Laura Ellen Joyce, The Luminol Reels, Calamari Press, 2014.
excerpt & interview in The Collagist
When human blood reacts with luminol, it lights up a ghostly blue. This reaction,
most commonly used to detect whether violence has taken place at suspected crime
scenes, combines the human and the chemical, it invokes violence and disposability
but also transformation. THE LUMINOL REELS takes its imagery from
pornography, Catholicism, and crime scene investigation to interrogate the
violence done to women. It considers the ongoing brutality of the femicides in
Ciudad Juarez and the institutional misogyny of the Catholic Church. Violence
is intrinsically linked to location, and the shrines, quinceañera parties, holy
communions, and seances of this book are all stained luminescent blue.
«A fierce and deadly little fantasia that bites its way deep into your brain.»—Brian Evenson
«"We
were plump and pretty, our skin glowed like Chinese lanterns and he
wanted our laughter for himself": In THE LUMINOL REELS, Laura Ellen
Joyce finds the blue-glowing, b-movie heart of Plath’s and Ballard’s
atrocity exhibitions and the parapornography of reliquaries. Joyce may
write: "This one is for the sickos," but this is a book for readers who
are into David Lynch, Aase Berg, Bluebeard (any version), hagiography;
"splatter gurlesque" and media theory. In other words: people who want
their reading to feel like drinking "luminol margaritas.".»
—Johannes Göransson
To say I consumed Laura Ellen Joyce's The Luminol Reels
quickly is to suggest I took it all in willingly and with abandon. But I
prickled and bruised while I read. And yet, despite the cringe-worthy,
ultra-violent imagery, I couldn't keep the reel from slowing or
stopping.
The Luminol Reels is a small
artifact, about 100 pages choked into a 6" x 4" frame, with sinister
photo collages as section dividers and an ever-present film reel frame
along the top and bottom of the pages. I read quickly, as if the only
way to escape was to get to the end. This novella pretends to be a
compact and obvious thing, not only in size, but also in scene
description. The work revolves around blunt images: blood, fluids,
gouging, slashing, sores, holes, and damaged flesh and bone that could
have spilled out of a B movie. But it's not just flashes of cool and
gross shit, even though I said aloud to no one more than once: "This is
some really cool shit. And gross. This is some really cool and gross
shit." More than just a work of shock, it's a horrifying and too true
account of the unstoppable violence against women and the body parts and
viscera that pile up. And pile up. And pile up.
The Luminol Reels consists of
small prose pieces, evidentiary splatters of rape, murder, mutilation,
and physical assaults. We've all seen luminol used in every crime show
around. Someone sprays something, the lights go black, and bright blue
goo traces the movement and spoiling of every victim. It's a revelation —
a step towards solving the scene, but one of repulsion and viciousness.
It's a piece of data used to trace a crime and humanity's sickness.
Joyce revels in this fluid's abjection,
in this phantasmic relic. Some scenes are specific to the multiple and
brutal homicides of women in Ciudad Juárez,
while others find their setting upon the stage of Catholic ritual and
dogma. Several moments utilize an everywhere-at-once space with an
anonymous character; as readers we understand there is no assured
safety, not in setting or identity. However, the most difficult passages
utilize second person narration, tying us directly into the work. We
are forced to recognize (or even to permit) the danger undoing us and we
are given commands and rules, which seem set up to fail us. This isn't
just a record of assaults; it casts them out at the reader without
mercy. I imagine for some the continual barrage of violence will stir up
a readerly distance. One might say the images don't always teeter
nicely between the horror that is a reality and the absurdity of pulp
horror imagery. I agree that some pieces provide more convolutions than
others, but I don't think the point of the read is to be always in the
moment of negotiating institutional misogyny, pornography, and femicide,
with some level of outsider distance. Rather, we are to sit (wriggle
and panic) and take it. This novella is a dangerous exhibit of bodies
taking it, a quality that's spelled out for us in Joyce's careful choice
of words and in the blood, gore, and unapologetic imagery.
In order to keep the tension in a filthy
workshop such as this, Joyce's prose is deceptively easy. The clean
starts of the sentences seem ordinary. One sentence begins, "Threads of
red hair," and another starts, "She tanned her small breasts." But each,
like so many others, fall into an action or image that snags this
steady line back into a complication: "Threads of red hair loop you
shut," or, "She tanned her small breasts, ironed flat, like all of ours,
from birth." We begin in one world: "You can lie on their soft, brown
pelts," and end in another: "and make generic love." Other lines do not
allow that safe admission: "There is time that is blank. You are on her
and you are guilty." But these lines always build up to a contorted
image, a knot of violations: "She slammed outwards, y-shaped, our
mermaid openings began to empty of scales." In the end, what we can find
of hope is only caught up in a strange type of comfort—one that builds
and reinforces a system of defeated relief and ghastly transformation.
The language assures us that despite the steady piles of flesh and loss,
we will never know what we are becoming.
As readers we are comfortable in
monitoring or steadying our own intake of text. We watch it on our time.
We carry our e-texts here and there. We set things down to do something
else. We tend to say a book that we can't stop reading is a good book,
one that's lured us in. We are engaged. I'm not sure if I was lured in
to The Luminol Reels. I had no desire to root there. And I
didn't find myself wondering what would happen next or what mystery
would be revealed, because there was no mystery; the female body made
messy and chunked always happened next. I read this text quickly and did
not put it down, because not reading was a lie and because pausing to
process and accept this reality splashed on and gouged into these pages
is a luxury. That is, only the privileged have the time and energy to
reflect. This read is a gutting, but it's also a testament—a necessary
one. - Natanya Ann Pulley
You can afford to read Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels, which runs a slender ninety-seven pages, multiple times. Plan on doing so. This novella cum how-to-manual — replete with pronouns demanding considerable detective work to identify the referent; page-length sections of vexing connectivity and often dim internal legibility; and objects with some function in the world Joyce constructs but which could arguably use a clarificatory glossary entry — acknowledges its difficulty: a section labeled “Reading” notes, “The first time will be grueling. You will be in handstand position, paper fed roughly down your gullet until you are blue. If you lose height, poise, or grace repeat the task.”
