"Bombyonder is a book of beautiful ancestors, not least of which is Gertrude Stein. Tommy Zurhellen, author of Nazareth, North Dakota And did I mention the dragon? Reb Livingston’s new novel is completely unique and utterly satisfying. "I hope the world after the apocalypse looks a lot like Bombyonder: deliciously fragmented, breathtakingly poetic, and hellishly funny. Kim Gek Lin Short, author of China Cowboy We should all eat bombs and hack into our own Hera journeys.
Livingston’s unnamed protagonist-call her Psyche, Cogito, Dingbat, or even Carry-is endearing in her absurd quest for self-improvement. The prose products that singe this portrait of the psyche burning are tooled like circuitry on a dysfunctional motherboard. "Bomb-pills, birthed birds, and the scorched Jacob’s Ladder of a story-stoked neural brinkdom-Bombyonder is a gestalt of grim and Grimm. Honestly, I do not know how she survived the writing of it." Livingston has delivered a fabulous, mind bending book. The narrator tells us: Between a gauntlet of opposing dogs, she walked between two lines.This was her path. Leave your cardboard containers at the door. I came from a long line of fuses Livingston’s central character reports. Through the marvel of her language, the book becomes a shimmering whole a miracle met like the first mirror.Bombyonder transcends any sense of “experimentation,” and occupies, essentially, its own genre. Livingston devises a pulsing, haywire logic that somehow rivets the parts to each other and the reader to the page. But Bombyonder is not merely a scathing, slicingly funny assemblage.
When you reach for your seat belt, which you will, you will come up with Medusa’s snakes in your clenched hands. Butterworth, Home Depot, Rapunzel, Facebook, Leona Helmsley and countless others in a blur of narratives, dreams, texts and diary entries. You ride in a vehicle with a thousand gears, each ratcheting the velocity upward.
Bombs, masks, machinery, birds buried at the bottoms of women, emerge and recede in the blistering landscape. So begins Bombyonder, Reb Livingston’s blistering, kaleidoscopic, post-bomb-blast shrapnel-storm of a book. "Some kind of war happened at some time or another and continued for quite some time to come. Lady swallows a bomb in pill form (invented by her father), barfs up a dead bird and embarks on an excavation layered with murder, sexual politics, patriarchy, matricide and ancestral torment along with a parrot-faced cat girl, a boy on a donkey, a terrifyingly handsome lover/golem, an unconceived brother, a straight-texting friend who lives in a box inside a box and Medusa.
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