Karl Jensen

Reach: a Novella Karl Jensen

Horror as critical theory. Addiction as metaphor for terror. Loss of fulfilled living through a preoccupation with every normalized and unnatural perversion and pasttime. Set in a future that's as much a present, and where one drug or any drug, a diversion and any distraction and from one side of the innocent spectrum to the deadly and destructive and dark other has found a way to play such a role as to effect every living creature on the planet such that one-by-one they, (and we), are slowly disappearing from view. An evolution or change and new ability, inexplicable and especially by anyone who'd say they knew, humans now have found the high or most impressive and effective peak experience through what even a year previous would been laughed at as something that no person, even someone in the worst throes of addiction would resort to as a way to get a fix. An ultimate intoxication via self-ingestion, the supreme self harm and incredible low by way of literally and as-never-before-consuming oneself. Eating away potential not merely in terms of the lost "nights and days", but the necessary-thought-essentially-temporary self-sacrifice of pulling apart one's own skin, penetrating the flesh and all that's beneath and within. The safety one finds in a substance is what society even a hundred years from now apparently lacks (in abundance.)