A passable summation seems to be that The Luminol Reels adumbrates a dystopia in which women’s bodies and interiors are violenced in the same ways they are outside Joyce’s novel — including rape, murder, compromised reproductive freedom, coerced display — and in which the manifestations of these brutalities are presented at and beyond the semblance of Hollywood horror script: there is a factory where young girls are drained of blood and hung on hooks to cure, after which they will be cannibalized; there are pageants of, it seems, dead bodies. Simultaneously the work forms an instruction manual for how the protagonist might be able to journey to “bring the girls back to life and make their bodies whole.” This protagonist appears to be a mother whose daughter has been stolen from her, and is addressed throughout as “You.”
The novella employs the conceit of luminol, a forensic substance used to detect blood at crime scenes, and through this conceit it investigates violence against women. While this violence is recognizable in the fiction generally, the novella’s specific investigations of misogyny and violence within the Catholic Church and in Ciudad Juarez demands that the reader bring their own background knowledge. These locations of violence are gestured at throughout The Luminol Reels — the novella’s factory evokes the maquiladoras in which many girls and women come to Ciudad Juarez to work, and the recurring mention of saints and martyrs invoke the Church, as do section titles such as “Black Mass.” But Joyce chooses not to write journalism, which could provide for the reader an expository informing or analysis of what is occurring in these locations. As far as insight to these specific sites of misogyny goes, for a reader to take from The Luminol Reels more than the very apprehension that it concerns itself with these sites via allusion and allegory, the reader will need to have (or acquire) knowledge of these sites from a source other than Joyce’s novella.
The novella’s structure, too, can be opaque, and is admirably inventive. It’s chapters — titled “Agonies,” “Martyrs,” “Murderers,” “Porno,” “Rituals,” “Bodies,” “Virgins,” “Sacrificial Laws,” “Saints,” “Luminol,” and “The Dead Return” — are broken into sections. Some of these sections are described as reels. One such section, titled “Holy Water,” is subtitled, “This reel should be handled with care. Once dried out it has no further effect.” Other sections refer to objects within the world of The Luminol Reels. For example, “Stars” refers to some psychotrope, and is subtitled “When you eat the stars there will be a psychosis,” with further instruction that “Stars are to be used with the following reels: Big Dipper, Oracle.” It is as if the sections, while constituting a narrative and manual for how to rescue the protagonist’s daughter and resurrect the dead girls, simultaneously constitute post-its tacked onto objects in the toolkit for this journey.
Joyce’s deployment of reels helps construct, and reflects, the novel’s cinematic mode of presentation. The contents of the reel are sometimes displayed to the reader for viewing, as in “This one comes next. A close-up of her clean dollflesh. It is sewn up but there is a special effect — it blazes. . . . Cut back to her treacly hair scraped back. The braids you twisted in have been displaced. Blood on her lips.” For other reels, though, only a summary of the reel’s content is provided, as in, “This is imported footage of a multiple cadaver show”; alternatively, only instructions for the reel’s use is provided, as in “This reel must be played only at dawn and twilight. It may accompany the deaths of children; vigils and funerals if there has been no sexual contact (forced or natural). Or at any séance where two or more gods are invoked. It may never be used pornographically or for vaginal pleasure.”
This refusal to display the contents of many of the reels seems to be motivated in part by a concern that the novella’s gruesome details not blur, in some way, into entertainment, and that readers not take their gaze for granted. Announcing that “This is imported footage of a multiple cadaver show,” while withholding the actual footage, renders the reader self-conscious of having watched a presentation of the footage displayed in other sections.
Some sections, though, seem to label neither a reel nor a material object. The section “Fur,” for instance, begins, “This is the season for hunting. There are foxes, squirrels, deer and baby beers.” On one reading, “Fur” might be the name, within the world of The Luminol Reels, for a season of the year. (Perhaps replacing “Summer.”) In an alternate reading, it could simply be the case that this section is titled in the same manner as the section of a traditional work of fiction — i.e., thematically in some way — and this section’s title happens to be “Fur.”
This ambiguity has divergent implications for the interpretation — and experience — of reading The Luminol Reels. Consider that the section “Factory” is subtitled, “This reel is educational and must be broadcast during the entirety of Fur.” If we read “Fur” as a season in the world of The Luminol Reels (i.e., the first reading in the paragraph above), then the interaction of the sections “Factory” and “Fur” seems simple enough: the novella’s protagonist — whose identity the reader is encouraged to try on through Joyce’s use of “you,” producing an effect that is constructive insofar as it assumes a female role for the many readers who are male, but, if abstracted analytically from its gendered context, simply produces the fairly well-worn effect that this archetypal form of second-person narration is known to produce — must play the Factory reel during the season of Fur, on her journey to rescue the girls.
