Millennium, by Marty Phillips

Casualties of a flensed future, a zeitgeist ripped apart and gone mad.

I’m excited to be reviewing another book by Marty Phillips, who wrote Let Them Look West, an outstanding book that I reviewed some time ago. Millennium is a short story anthology, with themes of mortality, despair, and that there is still a measure of mystery and adventure in a world which has had its culture disemboweled in front of us for the last few decades. A bit of his inspiration from the introduction:

“The millennial generation has lived a tragic existence thus far. Theirs has not been a time of turmoil and conflict on a global scale as with prior generations, but like a dreamer experiencing a nightmare, they have watched massive changes overtake them with little control over the world they inherit. They are the children of September 11th, coming of age under an oppressive wave of alarmist and hyperreal media events as reality shifted beneath their feet in less dramatic but more insidious ways. The results have been massive shifts in racial demographics, economic decline, and institutional decay. They had one brief and fleeting glimpse of a much more decent country with semi-functional civics, a stabilizing White majority proud of their history, affordable housing, and a broad middle class.

…

This book was written for that tragic generation. Although comprised of four stories with different characters and settings, each is part of a singular arc forming the millennial bildungsroman. This is an anthological novel. Some stories are more fantastical and absurd than others, but my intent was to capture facets of the millennial White male experience and explore the harsh realities of a world that has been so spiritually and psychologically hostile to them.”

Marty really hits the mark in his stories. He opens up with Falwell, a story in which a man who jumps from the World Trade Center on 9/11 is intercepted by an angel. His fall is slowed to a crawl, but inevitable, and he has 5 days worth of time to go back and relive recent events, being forced to jump from the building at the same time as he originally did or face being stuck in limbo. He gathers information about the event right before it happens several times, in an effort to assist the angel who states that 9/11 is a physical manifestation of a war in Heaven.

“So, am I doomed to fall for days then?”

Glory jostled his head back and forth causing his blond curls to sway. “Sorry to tell you, Tom, but I can’t speed things up for you. I don’t control the future.”

“You can’t, you know, set me down on the ground?”

“Here’s the thing, Tom.” The angel’s voice was stern but not cruel. “I may seem like an easygoing guy, but I do possess divine intuition, and something tells me you jumped.”

“The fire was below me, Thomas insisted. “There was no way out. I-I was going to-”

“Did you jump, Tom?”

"Thomas let out a long sigh. “Yes.”

Glory nodded solemnly. “You chose to die. To take your life when death seems inevitable indicates a disbelief in the miraculous.”

“Well, I’m seeing the miraculous right now, and it’s not really helping my situation.”

“Tom, don’t make me regret giving you divine light. That’s the only reason you’re so calm right now.”

Marty does well with dialogue, the pacing and flow of his writing is great and one of the aspects of his writing that I really enjoy is a sort of comical relatability he lends to conversations between characters. It captures an aspect of absurdity at the situations he puts them in that is perhaps reminiscent of Discworld, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, or Flashman. It’s definitely one of his best qualities as a writer.

His second story, Holy Hunt, switches gears from the irony of Falwell to a psychological horror/adventure story. A young man drowning in college debt with no economic prospects after the 2008 crash takes off on a vagabond motorcycle cruise through central America. Foolish notions of American universalism taught to him in college get him kidnapped by cartels and used as a lab rat for psychadelics and other narcotics, breaking his mind utterly. He is rescued by chance when a Black Ops team raids the cartel bunker, only for the team to crash land on an uncharted island in the Caribbean. They become locked in an ageless cycle of barbaric sacrifice involving primitive peoples, foul magic, and an increasingly unhinged Sergeant who makes Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now look tame.

“He says that he is going to make you one of them officially,” Eduardo explained. “He is going to perform some kind of ceremony.”

“Endless rituals,” Jenkins muttered. “When will we finally be free of this nonsense?”

“Hold your tongue,” the sergeant barked over his shoulder. “Their customs are ours as long as we stay here.”

