The Familiar, Volume 5: Redwood

When Persephone devoured the six seeds of the pomegranate, she banished herself to six months in the realm of Hades, and consequently the earth to six months of winter (& fall). The price we pay for the things we take may not come to bear until it’s too late to undo. In The Familiar series, up to this point, we’ve tracked nine stories that from the very outset promised us deep, mysterious connexion, despite how strange and disparate the characters in them seemed: a gang leader and his crew in LA, an Armenian cab driver, a mother and husband and their three children, a Singaporean struggling-to-recover addict and the mysterious old healer woman who seems to need him as much as he needs her, a Turkish homicide detective, a fugitive duo in possession of a technology powerful enough to cause paradigm shift in humanity, and an existential cartel hitman in Mexico. As the story has unfolded across these five books, we’ve made literal and glancing connexions. Teased with them across arcs. Characters bump into each other like celestial bodies in near-miss events—the direct impact would bear steeper significance, but the gravitational pull of their interactions (large and small) pull and drag the world around them. Reverberations cut across the globe like the tidal locking of the Earth and the Moon—each one’s gravity balancing the other’s trajectory. And at the center of the novel’s gravity are Xanther and the cat she saved (or the cat that chose her to save it[?]): the true story at the heart of the series, because it seems the cat is what kicks off these connexions and significances. The cat cast as the force of gravitational matter. Along the way, Mark Z. Danielewski has buttressed these books with an outpouring of world and character, myth and meaning, motif and symbolism, plot and strife. Each volume meted out with the grace of a slowly unfurling tapestry telling an age-old tale. In book five, we’re delighted with a grand-scale conclusion to what has been hyped as the “Season One Finale.” In The Familiar, Volume Five: Redwood, MZD delivers one of the most direct, action-thrust entries so far in the living novel. While this entry spans the course of less than 24 hours, the first half of the book adopts the Rashomon technique of story-telling, letting several overlapping characters fill in the hazy spots of the surreal and supernatural events unfurling. Meanwhile, the second half bears ripe rewards for readers searching for answers, which are buried in action. Where some of the book’s action takes the whole volume to unwind, other plotlines spiral and twirl, unveiling some of the darker secrets plaguing readers to this point. Secrets, though, each like a seed of the pomegranate, come with the burden of their yet-known price, doling out further unfurling mysteries ripe with the garnet juices dribbling down your chin. The pomegranate never sates, and where we pluck the kernels from its sweet chambers, a seemingly endless supply of pips comes unburied in the devouring. What does all this mean about Redwood? It is full of action. Full of answers to questions simmering these past 2.5 years since One Rainy Day in May saw the sun. But it’s now the questions of what those answers mean that we must wait to discover in book six. As answers spring forth, new questions and potential plot lines arise while much-anticipated interactions create new conflicts. And the way this book destroys certain barriers and formal elements in the previous four tomes makes clear that MZD has many more tricks up his sleeves. While Redwood may lack some of the more layered meanings and multifaceted applications of ancient mythology like Hades does, it has its wealth of jaw-dropping moments and mind-blowing revelations. Revelations in all senses of its meaning. Now I pay my time abiding the seeds I’ve eaten while I wait for Season Two to keep messing me up.