If, though, we read “Fur” as simply the title of a section in the novella The Luminol Reels, then it is as though readers simultaneously embody the “you” — the mother — presented in the novella, and also separately embody themselves, the readers. This multiplicity results from the facts that the Factory reel is presented to the mother (and the reader-as-mother), but the instructions for this reel apply, in at least one way, to the reader considered simply as the reader. (This reader-as-reader address results because the instruction that Factory “must be broadcast during the entirety of Fur” can be read as instruction to the reader to read the section [not reel] “Factory” alongside the section [not during the season of] “Fur” [and, in all likelihood, based on this reviewer’s experience, then wrack their brain wondering what the purpose or effect of reading these two sections alongside should be or, even, is.])
Insofar as the section “Fur” is engaged with in this latter manner, a destabilization of identity is achieved: the reader is simultaneously the mother within The Luminol Reels and the reader reading about this mother. This out-of-body effect — this encouraged alienation from one’s body — may be experienced and regarded in any of a number of ways within a novella so focused on violenced bodies. And through this narratorial construction Joyce again makes the reader self-conscious of their gaze.
It should be clear by now that The Luminol Reels is both difficult and smart. It is also brutal. While most readers will share with this reviewer the sense that they failed to grasp so much of the novella, it should nevertheless succeed as a whip to attention, an invitation to learn more about various crime scenes of misogyny, and an expression of hope for resistance. - Luke Taylor
You can afford to read Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels, which runs a slender ninety-seven pages, multiple times. Plan on doing so. This novella cum how-to-manual — replete with pronouns demanding considerable detective work to identify the referent; page-length sections of vexing connectivity and often dim internal legibility; and objects with some function in the world Joyce constructs but which could arguably use a clarificatory glossary entry — acknowledges its difficulty: a section labeled “Reading” notes, “The first time will be grueling. You will be in handstand position, paper fed roughly down your gullet until you are blue. If you lose height, poise, or grace repeat the task.”
A passable summation seems to be that The Luminol Reels adumbrates a dystopia in which women’s bodies and interiors are violenced in the same ways they are outside Joyce’s novel — including rape, murder, compromised reproductive freedom, coerced display — and in which the manifestations of these brutalities are presented at and beyond the semblance of Hollywood horror script: there is a factory where young girls are drained of blood and hung on hooks to cure, after which they will be cannibalized; there are pageants of, it seems, dead bodies. Simultaneously the work forms an instruction manual for how the protagonist might be able to journey to “bring the girls back to life and make their bodies whole.” This protagonist appears to be a mother whose daughter has been stolen from her, and is addressed throughout as “You.”
The novella employs the conceit of luminol, a forensic substance used to detect blood at crime scenes, and through this conceit it investigates violence against women. While this violence is recognizable in the fiction generally, the novella’s specific investigations of misogyny and violence within the Catholic Church and in Ciudad Juarez demands that the reader bring their own background knowledge. These locations of violence are gestured at throughout The Luminol Reels — the novella’s factory evokes the maquiladoras in which many girls and women come to Ciudad Juarez to work, and the recurring mention of saints and martyrs invoke the Church, as do section titles such as “Black Mass.” But Joyce chooses not to write journalism, which could provide for the reader an expository informing or analysis of what is occurring in these locations. As far as insight to these specific sites of misogyny goes, for a reader to take from The Luminol Reels more than the very apprehension that it concerns itself with these sites via allusion and allegory, the reader will need to have (or acquire) knowledge of these sites from a source other than Joyce’s novella.
The novella’s structure, too, can be opaque, and is admirably inventive. It’s chapters — titled “Agonies,” “Martyrs,” “Murderers,” “Porno,” “Rituals,” “Bodies,” “Virgins,” “Sacrificial Laws,” “Saints,” “Luminol,” and “The Dead Return” — are broken into sections. Some of these sections are described as reels. One such section, titled “Holy Water,” is subtitled, “This reel should be handled with care. Once dried out it has no further effect.” Other sections refer to objects within the world of The Luminol Reels. For example, “Stars” refers to some psychotrope, and is subtitled “When you eat the stars there will be a psychosis,” with further instruction that “Stars are to be used with the following reels: Big Dipper, Oracle.” It is as if the sections, while constituting a narrative and manual for how to rescue the protagonist’s daughter and resurrect the dead girls, simultaneously constitute post-its tacked onto objects in the toolkit for this journey.
Joyce’s deployment of reels helps construct, and reflects, the novel’s cinematic mode of presentation. The contents of the reel are sometimes displayed to the reader for viewing, as in “This one comes next. A close-up of her clean dollflesh. It is sewn up but there is a special effect — it blazes. . . . Cut back to her treacly hair scraped back. The braids you twisted in have been displaced. Blood on her lips.” For other reels, though, only a summary of the reel’s content is provided, as in, “This is imported footage of a multiple cadaver show”; alternatively, only instructions for the reel’s use is provided, as in “This reel must be played only at dawn and twilight. It may accompany the deaths of children; vigils and funerals if there has been no sexual contact (forced or natural). Or at any séance where two or more gods are invoked. It may never be used pornographically or for vaginal pleasure.”
This refusal to display the contents of many of the reels seems to be motivated in part by a concern that the novella’s gruesome details not blur, in some way, into entertainment, and that readers not take their gaze for granted. Announcing that “This is imported footage of a multiple cadaver show,” while withholding the actual footage, renders the reader self-conscious of having watched a presentation of the footage displayed in other sections.
Some sections, though, seem to label neither a reel nor a material object. The section “Fur,” for instance, begins, “This is the season for hunting. There are foxes, squirrels, deer and baby beers.” On one reading, “Fur” might be the name, within the world of The Luminol Reels, for a season of the year. (Perhaps replacing “Summer.”) In an alternate reading, it could simply be the case that this section is titled in the same manner as the section of a traditional work of fiction — i.e., thematically in some way — and this section’s title happens to be “Fur.”
