check in you will be half way through before you realize what you’re doing. Because for all its twisted logic and refusal to adhere to any known rules, Sly Bang is a world you already know is there.

Even if you had no idea that’s what it sounded like before you started.
RW Spryszak

TOWARD A NEW NARRATIVE - SLY BANG

"TOWARD A NEW NARRATIVE: SLY BANG REWRITES, rethinks, and reimagines how we conceive of narrative. This slippery novel is a major step forward towards a radiant and explosive language. - Dean Kostos, Pierced by Night-colored Threads

MICHAEL McHUGH''S (McQ) REVIEW OF SLY BANG

Larissa Shmailo's sci fi thriller Sly Bang is a twisted and compelling thrill ride of a novel that not only transcends the form of that literary genre - it blows it up. It's a novel about an attempt to destroy the universe by reverse engineering the Big Bang. It deals with taboo subjects and is raunchy, funny and brutally intense. It's available on Amazon. Book release party at The Jefferson Library in NYC. I also like that's there's a character named Brave McQ. - Michael W McHugh aka McQ.

Exciting Review of SLY BANG by K.R.Copeland

Thrilled at this brilliant review of SLY BANG by critic Kimberly Rae Lorenz-Copeland:

What do you do when there is a, “Army of serial killers, mad scientists, and ultra rich sociopaths” after you?

Why, you summon your alter, “Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayevna Romanova, tsaritsa of all the Russias,” and embark upon Larissa Shmailo’s cornucopiac literary odyssey, Sly Bang, of course.

From Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, and Lady Gaga’s meat dress, to sadistic cult leaders and space Nazis, this sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, is chock-full of surprises at every turn. I mean, the lead character, Upper West Side, Manhattanite Nora, is a multiple personality FBI agent/possible alien, with an affinity for serial killers, who telepathically communicates with giant prehistoric birds, AND as luck would have it, writes uncannily brilliant poetry (journal entries).

Yes.

There is a LOT going on in this book.

In my opinion, the (quintessentially Shmailo) Interlude is where Sly Bang lives and breathes - It is the much anticipated doorway through which the reader officially exits suspended disbelief, and enters Nora’s world - her *real* world - introduces, through beautifully crafted poems, the backstory of Nora; a tragic tale of horrific abuse, betrayal, and ultimately, survival.

This stretch of writing - which jets the reader back to World War II, Nora’s camp family history, is nothing short of masterful, and reminiscent of Shmailo’s previous offering, Patient Women. The poem, Warsaw Ghetto, itself, is well worth the price of admission.

Generously infused throughout with humor, ebullient psychosexualism, and quasi-hypothetical political scenarios, this manic mind-trip, where alternate realities collide, full-force, culminating in orgasmic fits and fantastical flurries, Sly Bang, is a bit like eating chocolate cake on a roller coaster. Crazy. Delicious. Chaos.

K.R. Copeland - author of Love and Other Lethal Things