David Kuhnlein probes the spiritual depths of future decay, where bodily mysteries are revealed in corruption. A shuttling narrative interweaves bruised characters, rife with celestial grit, placed within the rot of a bankrupt system. 'Die Closer to Me' speculates on condemned destiny, where damaged anatomies dream of a phantom satellite

 

David Kuhnlein, Die Closer To Me, Merigold

Independent, 2023

David Kuhnlein's debut novella-in-stories Die Closer to Me follows Jo as she cares for her mother on planet Süskind - Earth's failed disability experiment. Along the way we meet a suicidal construction worker, a waitress who secretly eats her tip money, a jaded poet, a militant monk named Bhikkhu Brendan Fraser, and a small blue hypnotist named Bath.

"Reading Die Closer to Me feels like it's story time on the Assisted Living planet they reserve for people who can't afford a fresh lobotomy, and the only books left in your language they've got on file after the fires are Samuel Delany and Unica Zürn. An endlessly twisted, linguistically wicked experience, distastefully primed to shank the Depends off Costco sci-fi. Suck it up, Pops-Kuhnlein slays."-BLAKE BUTLER

"Kuhnlein probes the spiritual depths of future decay, where bodily mysteries are revealed in corruption. A shuttling narrative interweaves bruised characters, rife with celestial grit, placed within the rot of a bankrupt system. Die Closer to Me speculates on condemned destiny, where damaged anatomies dream of a phantom satellite. Writing that pulses with brooding prevision."-REBECCA GRANSDEN

"Hard sci-fi returns to form, The Cube Root of Uncertainty modded by Miguel de Unamuno and Leonid Andreyev, the family nest born out the wrong end, a unit that ate its bodycam live from hell on primetime bacchanal."-SEAN KILPATRICK

"Divided into 13 sections and densely written, David Kuhnlein's Die Closer to Me mesmerizes us with his intergalactic erudition and medical religion of life beyond space and beyond clinical advancements and experiments. His intelligent worlds are morphically entrancing, lavishly and unrestrainedly depicted, and medically intricate. It's a super-exciting, unforgettable book. The kind that you return for immediate delirium and savor."-VI KHI NAO

"Handling warning!! No one can imitate him. Readers are only corroded by David Kuhnlein's silent insanity." - KENJI SIRATORI

Reading David Kuhnlein’s opening salvo in what will be known for its strangeness. David Lindsey the author of A Voyage to Arcturus once suggested that the leit-motif of all fantastic literature is its “strangeness”. Mark Fisher in his essay on The Weird and Eerie tells us,

“What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us”. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.”

This is the feeling I get in reading Kuhnelin’s short vignettes and stories, a sense of that fusion of Body Horror, SF, and the whole gamut of fantastic literature ala Stanislaw Lem and P.K. Dick among others. To say his vision is warped is not a demeaning term but rather the state of our world as it shifts into the posthuman realms of the Outside. An Outside that we do not so much know as feel our way into growing new sense organs that must combine with all the known and unknown aspects of organic, metal, and artificial experience and experiments. Throw such creatures as have moved off into this realm into a world for disability rejects and one is aware that survival is not only a mode of being but a mode of non-being as well. Is this hell? Depends on one’s viewpoint and mythologies. In the old monotheistic religion’s hell was a place of absolute pain and punishment, a torture chamber for the priestly class’s dark mendaciousness. In the secular world hell is other people (or creatures?) as Sartre would express it in his bland fashion. In the posthuman world hell may be just another mode of survival in a realm where even Freud’s ‘death drive’ no longer demarcates the limit and litmus test of our secret secretions.

This is David Kuhnlein’s dark fable of our dishumanization at the hands of our own transhumanist experience/experiments. The supposed future of our desperate dreams becomes a lonely planet of rejects who are stuffed away in a Real of absolute loss to fend for themselves the best they can. As one character says:

“Where there is meat,” Jo said, “there’s hope.”

- https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2023/09/19/die-closer-to-me-david-kuhnlein-and-the-dishuman-realms/

David Kuhnlein, Decay Never Came, Maximus

Books, 2023

"You are a shadow eroded by rock"

Decay Never Came is the debut chapbook by David Kuhnlein, a poet in tune with the beautiful underbelly of the world - its necroses, its splendid withering, its decay. This collection also features six original collages by Kuhnlein, inspired by scenes from Medieval paintings.