This ambiguity has divergent implications for the interpretation — and experience — of reading The Luminol Reels. Consider that the section “Factory” is subtitled, “This reel is educational and must be broadcast during the entirety of Fur.” If we read “Fur” as a season in the world of The Luminol Reels (i.e., the first reading in the paragraph above), then the interaction of the sections “Factory” and “Fur” seems simple enough: the novella’s protagonist — whose identity the reader is encouraged to try on through Joyce’s use of “you,” producing an effect that is constructive insofar as it assumes a female role for the many readers who are male, but, if abstracted analytically from its gendered context, simply produces the fairly well-worn effect that this archetypal form of second-person narration is known to produce — must play the Factory reel during the season of Fur, on her journey to rescue the girls.
If, though, we read “Fur” as simply the title of a section in the novella The Luminol Reels, then it is as though readers simultaneously embody the “you” — the mother — presented in the novella, and also separately embody themselves, the readers. This multiplicity results from the facts that the Factory reel is presented to the mother (and the reader-as-mother), but the instructions for this reel apply, in at least one way, to the reader considered simply as the reader. (This reader-as-reader address results because the instruction that Factory “must be broadcast during the entirety of Fur” can be read as instruction to the reader to read the section [not reel] “Factory” alongside the section [not during the season of] “Fur” [and, in all likelihood, based on this reviewer’s experience, then wrack their brain wondering what the purpose or effect of reading these two sections alongside should be or, even, is.])
Insofar as the section “Fur” is engaged with in this latter manner, a destabilization of identity is achieved: the reader is simultaneously the mother within The Luminol Reels and the reader reading about this mother. This out-of-body effect — this encouraged alienation from one’s body — may be experienced and regarded in any of a number of ways within a novella so focused on violenced bodies. And through this narratorial construction Joyce again makes the reader self-conscious of their gaze.
It should be clear by now that The Luminol Reels is both difficult and smart. It is also brutal. While most readers will share with this reviewer the sense that they failed to grasp so much of the novella, it should nevertheless succeed as a whip to attention, an invitation to learn more about various crime scenes of misogyny, and an expression of hope for resistance. - Luke Taylor
Today’s fun definition, brought to you by Wikipedia: “Luminol (C8H7N3O2) is a versatile chemical that exhibits chemiluminescence, with a striking blue glow, when mixed with an appropriate oxidizing agent…Luminol is used by forensic investigators to detect trace amounts of blood left at crime scenes, as it reacts with iron found in hemoglobin.” You’re welcome.
What this book is is—and it’s so small, physically,
you’ll be kicked several inches back to feel it—this incredibly dense,
fragmentary list of atrocities or harms, basically, each of which is
small (<300 a="" and="" are="" blunt="" describing="" directness.="" disquieting="" feature="" feeding="" from="" girl="" lengths="" martyrs.="" moving="" murderers="" obotomy="" of="" on="" p="" pictures.="" porno="" ranging="" rituals="" saints="" scenes="" sections="" seemingly="" ten="" texts="" the="" there="" titled="" titles="" to="" various="" virgins="" words="">
Luminol is the stuff cops use at crime scenes to discover remnants of spilled blood. In that spirit, The Luminol Reels provides an index of the long array of mankind’s atrocities, particularly those in the form of violence against women.
The book is divided up into the ten types of traumas it relates, a Dante-like relation of the rings of pain: Agonies, Martyrs, Murderers, Porno, Rituals, Bodies, Virgins, Sacrificial Laws, Saints, and, finally, Luminol. Each section contains a handful of one- or two-page texts, somewhat like specimen slides, describing sick little short films that each provides an eye into a hellish scene or mind. “Mass Burial,” for instance, reads:
The smell is rotten in the desert. Putrefaction is scrambled in the heat. Some of the girls lie with their faces missing, brains leaking from the dead zone, but with their right arms or feet still covered in creamy flesh.
Relief can be gained by visiting the mass grave. Run your fingers through their hair and breathe in their sharp violent scents. Lie on top of them, rolling your heavy body over theirs, catching blue-black hair in your teeth and tasting their sweet perspiration where it collects underneath the fester and damp of their corpses.
There is little hope here, and even less relenting. Joyce’s hand is as unflinching in its force as any of the deathly actions rendered to the bodies on any page, almost like an alarm light throwing its glow over room after room, or stations in an exhibit of twisted murder scenes. Each leg is mercifully brief, landing its blow and moving into the next.
I read a lot of fiction that sometimes goes by the unhelpful label of transgressive writing, a term initially coined by Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt back in 1993 to describe the work of people like Kathy Acker, Mary Gaitskill, Bret Easton Ellis, and of course Dennis Cooper. These writers portrayed in sticky, stinky, and to my mind magnificent detail, scenes of brutal and often sexualized horror; for Silverblatt it was as if the Marquis de Sade had stopped by an American orgy and ended up choreographing the bloody thing.
Transgressive writing, like every other genre, pigeonholes the work it describes and limits its potential audience, but I don’t blame Silverblatt for coming up with it: part of a critic’s work is to file the inconvenient burrs off a piece of writing, make it agree to a greater or lesser extent with other writers, and fit it into a genre that a reader can readily understand. I get that. And it’s not bad as genres go: better than the fatuous “new sincerity” but maybe not as good as “alt-lit,” whose inadvertent evocation of .alt in its description of a bunch of young writers who can’t remember dial-up has always tickled me.
