Stories Within Stories

[you]

David Keenan - Monument Maker is full of nested, buried stories that also comment and reflect on each other. In fact he’s in the process of creating this whole Keenan universe where characters re-occur in other novels. I think he’s out there like Alan Moore on a psychedelic quest.

This Is Memorial Device is chock full of stories within stories, all 2nd or 3rd hand rumour, legend and hearsay.

 

[catalog]

I read both memorial device and good times but stopped there, had enough of him, I think he's a twat

 

[catalog]

I think he's playing a trick and once you work the trick out he's annoying.

 

[catalog]

I did really like the very end of memorial device, the big when he's in the flat in Paris. But there's something about him that I can't quite put my finger on, but I ve had enough of him

 

[IdleRich]

I think he's playing a trick and once you work the trick out he's annoying.

I hate it when you figure out someone you like.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I wonder if any story has more nested layers than 'The Call of Cthulhu'?

I think I've answered my own question.

Charlie Cook's Favourite Book, by Julia Donaldson, which carries on for a further eight iterations after that. The last of these is a book about Charlie Cook, in a feat of metafictional gymnastics that would have impressed Flann O'Brien.

 

[WashYourHands]

Do you ever think Mr Benn had a partner who started getting the hump? “Enough with the going out to be a story within a life which is fictional anyway love, the hoover is waiting DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

Mr Benn looks at the hoover, the hoover looks back at Mr Benn and announces “for the record, when you’re out my various proboscises are saving your marriage mate”

Possible revised Mr Benn inter-narrative themes -

• Mr Benn loses everything in FTX collapse

• Mr Benn trips over the storefront doorway and waits 44 hours for an ambulance while said storekeeper covers him in past attire to keep warm (nod to cognoscenti) and a further 24 hours in A&E for an x-ray

• Mr Benn gets a Covid booster and faints

• Mr Benn meets HmmGuv on the way to the shops and falls into a w.r.t. wormhole about stolen electins and clotshots

• Mr Benn in a costume made entirely of recycled ppe

• Mr Benn can’t afford to put the radiator on at home so lurks in the store trying to stay warm, embittering his old friend the owner

• Mr Benn goes whoring across the Baltic states for MI6 while detonating underwater gas pipelines

• Mr Benn volunteers to fight in Ukraine

• Mr/Mrs Benn shifts into non-binary gender roles, explores luxury chiffon dresses lost in a world of haute couture, which his partner subsequently steals in their divorce