SILICONE GOD

A Novel by VICTORIA BROOKS [HOV039]

Shae wants to stop shagging the husbands of other women and be a proper queer. Plus, she’s bored of only ever getting to use her new strap-on on a pile of cushions. The answer seems simple: come out, go out, and finally get it on with the fit bird at dyke night. Even better if Evaline, a wayward silicone mistress from the future, wasn’t so jealous. A surreal, dirty little book that falls somewhere between Derek McCormack, Kathy Acker, David Cronenberg, and the tentacle porn you “accidentally downloaded,” Silicone God is a heartbreakingly horny lesbian-body-horror sex romp—not for the squeamish!

“...a Cronenbergian tenderness to the boundaries of queerness, forcing us to confront the social mores of monogamy, infidelity, and what it means to plumb the depths of taboo when you’re still discovering who you are and what you want from the world.”—ELLE NASH, author of Deliver Me

Amazon | Asterism

An Introduction by JACK SKELLEY

The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish. — Terence McKenna

The God and Silicone of Silicone God are not far, far away in time or space. All the nouns in the sentence you just read may manifest with immediacy in the world of words. They are conjured by a carnal imagination, embodied by desire and a horniness of mind for meaning.

The restlessness, the angsty-quest, that blasts narrative and characters beyond the bondage of genre and gender prove that these are artificial constructs, after all. The author knows—and the reader soon pretzels into knowing—that language begets all. By “deciding which false coherences I’ll accept,” as the author Victoria Brooks recently explained to me, behind her narrator, both shares and defies a world of imposed concepts usually confused with “normal reality.”

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. — William Blake

It takes a bombardment to the ego—via sex, desire, epiphany, substances, or other urgencies—to force an Armageddon right there on the page and in the psyche.

As the author also told me in an X-R-A-Y magazine exchange, “It’s all a mess: me, bodies, sexual orientation and gender. Sex. Time. I always feel like I’m fighting between letting the mess in and keeping it out. Choosing genres and drawing straight lines is hard because that mess is fucking fun. And when the mess is sex, it’s horny!”

This multiple boundary-blurring turns the mark-missing, ever sub-slicing categories of sci-fi, body horror, autofiction, alt-lit (ugh), queer writing, etc. into verbal shards that mirror the inadequacy of cultural terms such as LGBTQQIP2SAA etc. Those acronyms—“queer,” “questioning, “transgender”—survive most fertilely intact via the elastic and plastic (silicone) auras which still stretch the limits of meaning, even in earth-years. In this context, words are projection of desire and even grammar is emotive. 

Right now. That’s when everything happens. Or happened. Or will happen. All at once. For The Singularity—the point where all technology hyper-evolves to a point in mass/individual consciousness—is not an event in a historical period: It is forever present.

In Silicone God, that point is called TIME. It manifests in the characters of future Silicone/human/god hybrids (their bodies composed of THE NEW FLESH), while the NOW is “our” limited experience as fleshly humans, also known as THE ROTTEN. The author’s stand-in, SHAE, envisions the Singularity of TIME in passages that mix the cosmic with the tartly comic (and just plain freaky), sometimes echoing (to me) the deranged geography of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations: 

When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same colour as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes. 

Singularity is a term not employed in the novel. Perhaps because it’s not messy enough. But it equals (more or less) the novel’s SILICONE BECOMING.

This partly explains Silicone God’s portal shifts of temporal teases. With tentacle-tongue in cheek, Brooks’s book’s dramatis personae embody a menu of preposterous and sublimely amusing monstrosity. Personal apocalypse is a hot and horny bitch mistress from a “future” (teasingly aggregated into the figure of EVALINE), ever out-of-reach from a yearning ego-desire loosely reduced to a self-conscious, auto-fictionesque narrator named SHAE, which scrambles the (noted above) imposed and artificial concepts of “character” and “narrative.” Not to mention “gender.” And even “species.” Interrupting and disputing SHAE’s chronology directly on the page is NEZ, a divine transexual character (created by mushroom gods 3,000 years in the future).