Plus, in the basic sense of constituting an offence against certain laws, spoken and unspoken, there is something transgressive about this writing. A hot kid taking a dump into his adult lover’s hand in Cooper’s Closer; a girl lusting after her father in Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School; Patrick Bateman’s laudatory appraisals of Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News in Ellis’ American Psycho: these works pit themselves against everything the reader thinks is right and true, forcing them to reflect on their unconscious adoption of social codes and demanding the reevaluation of normative assumptions about art and sex and the Oedipal family.
But one of the things about transgression is that the boundaries keep moving about. This was Bataille’s lovely maze-like logic: once whatever it is that is transgressive is codified and drawn into the realm of the understood as transgression, it ceases to be truly transgressive. Transgression is in the crossing-over, not in the being-beyond, and for Bataille, fellow traveler of a number of clandestine societies, it’s often better done in secret. Similarly, as soon as it is defined as such, transgressive writing loses its original punk frisson and becomes bounded by its own codes and exceptions; like punk rock, it becomes accepted and normalized.
So the thinking goes. Yet reading through Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels on the Tube recently, it was immediately apparent to me that although transgressive writing may be dead as a genre (hey, it’s as easily murdered by a critic as it is conceived by one), writing such as hers that errs on the side of transgression still does vital work. Her book throws into razor-sharp relief the intricate lattice of social and sexual codes that ensnares consciousness, which covertly determines the way that we behave, and into which we have been interpellated as subjects.
Put it this way – surrounded by the frowning, conservatively-dressed men and women of London, which chapter of Joyce’s work should I crack open: “Fingerlube” or “Child Killer”? In fact, I settle for a section called “Coat Hanger,” (subtitled “This may be used when a girl gives false urine for her daily sample”) and I immediately imagine the mother of a cute baby across the way eying me with suspicion. Then I flip to a section called “Masturbation” (“Following fasting, you may masturbate for two hours continuously…”) and as I do I think I see a laborer to my left raise a defensive eyebrow. One of my students sits down in the seat beside me and I quickly stash the book in my bag: trigger warning (TW) – The Luminol Reels contains passages like:
Not to say that this is the only thing Joyce’s beguiling little handbook of transgression has going for it – far from it. In fact, I’ll admit to being intimidated by the sheer sprawling menace of the work, and the way it willfully eludes any straightforward summary. Perhaps it will suffice to note that most of it seems to imply the notion of ritual – ritual mutilation, ritualistic horror presided over by initiates of a shadowy religious order – and that the eponymous luminol is a chemical sometimes used in crime scene investigation, glowing blue when it reacts with iron in the blood. So the brief, disturbing episodes that make up the work are framed from the outset as a mere trace of the horror that happened before the reader chanced upon the scene.
What exactly a “luminol reel” is changes throughout the work, but it sometimes denotes celluloid film stock upon which the details of a crime have maybe been recorded. Joyce’s sequence of cinematic chapters are presented as a mute, flickering montage that Blake Butler likens to “an alarm light throwing its glow over room after room, or stations in an exhibit of twisted murder scenes.”
In fact, The Luminol Reels’ closest contemporary is Butler’s 2009 paean to despair, Scorch Atlas, whose disconnected scenes of lathed horror set in some godforsaken elsewhere recall the more buoyant moments of Joyce’s work. There as here there is no love or joy or pity, and only an overriding sense of devastation joins the parts together. All that appears to proliferate is grief and putrescence. Spores, too. Indeed, the “off-green spores that blister into faint rings” in Atlanta-born Butler’s book seem to have been carried on a warm southern wind across the sea to Joyce’s native England, where they’ve become her “cardiac spores,” mysterious substances that when ingested bring on quasi-religious visions of luminol.
The spores that stick to The Luminol Reels could also have been blown in from Joyce’s 2012 debut, The Museum of Atheism, a Lynchian detective novel set in small town America, which is teeming with toadstools. At the top of each of the book’s chapters, Joyce names and describes varieties of fungus called things like Slime Cap, Destroying Angel, Disco Cup, Midnight Bolette; the inclusion of fungi invariably portending some dead matter that the reader unearths beneath. This is more than just a clever ploy that sets an unsettling tone, it also hints at Joyce’s take on writing in general, and encourages us to consider the parallels between the written text and the mushrooms it describes.
This is perhaps Joyce’s improvisation upon the deconstructionist adage that all writing is parasitical: for her, fiction writing may instead be fungal, nourished by the moldering work of dead and decaying authors, springing up threadlike and dangerous in the dark. Although both this and the deconstructionist procedure see reading and writing as a kind of vitalist ecosystem, Joyce’s work seems to linger longer upon the moment of decomposition – the transgressive moment that dawdles at the boundary between death and life. The opening of The Museum of Atheism, for instance, details the progressive disintegration of a rotting corpse, complete the “violet scum [that] bubbled out and formed a hard shimmering caul like blown glass.” With The Luminol Reels, Joyce once again pens a door to the depths that, creaking open, eerily lights a world of abject horror. To read it is to have its seeds take root in you. - Diarmuid Hester
Catholicism obviously, but especially rosaries and novenas: The exquisite sadism of rosary meditations have always interested me. The names of the prayer cycles are so rich and resonant: sorrowful, glorious, joyous, and luminous mysteries — full of agonies, scourging, and miracles to meditate upon. As a child I collected rosary beads: plastic, glow-in-the-dark, crystal, and kept them in secret places, to ward off danger. The structure of the rosary is a direct influence on the layout and tone of The Luminol Reels. Related interests include the game Bloody Mary shrines of any kind; crucifixion images; Catholic memorabilia; and gold robes, altar cloths, and tabernacle covers. All of these find their way into the text in one way or another.
