Soren Melville - It begins with Laura, a barren modern gothic, a vampire story without any vampires, a mystery of misdiagnoses and misgendering in the bleakness of polar night. It ends with Black Sands, a love story lost in time

Soren Melville, S/N/D, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017.


excerpt


Soren Melville’s debut is a novella and a novel. It begins with Laura, a barren modern gothic, a vampire story without any vampires, a mystery of misdiagnoses and misgendering in the bleakness of polar night. It ends with Black Sands, a love story lost in time between two people who keep dying and coming back to life. Together they are S/N/D, a world of gentle surrealism and emotional wastelands haunted by undeath and the ever returning tide.




“S/N/D is beautiful in its calm. Divvied up into two separate pieces the stories work together to harp upon similar themes. Longing is a prominent theme. The loss of a something pined for and never gotten hurts. People go through it all of the time no matter what the age or setting. Each story works hard to avoid any specific reference to time. Fragments of modernity come through (puffy jackets, glitter, and cars) yet these are mere adornments. Put into a vacuum the stories exist in another realm universe resembling a gentle surrealism.”—Beach Sloth


“Soren Melville is writer who is two writers writing two books that is also one book which is a cool, precise timelapse of death without dying, insanity without chaos, feasting without fuckery. Read it and touch yourself.”—Penny Goring