A REVIEW ON The Watchman Protocol

Mohsen Elbelasy

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Apr 10

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3–5 minutes

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The Watchman Protocol

A novel by RW Spryszak

published by Sulfur Editions

Long ago my mentor, Marjorie Peters, told me if I keep doing what I’m doing my work will find its audience. I’m grateful to her advice, and more grateful for the tiny but rabid band of fanatics who always pick up my writing whenever it comes out. I don’t usually go this way, but I’m kinda proud of this review from one of those people, and put it up here because not everybody here is on Goodreads. It’s from last year just after Sulfur Editions published the Watchman and it was just brought to my attention yesterday. Thanks, Nathaniel.

“Like Edju, The Watchman Protocol is an irreal clerico-catastrophist world, where thick ambiences warp all recognizable psychology and history. There are many offices to be filled, The Occupant, The Watchman, The Courier, The Seer. They provide a kind of divine machinery which humans, made of meat and guile, give material form. It’s a of course a very fallen, miserable form. Nobody likes it. Or understands it. Mystery is preserved for the sake of mystery, because without it what is there to live for? Yikes.

“This is what I’m looking for from a small press. The book design may not be as polished, the sentences may not be edited within an inch of their lives, but with Spryszak’s The Watchman Protocol in hand one feels they’re holding something raw and alive, something numinous, a dream scrawled right at the edge of the bed, before it can escape, while it’s still at its most weird and covered in dream dirt.

“Not to say Spryszak’s writing is vague or slapdash. Only a writer so precise could guide you through such aberrant peculiarities of logic and into this out of the way but very specific corner of the unconscious. The book is a balancing act of bleakness and farce. There are regularly scheduled amputations and casual beatings. Scullery maids fight to the death. Two priestly pooh-bahs spend an awful long time locked in a coal scuttle.

“We need more writers like Spryszak, writers who write whatever they damn well please, who risk alienating the more pampered reader (read: overly marketed to, their reading life too shaped by genre conventions, etc) in order to present a unique and maybe even sometimes difficult inner vision.”

lol… everybody always eventually gets to the “difficult” thing…

“The Watchman Protocol.”

by RW Spryszak

Published by Sulfur Editions

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 similarities 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

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“In the outlandish world of R.W. Spryszak’s holy The Watchman’s Protocol all 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 medieval times (“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). Lang’s Metropolis look almost like a gated community.”

Joel Allegretti, author of Our Dolphin and editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems

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“‘The Watchman Protocol’ is bewitching, as if dug up from some middling-earth of the Dark Ages, primal, brutal and yet somehow evocative of our strangest human compulsion for love, Spryszak once again tears at, and shreds conventional notions of narrative plot, intimate characterizations, and, in its deeper than dark premise, leaves us ambiguously leaning into a certain historic nostalgia for the mystery of circus, and the performers 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.”

____Amantine Brodeur. Butterfly in a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press)

Available NOW in Print & E-book!

Get your copy of “The Watchman Protocol” today:

Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Watchman-Protocol…/dp/B0F88NGTKK…

Barnes & Noble

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/…/the…/1147291112…

Apple books

https://books.apple.com/…/the-watchman…/id6745180413

Book 2 read

https://books2read.com/u/mK5eM9

kobo