Cunt Space is a corruption of Rem Koolhaas’s essay “Junk Space”. “Junk Space” is a major influence on the topography of The Luminol Reels — the tone of space as psychosis, art as horror, is something that came through from my reading of “Junk Space.” Cunt Space takes Koolhaas’s thesis and views it through the filter of the female body. The landscape of The Luminol Reels is cunt space, as articulated by Elfride Jelinek on Josef Fritzl, whose subterranean prison which was created for the abuse of his children. Jelinek states that Fritzl:
Constructed an idyll which he has artlessly built in the form of a female body, with its many niches and passages, where you can’t look in at everything from everywhere, it is not art to use something as the female body, even if you don’t have one, there are blow-up sex dolls, hollowed out apples, animals, etc., but it is an art to build spaces as a woman might, and decorate them with pretty patterns, a temple, only built for the lust of the father.
Related interests include: Extimacy “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside),” by My Bloody Valentine; Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll.
Excessive Female Voice is important to The Luminol Reels. This is perhaps most easily represented through vocal expression, and many of my favourite female artists are those who use their voices in unpretty, unharmonious ways. “Portrait of Linda in Three Colours, All Black” is one of the best examples of this. On this record by Sonny and Linda Sharrock, Linda begins singing melodically and ends the track by screaming in an excessive, but precisely controlled way. Tanya Tagaq’s vocalization is rooted in Inuit throat singing and is absolutely electrifying. Pharmakon has live sets of exactly 20 minutes. Her screams are intensified and looped and yet she has absolute control over her sound and her physicality. Related interests include Diamanda Galas; PJ Harvey; Hole; Riot Grrrl.
Found or Repurposed Material makes its way into the book. I’ve taken material from scientific journals, religious pamphlets, etc. The artwork includes found photographs that have been treated and repurposed. Examples of repurposed, collaged, remade, and found material that I have loved include Sara Tuss Efrik’s Persona Peep Show, Tytti Heikennen’s Fatty XL, The Atrocity Exhibition, found footage cinema. - Laura Ellen Joyce
But there’s something happening here that’s more than
just a gross-out or brutalizing: Laura Ellen Joyce is trying to get the
reader somewhere: we start at “Mothering,” in which the blood and
ruptures of flesh are already (of course) present and we end on
“Revelation,” which is as follows:
Oxidation of luminol is attended by a striking emission of blue-green
light. An alkaline solution of the compound is allowed to reac with a
muxture of hydrogen peroxide and potassium ferricyanide. The dianion (5)
is oxidized to the triplet excited state (two unpaired electrons of
like spin) (6) of the amino phthalate ion (Scheme 2). This slowly
undergoes intersystem crossing to the singlet excited state (two
unpaired electrons of opposite spin) (7), which decays to the ground
state ion (8) with the emission of one quantum of light (a photon) per
molecule.
Is it already obvious that the back of the book’s got an
image of the Shroud of Turin? Or that the first-person-plural that feels
weirdly exclusive at book’s start by the thing’s end feels radically,
harrowingly inclusive? That the book reads like an assortment of the
atrocities we visit on each other and that, because of the causelessness of the book—these things just happen,
a priori, idiopathically, right from the book’s first entry—you’re left
at book’s end suffering a raft of questions as applicable to your
extra-book existence as they are to the text you’re just leaving?
This should all be obvious. - Weston Cutter
The book is divided up into the ten types of traumas it relates, a Dante-like relation of the rings of pain: Agonies, Martyrs, Murderers, Porno, Rituals, Bodies, Virgins, Sacrificial Laws, Saints, and, finally, Luminol. Each section contains a handful of one- or two-page texts, somewhat like specimen slides, describing sick little short films that each provides an eye into a hellish scene or mind. “Mass Burial,” for instance, reads:
The smell is rotten in the desert. Putrefaction is scrambled in the heat. Some of the girls lie with their faces missing, brains leaking from the dead zone, but with their right arms or feet still covered in creamy flesh.
Relief can be gained by visiting the mass grave. Run your fingers through their hair and breathe in their sharp violent scents. Lie on top of them, rolling your heavy body over theirs, catching blue-black hair in your teeth and tasting their sweet perspiration where it collects underneath the fester and damp of their corpses.
There is little hope here, and even less relenting. Joyce’s hand is as unflinching in its force as any of the deathly actions rendered to the bodies on any page, almost like an alarm light throwing its glow over room after room, or stations in an exhibit of twisted murder scenes. Each leg is mercifully brief, landing its blow and moving into the next.
Like its namesake, The Luminol Reels coats the floor of every surface it presents with a stain that won’t be easily forgotten. - Blake Butler
I read a lot of fiction that sometimes goes by the unhelpful label of transgressive writing, a term initially coined by Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt back in 1993 to describe the work of people like Kathy Acker, Mary Gaitskill, Bret Easton Ellis, and of course Dennis Cooper. These writers portrayed in sticky, stinky, and to my mind magnificent detail, scenes of brutal and often sexualized horror; for Silverblatt it was as if the Marquis de Sade had stopped by an American orgy and ended up choreographing the bloody thing.
Transgressive writing, like every other genre, pigeonholes the work it describes and limits its potential audience, but I don’t blame Silverblatt for coming up with it: part of a critic’s work is to file the inconvenient burrs off a piece of writing, make it agree to a greater or lesser extent with other writers, and fit it into a genre that a reader can readily understand. I get that. And it’s not bad as genres go: better than the fatuous “new sincerity” but maybe not as good as “alt-lit,” whose inadvertent evocation of .alt in its description of a bunch of young writers who can’t remember dial-up has always tickled me.
