Immortality sucks
Synopsis
Our Own Unique Affliction is the story of Alice Ann, a dejected immortal who longs for her life in the sun. Navigating guilt, loss, family, meaning, murder, and all that comes with the curse of living forever.
An existential, bleak, quiet until it’s not, hallucination on duality, rife with fangs, empathy, blood, and grief.
Review
Our Own Unique Affliction, the first of Shortwave Press’s 2025 stable, is a novella that examines the centuries-old existentialist question of what is the point in living in a cruel world without meaning, but does it with fangs and blood and gore and grief and a bleak, dream-like style, balancing its initially desolate tone with unexpected and heroic heart. It’s not the first vampire tale to do so, and you might argue – well I certainly would, because it’s one of the reasons I love vampire stories so much – that this is the ultimate vampire theme. After all, how better to examine the utter pointlessness of life and the small snatches of warmth that might, just might, get us through it than with a being whose lifespan crosses centuries… with the long decades of grief and cold that come with that.
But oh man, although it might not be the first to examine vampires this way it can vividly stake a claim to being one of the very best.
The story centres on Alice Ann, a vampire who’s been getting through the centuries with her sister Hannah, not so much enjoying vampire life as tolerating it. There’s little more I can say without spoiling the plot, but I will add that there’s some interesting twists of vampire lore, particularly the hallucinatory dreamlike spiral that occurs when a vampire is starved of blood, and a very interesting outcome of humans taking in vampire blood.
But what I can’t say about plot I can definitely say about the themes and tone, because this is a bleak book—oh boy is it bleak—with one very, very important exception. Alice can never see the warmth of the sun, but can she seek warmth another way? Or are her centuries destined to be cold? If you’re like me and this is your vibe – think deep philosophising with an angsty emo edge to it – then this, as it was for me, will feel like a book written for you; a soul book. It won’t be for everyone, but that’s okay.
Sorry to get pretentious about this (too late) but the existential angst here, wrapped in Moses’ lyrical, potent, hard-hitting, astonishing prose, is perfect. Sisyphus is mentioned at one point, the figure from Greek myth condemned to roll a boulder up the hill in Tartarus only to have it roll back down every time he almost crested the top. The French philosopher Albert Camus used Sisyphus to explain how we could fight back again the meaningless of life – maybe Sisyphus’ fate wasn’t pointless? Maybe by Sisyphus enjoying such a pointless act despite its pointlessness, it took on a kind of rebellious meaning. Life is pointless – but look, still he rolls. Fuck you!
There’s a lot of that spirit of rebellion in this book, as Alice confronts her demons and the secret truth of her life and tries to not let it all drown her. Some people might find it all a bit too much. I wallowed in it, dined on it, like the central character feasts on her victims. It’s never done awkwardly. It’s poetic and tragic and shows that sometimes the best way to consume philosophy is through fiction. Maybe it’s the best book to show this that I’ve read in a long time. At one point one character says to another “Is this your way of an introduction? Drunk philosophising?” Well this book is the cold sober kind, and boy is it a hell of an introduction to Moses’ writing.
It’s also a book abut the responsibility of family, and the grief that’s accompanied by loving someone, and how that can almost kill you, and how it can save you, too. It’s in Moses’ examination of whether the warmth of someone close to you can save you from the cold of eternal life where his existential musings become a powerful emotional core of the story, pumping blood into its intellectual veins.
At the ending I cried, seeing Moses’ own way of solving the existentialist question. Were they sad or happy tears?
You’ll have to read it to find out.
This book is the search for meaning in a meaningless life, vampire style. It’s bleak and beautiful; brutal and life-affirming. I love this book – it was written for me, and those who get it will cherish it forever.
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