We now rejoin the greatest serial novel in history, already in progress. Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his revolutionary House of Leaves, a fever dream that resculpted, reimagined the very space (internal, universal) of prose. He pioneered his own version of the graphic novel, not as a literary comic book (though he's been pushing Lone Wolf and Cub on me for years), but as a canvas for the reorienting of words, punctuation, density, chaos and chasms: we sometimes see one word on a page, or like a flip-book the explosion of all possible thought, or a black hole of hyper-reality. Only Revolutions was a prose-poem road novel of eternal teen lovers, with circularity, endless return as its theme and palette. The weave of his ghost story, The 50-Year Sword was literally woven from yarn onto the page in its sword swaths, blood flow, star-tracks. The Familiar is his projected 27-volume novel of a young, gifted epileptic girl adopting a magic cat in the streets of Los Angeles. Again, MZD takes the very essence of the printed word, setting each character's narrative in their own font, the girl's parents' internal monologues as a series of eternally nested parentheses (his born of his programmers organized mentality, hers from her intuitive psycho-therapist-in-training internal delvings), matchbook-sized musings of a Mexican hitman (bringing to mind the poetry of Roberto Bolano), the checkered graphic of a taxi-driving duduk player, the noir musings of a retiring L.A.P.D. detective, dark and light armies of apocalyptic data mining, even interspersed narrative from omniscient Others. There are, too, collages and other Orb-view illustrations each with their fractally-intricate depth, each worthy of their own infinite delvings. And the writing, the insight, the humour, all that would be requisite for a 'normal' work of fantastic fiction is all there in abundance. I just finished Volume 5, Redwood. MZD refers to this volume as the end of Season One. At a, to some daunting, 830pp in length, one might be put off, but with the capacious arrangement of image and text, of simultaneity and synchronicity, just this one volume took me two tail-ends of evenings. Y'all got some catching up to do. Required reading.

This series is not one too pass on.....despite the “hault” on the series/project, I find I got so much out of it just within the first “season”. Even if it doesn’t go on, I was turned onto soooo many good artistes, poets, and authors I never heard of that are loosely tied into the story by the content/ themes they write about. These books could be read over and over and you would find more and more information embedded in the text, art, and layout, that all gives the unconscious mind clues to what is happening without actually stating it directly. I hope they continue the series but these books alone still hold up. The 5th book provides some closure but opens the door to so many more questions at the same time. Help support the little one!

I really have no idea why this series isn't more popular. I've never had such emotions from a book. And Redwood is perfect for S1 finale - it's full of action, full of unexpected turns, more than any previous volume. It's rare that I can't put a book away. This one I've read in one day, one ~12 hour sitting. The Familiar is the perfect modern novel - unique, fresh and so,so,so inventive in how it presents itself. Please, give this series a shot.

The season 1 finale will leave you breathless! Danielewski manages to create both a sense of closure and need for more at the same time in Redwood. Readers will not be disappointed in the last book (for now!) of The Familiar series. The universe created within these pages will stay with you long after you have closed the book, and you’ll likely find yourself reading them again and again, finding new threads each time. An incredibly worthy investment.

Some of the characters in this lengthy series meet at last. Others may be dead. And taken altogether, one wonders who is really on what side. Good, but loooonnnng.

MZD's use of font and arrangement throughout the series plays with his prose to create a fascinating yet familiar facsimile of the human experience. The mundane laced with the mystical, childhood wisdom clashing with adult anxiety...Redwood is a chilling continuation of the series...so flick the stones from your eyes and take a walk through this forest of mystery.

So I finished 'season one' of the Familiar, which I found very interesting, and enjoyable, but of course it being the first of a number of seasons, things weren't wrapped up, and I'm not sure he's going to continue. Oh well.

My copies cover was not glued properly

Obviously no-one would get this far if they didn't think it was worth 5 stars. Without giving too much away, you'll definitely get a lot more out of this volume if you've read House Of Leaves Seeing as this is the last volume of The Familiar Season One, in my opinion it really does resolve some of the plot threads, while also setting up stuff for the next volumes. Those two-page graphic sections in every volume suddenly have more context, and it looks like this might be the most important strand of the next season. (And also the short pieces at the start of each book). The only thing I didn't like was the reference to Trump becoming president, it seemed a little false in a book that's set in 2014. So although this is a 27-volume series, already there's enough progress that I think anyone unsure whether they wanted to commit to the whole series, would have grounds to start now.

This season's finale is as good as the first book. The novelty is gone but the characters come together - well, some of them - to bring us an exciting night. The book takes place over a single evening and night, starting at 4:38 pm and ending at 3:38 am. The Ibrahims are still wonderful to read about, and since Jingjing and Tian-Li have met up with them, their chapters contain more normal language than usual, hence making them more understandable. Luther is talking a more understandable form of English as well, yet with many Spanish phrases woven through, making his part of the book still difficult to grasp completely. Danielewski is kind of the David Lynch of literature, and this series also reminds me a lot of the "Homestuck" webcomic.