The chief turned and gave a command. Moments later, a woman led a young girl up from the back of the crowd. She had flowers in her hair like the older women. She looked very timid and would not meet the soldier’s eyes with her own. The chieftain explained something to the professor while gesturing to her.

Eduardo’s face went red, and he grew very flustered. He turned to the sergeant. “This is his niece who he is giving to you as a wife in order to bind you to them by family.”

The soldiers looked at one another unbcomfortably. It was Sabo who voiced their collective concern out loud.

“That girl can only be maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. She’s a child.”

Ashleigh turned to look at the medic with his eyes narrowed to slits. “What do you take me for, soldier?”

Sabo looked slightly relieved and let out a long breath. “I-I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

As the sergeant continued, the young man’s face once again twisted and then slackened first into a look of mental anguish and then bloodless shock.

“What do you know about absolute commitment? I mean, look at the way you squirm, you’re practically a civilian.” The last word came out of a lopsided grimace as though it were a grave insult. “If I told you about the things I had to do while embedded in Afghanistan, you would turn into a gibbering mental patient. There is no sin in service to the nation, nothing it cannot forgive.”

“But what of God?” Sabo pleaded. “God will judge you for this. Don’t do it, I’m begging of you.”

Ashleigh chuckled. “God will judge me? What God? The gods of this earth belong to the people, and each has its own domain. I have the favor of the only gods that matter.” He gestured to the natives. “Their gods rule this island.”

The Casper House is a horror story about a corporate drone who dreams of escaping the wage cage while building out dollar stores in rural towns on the California coast. There is a lot of ruminating about the way small towns away from the city are often cored out, and the youth leave, but the main arc of the story is the mysterious victorian fixer upper he purchases to renovate & flip before he leaves. What he thinks is the ticket to his first million he’ll ever make unravels a secret that threatens to drive him to madness.

The bottom floor wood planks were complete by this point. I had begun stripping wallpaper off the kitchen walls when I came across a symbol underneath the second layer. I scraped away the material frantically to reveal a large painted image of a scarab beetle with hieroglyphs written in a circular spiral around the outside. Aside from the voice itself, this was the most disturbing revelation, an absolute confirmation that the house was indeed a site for ritualistic activity of some kind. At that moment, I made the determination to take off the ear protection and listen to the voice. I sat in the empty space of the kitchen with a glass of brandy and waited. For a long time, nothing happened. Then, a strange vibrating sound began eking through the floor and walls of the house, a mournful noise that seemed only a faint wailing at first. I jumped to my feet, ready to bolt through the front door if need be. After a moment of hesitant listening, I could determine that it was the same voice as before singing words to a melody, a sad song formed with difficulty, as though it were a child approximating a song they had heard on the radio without understanding what it meant.

The singing voice trailed off in a final vibration through the house, and then, after a short pause, it asked again, “Hello? Please, help me.”

American Bastard is the final story of the anthology, about the wastrel son of a wealthy family. Estranged from his father, he took off and became a leftist activity, taking part in the 99’ WTO riots, Occupy Wall Street, and other causes. After being arrested he becomes cynical and decides to live in the woods and take mushrooms all day, but when his fathers body man shows up in the middle of the appalachian trail to retrieve him, the prodigal son returns home and his life takes on a drastic change..

“That green up there between those buildings is Central Park,” Terry explained. He then gestured to the right. “Stonebrook offices are south in lower Manhattan on Liberty Street, in the JP Morgan Chase Building. The plan is to move into the One World Trade Center once it’s completed.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” I said and spat off the balcony.' “Liberty Street in the financial district. Now if that isn’t a fucking irony, then I don’t know what is.”

Terry rolled his eyes but smiled. “Spitting off the balcony, huh? You’ll make the worst kind of New York elite yet. Which reminds me, we have business to discuss.”

The stories in Millennium feel like an anthology written by several talented yet different authors. Four vastly different plots, themes, and scenes, all of which are thoroughly enjoyable. I highly recommend it, and I can’t wait to read the next thing Marty writes.

Buy Millennium, by Marty Phillips, on Amazon