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The Watchman Protocol
Paperback
Publisher: Sulfur Editions
Published: Apr 28 2025
Pages: 210
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Watchman Protocol is an oneiric trip to an allegorical alternate universe filled with signs and prophecies. With an examination of the sacred, hierarchies, and death, the language is poetic and the similes heroic. Existential angst abounds as we follow archetypal characters in a stronghold of the mind. Replete with intrigue and vivid plotting, this narrative gives a new dimension to the word imaginative.
Larissa Shmailo, editor,
The Writing Resilience Anthology--
In the outlandish world of R.W. Spryszak's The Watchman Protocol, all holy books are man- made; amputations aren't a matter of medical judgment, but are required by law; and central characters are identified not by their given names, but by their official functions (e.g., the titular Watchman, the Seer, and the Courier). The author presents us with a sinister parallel world that at times comes across as futuristic (half the world was in a heroin stupor) and at times medieval (But he was mistaken, having forgotten about the red candles in the confessional upstairs). A hint of anxiety runs through Spryszak's sentences as they propel the characters toward fates that seem to have been predetermined by the human Masters (Why are these particular men the Masters? Because that's just who they are). The society described in The Watchman Protocol makes the society in Fritz Lang's Metropolis look almost like a gated community.
Joel Allegretti,
author of Our Dolphin and editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems
Brutal and yet somehow evocative of our strangest human compulsion for love, Spryszak once again tears at and shreds conventional notions of narrative plot, and intimate characterizations, and, in its deeper-than-dark premise, leaves us ambiguously leaning into a certain historical nostalgia for the mystery of circus performers, and the non-conformist art of the 17th-century burlesque, when mockery and ridicule were once the true oxygen of socio-political satire. A necessary dark tale for the darkness of our time. 'The Watchman Protocol' is bewitching, as if dug up from some middling-earth of the Dark Ages, primal,
Amantine Brodeur. Butterfly in a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press)
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