Plus, in the basic sense of constituting an offence against certain laws, spoken and unspoken, there is something transgressive about this writing. A hot kid taking a dump into his adult lover’s hand in Cooper’s Closer; a girl lusting after her father in Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School; Patrick Bateman’s laudatory appraisals of Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News in Ellis’ American Psycho: these works pit themselves against everything the reader thinks is right and true, forcing them to reflect on their unconscious adoption of social codes and demanding the reevaluation of normative assumptions about art and sex and the Oedipal family.
But one of the things about transgression is that the boundaries keep moving about. This was Bataille’s lovely maze-like logic: once whatever it is that is transgressive is codified and drawn into the realm of the understood as transgression, it ceases to be truly transgressive. Transgression is in the crossing-over, not in the being-beyond, and for Bataille, fellow traveler of a number of clandestine societies, it’s often better done in secret. Similarly, as soon as it is defined as such, transgressive writing loses its original punk frisson and becomes bounded by its own codes and exceptions; like punk rock, it becomes accepted and normalized.
So the thinking goes. Yet reading through Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels on the Tube recently, it was immediately apparent to me that although transgressive writing may be dead as a genre (hey, it’s as easily murdered by a critic as it is conceived by one), writing such as hers that errs on the side of transgression still does vital work. Her book throws into razor-sharp relief the intricate lattice of social and sexual codes that ensnares consciousness, which covertly determines the way that we behave, and into which we have been interpellated as subjects.
Put it this way – surrounded by the frowning, conservatively-dressed men and women of London, which chapter of Joyce’s work should I crack open: “Fingerlube” or “Child Killer”? In fact, I settle for a section called “Coat Hanger,” (subtitled “This may be used when a girl gives false urine for her daily sample”) and I immediately imagine the mother of a cute baby across the way eying me with suspicion. Then I flip to a section called “Masturbation” (“Following fasting, you may masturbate for two hours continuously…”) and as I do I think I see a laborer to my left raise a defensive eyebrow. One of my students sits down in the seat beside me and I quickly stash the book in my bag: trigger warning (TW) – The Luminol Reels contains passages like:
PurificationIt’s like that scene in Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods when the film’s teenage protagonists suddenly realize they’ve been trapped by a giant invisible net. One of the kids jumps his motorcycle across this gaping chasm and just when you think he’s going to make it, PAF! he hits the net. Sparks fly and pulsating orange threads spread out from the point of impact, illuminating an immense web, apparently without beginning or end. So reading The Luminol Reels in public is a bit like that: PAF! the social web that surrounds you and conditions your behavior is suddenly, oppressively apparent. Except here you realize that in some ways you’re the source of that web; you’ve been complicit in its construction.
Take off your skin to the elbow to begin this reel
Rough hacking is effective, but for quicker results use domestic flesh stripper. Once the muscle plate is revealed, burn your number into it. Once you have been branded, take the flesh heap (if there is any remaining) and throw it down the kitchen chute.
Not to say that this is the only thing Joyce’s beguiling little handbook of transgression has going for it – far from it. In fact, I’ll admit to being intimidated by the sheer sprawling menace of the work, and the way it willfully eludes any straightforward summary. Perhaps it will suffice to note that most of it seems to imply the notion of ritual – ritual mutilation, ritualistic horror presided over by initiates of a shadowy religious order – and that the eponymous luminol is a chemical sometimes used in crime scene investigation, glowing blue when it reacts with iron in the blood. So the brief, disturbing episodes that make up the work are framed from the outset as a mere trace of the horror that happened before the reader chanced upon the scene.
What exactly a “luminol reel” is changes throughout the work, but it sometimes denotes celluloid film stock upon which the details of a crime have maybe been recorded. Joyce’s sequence of cinematic chapters are presented as a mute, flickering montage that Blake Butler likens to “an alarm light throwing its glow over room after room, or stations in an exhibit of twisted murder scenes.”
In fact, The Luminol Reels’ closest contemporary is Butler’s 2009 paean to despair, Scorch Atlas, whose disconnected scenes of lathed horror set in some godforsaken elsewhere recall the more buoyant moments of Joyce’s work. There as here there is no love or joy or pity, and only an overriding sense of devastation joins the parts together. All that appears to proliferate is grief and putrescence. Spores, too. Indeed, the “off-green spores that blister into faint rings” in Atlanta-born Butler’s book seem to have been carried on a warm southern wind across the sea to Joyce’s native England, where they’ve become her “cardiac spores,” mysterious substances that when ingested bring on quasi-religious visions of luminol.
The spores that stick to The Luminol Reels could also have been blown in from Joyce’s 2012 debut, The Museum of Atheism, a Lynchian detective novel set in small town America, which is teeming with toadstools. At the top of each of the book’s chapters, Joyce names and describes varieties of fungus called things like Slime Cap, Destroying Angel, Disco Cup, Midnight Bolette; the inclusion of fungi invariably portending some dead matter that the reader unearths beneath. This is more than just a clever ploy that sets an unsettling tone, it also hints at Joyce’s take on writing in general, and encourages us to consider the parallels between the written text and the mushrooms it describes.
