‘Til Throne or Less Outré by Joshua Nilles

                ‘Til Throne or Less Outré marks the return of Joshua Nilles. For too long I’ve seen his blog lay dormant, waiting in anticipation for its next resurrection and flurry of activity. Whatever the reason for the hiatus, it appears Joshua has taken a new approach to writing. In this book Joshua continues his fine use of language and sense of dread. No one would deny that. My shock is with the new found focus on dialogue, an opaque plot, and character development. 

                One of my favorite things about Joshua’s work has not been abandoned. I cover a great deal of writers on this blog. Joshua’s take on writing is doubly refreshing. Rarely do I get to see someone who possesses a sense of style completely removed from the incoming popularity contests. Wherever Joshua writes and whatever he reads, I’m very interested. The movement in the book itself is a large break from his previous collections of prose, though the attention to tiny detail (right down to the exact food and exact way of sitting) is still present. 

                I found the small pieces of blog mythology thrown it to be particularly interesting. Blog handles, emails, etc. are thrown in, ready for the reader to readily decipher. We’re even treated to characters like Holly or Syre.e, places like the Mercantile North. The characters may live a bit in shadows, in the night, suffering heavily from insomnia, like any good sympathetic character. Perhaps these characters are a bit flawed, a bit strange, but parts of this book rank among my favorite parts of Joshua’s work.

                Before this book Joshua’s previous work explored ideas with cut-up techniques and poetry. Those pieces of poetry (which Joshua continues to write) gave some indication of the moods explored in this book. With actual characters, complete with worries, paranoia, fears and horrible wretched situations the mood feels heavier. The mood is pitch-black, the sort of pitch black you encounter on a starless night in the middle of nowhere. 

                Nowhere is where most of the book takes place. I’m given the impression of some dirty, run-down, near-nothing town. The constant mentions of classic rock, late nights of nothing, and the slow grind remind me of a small city or town which exists only inside itself. Little gets through, and what does is heavily filtered and scrubbed clean of any potential geographic locale. I’m a bit in awe of this feeling, to create a timelessness and placeless location. It is pretty rare to create such a difficult, brooding place in a book but somehow Joshua has created this overwhelming effect. Even going through the dialogue you’re left trying to figure everything out. 

                I enjoyed this quite a bit. Joshua writes according to his own internalized system. This is a rare talent indeed. His ability to take aspects of his own online persona and interject them into the story gave it an additional layer of meaning for me. Perhaps this is the most brutally honest thing he’s ever written, now that he’s moved away from the cut-ups into an even more forceful, direct, and downright blunt language.