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A review by screamdogreads
Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul
4.0
"The world should have been a void, a non-place where nothing ever happened, which gave shape to nothing. Maybe that is what it was, yet in our desperation, we were made to think it was not so, that the world was something other than a grand delusion."
Supplication is one of the most hallucinatory, vividly fever-dream like, fluid and bizarre of horror novels to exist. As a piece of text it's just rammed full of completely confusing metaphorical, poetic ramblings that make navigating the entire thing insanely difficult but utterly enjoyable. Being gifted the ability to experience Supplication is akin to being dosed on acid, and then being forced to wonder a darkened street at night, alone, only the street, it extends and extends and extends. It goes on forever. That's what reading Supplication is like. A never-ending nightmare. It's truly a novel like no other, and it's all very dreamlike, reminiscent of both obscure older black and white horror games, and the worst drug trip of your entire life. It's an entirely disorienting thing, designed to completely eviscerate readers. It's something so consuming, the only option is to drown in it.
There exist a lot of novels out there, that quite simply make their readers feel foolish. Supplication is one of those novels, it's an unending, rolling stream of consciousness, it's the most brutal of drug trips, it's an entirely too intense, unflinching and savage horror story. Supplication is almost indescribable, it's so damn beautiful and poetic and kaleidoscopic. There's a sadness here, a haunting, surreal and gorgeous sadness, it's one all too painful story of anguish and regret. No matter how vivid of a novel this is, it's something that readers will be forced to stumble through, it's a novel that you must soak up, that you must let devour you. It's an odyssey of a story, it's an event, something so enthralling and enrapturing, you'll be unable to peel your eyes from the page.
Supplication is one of the most hallucinatory, vividly fever-dream like, fluid and bizarre of horror novels to exist. As a piece of text it's just rammed full of completely confusing metaphorical, poetic ramblings that make navigating the entire thing insanely difficult but utterly enjoyable. Being gifted the ability to experience Supplication is akin to being dosed on acid, and then being forced to wonder a darkened street at night, alone, only the street, it extends and extends and extends. It goes on forever. That's what reading Supplication is like. A never-ending nightmare. It's truly a novel like no other, and it's all very dreamlike, reminiscent of both obscure older black and white horror games, and the worst drug trip of your entire life. It's an entirely disorienting thing, designed to completely eviscerate readers. It's something so consuming, the only option is to drown in it.
There exist a lot of novels out there, that quite simply make their readers feel foolish. Supplication is one of those novels, it's an unending, rolling stream of consciousness, it's the most brutal of drug trips, it's an entirely too intense, unflinching and savage horror story. Supplication is almost indescribable, it's so damn beautiful and poetic and kaleidoscopic. There's a sadness here, a haunting, surreal and gorgeous sadness, it's one all too painful story of anguish and regret. No matter how vivid of a novel this is, it's something that readers will be forced to stumble through, it's a novel that you must soak up, that you must let devour you. It's an odyssey of a story, it's an event, something so enthralling and enrapturing, you'll be unable to peel your eyes from the page.
"The hot black rubble of the road was sulphurous and fissured and I could pull it apart with my fingernails, I could turn my hands into spades and dig and dig but never, ever find any bottom to it, never find anything underneath other than more asphalt, endless, noxious and heat-packed all the way down to the core of the earth; and then I would find the core itself was just another impenetrable mass of petrol and waste, that its toxicity was what kept the earth around it belching, vibrating, alive."
Offering up a deeply profound and extremely ugly reflection upon alienation, grief, and the human condition, Supplication is one adventurous and very, very strange horror novel. There is some seriously brilliant storytelling displayed here, Supplication is one of the single most evocative and depressing novels around. Somehow it's both a tale of poignancy and comfort, it's a thing that sits right on the border of nightmare and reality. It defies all convention, refusing to bend and fold to any rules. A highly immersive experience, a novel one can lose themselves within, a delightful, weird, odd, beautiful story that raises more questions than answers - a divisive little thing, Supplication reads like a story penned by the Devil himself.
"As I stared at my dying body tied to the chair something in those life-losing eyes shifted, and they were no longer filled with love but with snarling hate, saliva dripping from the mouth, eyes two black holes that would swallow, that would consume. "