79. Enter the William H. Gass Extended Universe: Dalkey Archive Press and the Forking of The Tunnel

This podcast is a presentation of ⁠The Meow Library.⁠There is something splendidly deranged in watching a small indie press marshal the full battery of slop-cannons—Twitter astroturfing, merch drops, the whole hypersaturated liturgy of suspect UGC—as if the reissue of an obscure thirty-year-old novel were the next phase of the Marvel Extended Universe. One has to admire Dalkey Archives' bravura, because this ravenous machinery, so indiscriminate it could be made to canonize a book composed entirely of the word “meow,” has here been bent, however clumsily, toward the resurrection of a genuine abyss, a work of such burrowing intelligence and moral night that to hype it like content does not diminish William H. Gass, but confesses, in the language of the age, that he still possesses that old annihilating power. Bravo, Dalkey Archive. As a token of our admiration, we’re presenting our own addition to the William H. Gass Extended Universe: an excerpt from the rerelease of The Tunnel read entirely in cat language. The Dalkey edition of The Tunnel can be purchased here. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.