Among them, a form of gender politics is at play. Males are backgrounded or perhaps subsumed into sometimes-competitive female psyches. And the carnally-charged friction between these characters pistons plot conflict, intermingling their voices, suggesting that, in TIME, they are components of one GOD—or GODDESS—psyche. Freud-style: Id, Ego, Superego. Or perhaps, more accurately free of lame Freudian baggage, as a comic and decidedly English contextualization of Hinduism’s Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

The above character/concept gloss is (by necessity) reductive. But to read this interaction on the pages of Silicone God is to feel it. Sometimes through laughter. Just as its characters “feel” more than “read” the bio-mech, shape-changing “capsule” books that populate the text. (SHAE is a would-be writer.) 

Networking such concepts is a web of messy evolution imagery. This includes mushrooms, plus cephalopods and their anime tentacle-porn appendages. If mushroom gods usher in the SILICONE BECOMING of TIME (allowing for the sexy apotheosis of EVALINEand NEZ, and, incipiently, SHAE) does their form signify the phallus? As with the living, twitching dildoes in multiple sex-scenes, the answer is yes. Except, like everything, the phallus mutates, often mid-coitus, to female organs, and mixtures betwixt:

My little suckers cupped her skin—the slimy hot and cold sensations made her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with so much blood that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came. 

The Hamletesque, self-doubting narration of SHAE jolts these freak shows with the frisson of lived experience. This is Silicone God’s twist on the (by now) depleted or (always) ill-defined genre of auto-fiction. Did these scenes “really” happen? I don’t mean, did SHAE’s legs really engorge into semi-autonomous octopus limbs, the better to pleasure her lover? But did the narrator want you to wonder if the author “really” was/is a multi-lover mistress gunning for full-on lesbo relations in a world of earthquaking gender norms? Or is the shifting of skin and sexes a metaphor for lovers deceiving their intendeds and themselves? For seduction? 

Brooks cagily demurs. She posited her theories of plastic narrative to me thusly: “My book gives dramatic colour to thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones!) are direct from experience. I’ve paired the very real with the outright unreal.” 

As for the fungal stuff, the sporing and spouting of mycelium mirror the out-of-control concepts/story, for sure. But consider the source of this here essay’s epigraph: Terence McKenna. The late science shaman of hallucinogens and imagination is famous for the hypothesis (outrageous but not disprovable) that psilocybin jump-started human evolution. That, as proto-humans faced extinction on the 1 million BCE plains of Africa, mushrooms popped up on beast dung and boosted mental and sexual alertness, as if bestowed by god-like aliens (spores can survive unlimited by time and space, after all), and ushering a Gaia-prone Golden Age before domineering “male” ego plunged us into the “history” of war, sexism and enslavement. Or were those gods actually us in the novel’s SILICONE BECOMING of TIME?

Brooks has made her share of psychedelic trips. (That’s a no-brainer!) But, while not negating McKenna-isms, the source of her imagery is rather the evolution and physicality of mushrooms themselves: “Mycelium underground networks have helped trees secretly communicate; even flirt with one another. And as a queer person who is also keen on activism, I adore this.”

And the symbolism of Silicone? It is the fleshly plastic technology that our species is only starting to actualize via AI, and via the bio-psychologically explosive concept of neurodivergence, and via the expanding bio-medical universe that—confirming the sexual impetus of all narrative, all art, all expression—advances everything from Hormone Replacement Therapy, to serotonin and dopamine infusion, to hawt boob, butt, lips, hips (and whatever) prosthetic implants… all helping to modify our species, our reality, into sublime apotheosis: What William Blake termed “The Human Form Divine.”

For the world is made of words. And technology, too, is—seen through the prism of Silicone Godand all visionary works—a prosthetic of human emotion and imagination.

-end-

JACK SKELLEY is the author of the novels The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023) and Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love (Far West Press, 2024). Jack’s psychedelic surf band, Lawndale, released two albums on SST Records, and has a new album, Twango.

Preface by VICTORIA BROOKS

I can’t keep reading this book. 