This is perhaps Joyce’s improvisation upon the deconstructionist adage that all writing is parasitical: for her, fiction writing may instead be fungal, nourished by the moldering work of dead and decaying authors, springing up threadlike and dangerous in the dark. Although both this and the deconstructionist procedure see reading and writing as a kind of vitalist ecosystem, Joyce’s work seems to linger longer upon the moment of decomposition – the transgressive moment that dawdles at the boundary between death and life. The opening of The Museum of Atheism, for instance, details the progressive disintegration of a rotting corpse, complete the “violet scum [that] bubbled out and formed a hard shimmering caul like blown glass.” With The Luminol Reels, Joyce once again pens a door to the depths that, creaking open, eerily lights a world of abject horror. To read it is to have its seeds take root in you. - Diarmuid Hester
The Luminol Reels developed over the course of around three
years. It began as part of my doctoral research, and then took on a
shape of its own. Derek White’s artwork brought the book into being, and
created a visual dimension to the work. The Femicides of Ciudad Juarez
are the subject of this book, but I couldn’t represent those horrors
directly so I looked for other ways to approach the material. I have
been influenced by the following artworks, disasters, crimes, and myths
(in no particular order):
Greek tragedy is perfect. There is an excess of emotion, hysteria,
blood lust. But amongst this chaos there is control: Greek tragedy
follows a carefully observed set of literary conventions, and,
ultimately, these plays were created as a form of worship, as religious
observance. This controlled excess is something that The Luminol Reels attempts to emulate. The tragedies that most inspired this book are Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Electra, in both cases for the vengeful female protagonists. Related interests include: The Oresteia; The Bacchae; Antigone; The Virgin Suicides and tragic choruses.Catholicism obviously, but especially rosaries and novenas: The exquisite sadism of rosary meditations have always interested me. The names of the prayer cycles are so rich and resonant: sorrowful, glorious, joyous, and luminous mysteries — full of agonies, scourging, and miracles to meditate upon. As a child I collected rosary beads: plastic, glow-in-the-dark, crystal, and kept them in secret places, to ward off danger. The structure of the rosary is a direct influence on the layout and tone of The Luminol Reels. Related interests include the game Bloody Mary shrines of any kind; crucifixion images; Catholic memorabilia; and gold robes, altar cloths, and tabernacle covers. All of these find their way into the text in one way or another.
Cunt Space is a corruption of Rem Koolhaas’s essay “Junk Space”. “Junk Space” is a major influence on the topography of The Luminol Reels — the tone of space as psychosis, art as horror, is something that came through from my reading of “Junk Space.” Cunt Space takes Koolhaas’s thesis and views it through the filter of the female body. The landscape of The Luminol Reels is cunt space, as articulated by Elfride Jelinek on Josef Fritzl, whose subterranean prison which was created for the abuse of his children. Jelinek states that Fritzl:
Constructed an idyll which he has artlessly built in the form of a female body, with its many niches and passages, where you can’t look in at everything from everywhere, it is not art to use something as the female body, even if you don’t have one, there are blow-up sex dolls, hollowed out apples, animals, etc., but it is an art to build spaces as a woman might, and decorate them with pretty patterns, a temple, only built for the lust of the father.
Related interests include: Extimacy “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside),” by My Bloody Valentine; Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll.
Excessive Female Voice is important to The Luminol Reels. This is perhaps most easily represented through vocal expression, and many of my favourite female artists are those who use their voices in unpretty, unharmonious ways. “Portrait of Linda in Three Colours, All Black” is one of the best examples of this. On this record by Sonny and Linda Sharrock, Linda begins singing melodically and ends the track by screaming in an excessive, but precisely controlled way. Tanya Tagaq’s vocalization is rooted in Inuit throat singing and is absolutely electrifying. Pharmakon has live sets of exactly 20 minutes. Her screams are intensified and looped and yet she has absolute control over her sound and her physicality. Related interests include Diamanda Galas; PJ Harvey; Hole; Riot Grrrl.
Found or Repurposed Material makes its way into the book. I’ve taken material from scientific journals, religious pamphlets, etc. The artwork includes found photographs that have been treated and repurposed. Examples of repurposed, collaged, remade, and found material that I have loved include Sara Tuss Efrik’s Persona Peep Show, Tytti Heikennen’s Fatty XL, The Atrocity Exhibition, found footage cinema. - Laura Ellen Joyce
Saints by Laura Ellen Joyce {Click here for PDF version}
Bone Saint
There is nothing left of her. She sways in the wind. Her platform is a meatheap—the slough and offcut of her flagellations lay in thick layers on the wood.
The shucking knife is in her waistband. She feels every scrape of it against her bare belly. A neon thrill goes through her as metal licks flesh.
She raises her eyes to the virgin and blue light rainsdown. She is luminol pretty. Her scabs become a lace of glitter. The untouched pattycake, piped in yellow roses for her birthday, melts in the sun and she smiles.
Metal Saint
The first time you watch this reel, do it with a blindfold.
Slowly lift the silk from your eyes and let the sharpness come into focus. Unless you want an iron shock—in that case pin open your eyes and let it flood you.
There are one hundred precious metals in this reel. They have been slaughter mined.
Flash Saint
This reel has been sealed in plastic and buried in the blue sand. When you open it, do it with tact—there is a gelignite sanction internally. Touch it once and the saint will appear, or you may touch it a hundred times and nothing happens except the flesh burns from your fingers.
The explosives are tiny crystals of light—afterbirth, coeliac and winedark.
Once you release the saint from this reel he will be thick upon you. He will mist you in ghoul smoke. He will suck.
If you see his face, you are ended. It is the face of the bad man.
Jewel Saint
If you use the oven terminally, you become a jewel saint.
This reel is a compilation of all the gassings. The oven is wiped clean, silver. Stop motion poisons leak from it.
If you look deep into the mouth of the oven, you can see death, the apocalypse, violence.
You can be in the metal tunnel.
Throw the following items into the flames: water, glitter, foil, food.
The flames will change colour and sputter.
Blow out the flames on your sweet sixteen and lie down.
PORNO (from THE LUMINOL REELS)
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