I can’t stop reading it.

If I keep reading, I’ll die.

If I don’t, I’ll die.

It glows like a wedding ring. 

The book lies in front of me. Part paper, part silicone. I hope this is the last time I ever have to see it, but I fear it won’t be. I also, secretly, fear it might. I feel the same way about the book as I do about my married lovers: hate/lust. But I must keep on going, keep on reading. 

The next husband, the next paragraph.

Read me, it whispers. All of me. Look at the band on my finger. I’m a husband who’s not yours. Yes. That’s what I want. More. Gimme more. An illicit fuck. Spread your legs. That pussy is dynamite. Fill me right up. This feels good. Good-bad. You’ve got magic—the kind my wife doesn’t have.Crack flooding my veins. Chocolate on my tongue. You’re not the kind of woman I’d ever marry. No holding hands in public. No staying the night. The dope is bleach. The choccy is vomit. But you understand me like she never could. Drip, drip—a little more of the good stuff. Hang on—you think my wife’s hot? Why are you not with her then? My skin’s starting to itch. I’m decomposing. Homewrecker. You’ve always been rotten.

I’m sitting opposite Evaline in her kitchen. In her big house by the sea. Evaline’s mostly silicone, an advanced future-being. And she’s from Time, which is the future, a world that has not-yet-become, from a world that will become. A future that’s been turned upside down by the women she hates the most. And I’m one of those women: a Mistress.

Evaline and I stare at one another. The blood in my knuckles pulses as I grip the chair. I shift my focus from her nose to her eyes, which are like a snake’s. Her skin is the whitest white. Tight with a plasticky sheen. And she has bright red lips. They’re flawless. It can’t be lipstick. The effect is creepy. Her hair is short and dry. I’m close enough to smell the faint staleness of too much coffee on her breath, and a note of biscuit. Just because you’re made of silicone doesn’t mean your breath won’t smell of what you’ve eaten. 

‘Read it, Shae. It’s for your own good. Don’t you want to get a wife of your own? A good woman instead of a bad man? Lick some pussy? Don’t you want to be a proper queer, instead of a married man’s bit on the side all your life? Flirting with straightness? Haunting the nuclear family like a ghost? Fucking people’s lives up?’ 

My arsehole tightens. I might shit myself again. 

I look down at a bruise on my arm. This one appeared after I read the first chapter of Evaline’s book. More came after the second, along with burning skin like I’d bathed in battery acid. My flat now stinks of mould. Everything is covered in the stuff and mushrooms sprout from any available crack. It hurts when I rub the bruise. 

I should clarify: Evaline is from the future, which she calls Time, but she can travel back in time to the present, which she calls The Now. Evaline also knows the absolute objective truth. Or so she says. Because in Time, you can re-live people’s stories. You can re-feel them through your own silicone flesh.

Lick some pussy, she says. Be a proper queer.

I don’t shit myself, but I still can’t speak. 

Evaline’s book is right about somethings. Like my relationship with wives. It’s complicated. When I was about twenty, I had an affair with my professor. His wife fingered me in the pub toilets while he waited for me at the bar. Paying for my overpriced beer and goujons.

Looking back, I think I’d rather she’d just slapped me like some of the other wives did. It wasn’t a tender fingering—it was brutal. A humiliation. A slap would’ve been easier to handle. 

I remember the silicone-woman-monster-thing sitting opposite me and hating the core of my being, which makes me a bit sick in the mouth. 

‘I really admire you, Shae.’ 

Evaline doesn’t admire me because she knows that admiration gets me excited. 

She brings her face closer. 

Is she going to kiss me? I’m prone to idolatry—even when my idol’s a bitch. A major downfall. I catch a waft of her cinnamon perfume. It doesn’t mask the smell of my sweat, which is made worse by my tight synthetic top. 

‘I just can’t.’ 

‘I think we both know you must.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Evaline—look at me. And I hardly sleep—the nightmares—the flies and the mould—my God, the mould. There’s a huge penis-shaped mushroom in my lounge—’ 

Which tastes sour. Like dirty cock. 

Trust me, I know. 

Evaline looks away, smiling to herself as if she’s thought of a joke. ‘You’re skinny,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you want to be more like the sixteen-year-old you? The eighteen-year-old you? The last twenty years has made you flabby. At least you’re skinny now, and you didn’t even have to diet.’

I stare at Evaline as she stands and then walks from the kitchen table towards the French doors. She looks at the statue of Venus, Goddess of Love, in the garden, and tries mimicking her pose. 

Her book is also wrong about some things. It’s causing the mould, the cock-shroom, and my body to fall apart. And she talks shit about me, which makes me doubt her. Ah, the power of the silicone. I fear the absolute truth of others’ stories has alluded even her. 

I look at a scar in the shape of an ear of wheat stretching across my palm. It’s been there, itching, along with the bruises, since I read Chapter One: Evaline’s version of The Story of Les.

I’d rather call it The Story of Kay. Kay is Les’s daughter. Evaline’s book never even mentions that time on the swings. But it happened, and I swear that Kay and I could’ve kissed.

I’m embarrassed when I remember Les. Anything but him—his crisp, coleslaw breath; his tongue slipping inside my much-too-small mouth—a tongue prising the shell away from the outer membrane of an egg while a blueish, angular embryo wriggles underneath, uncomfortable, fearful at being exposed to premature light. 

I must’ve been twelve when I first met Les. I didn’t become his mistress until I was sixteen. At least he waited until I was legal. Evaline’s book says that I liked his ‘grown-up’ attention as he looked me up and down. I guess she’s right. I remember the feeling as I drank in his compliments, and how his manly body felt. He was handsome in a scruffy dad way: shaggy hair and a wonky goatee. His shirts were usually stained with motorbike oil. He used to say how he liked that I was ‘smooth.’ I didn’t know what he meant. Smooth of movement, smooth of shape, or smooth of skin? Maybe smooth like a pearl, which is how I felt when he breathed heavily into my ear. ‘You’re so tight,’ he’d say, streaming with sweat. ‘You’re like a wet dream. I just can’t keep it in.’ His dick felt huge, though I was slight. He’d come quick. 

It reminded me of that Cat Stevens song with the same title. Dad would play it in the car. It would hum in my ears as I sat silently beside Les, who was wide-eyed and wired as he drove me home. I felt like I’d won. After fucking in the field, I really did feel like an erotic dream queen, servicing him well and quickly. He and I shared a dirty, deadly secret.

I was sure Kay sensed that something was wrong, but she never said anything. I fancied her real bad. Reading Evaline’s book reminded me how I sneaked glances at her when she was getting changed. How I wanked off thinking of her after meeting up with Les. Sometimes, when I was there, Les and Kay would play-fight on the sofa. He’d hold her down with his big hands, tickling her, and she’d kick her legs. It was like he was displaying her for me. I’d look up her mini skirt to try peeping her underwear. It was hot. 

Fucking him brought me closer to her. 

There was a look that she’d give her father—one of affection bordering on desire. I imagined the feeling bouncing off him and into me. Absorbing both her and the person she loved so much was almost better than just touching her. I was closer to him than she was. Would she be jealous? Also—and this is fucked up—there was his arse. Her arse. There was a similar pleasing meatiness to both. As I grabbed a handful and pulled him into me, it felt as though she came with him. I don’t know what feeds most people’s lack, but at sixteen I knew that I’d found my thing: married men. 

Evaline’s book said Kay thought I was ugly and thick, and not a true friend since I was always making eyes at boys she liked. After the affair was revealed—a friend of her mum’s saw us humping in the field—Kay despised me. It was all my fault. She was right. In her eyes, I was no longer a friend—simply a slut. I stole her mum’s husband. But the most hurtful thing? I stole their innocence—Kay and Les would never play-fight on the sofa again. I stole her father. All I was—all I am—is a whore, hungry for fucks with the best Dad-substitute I could find.

Yet, as I say, there are gaps. Evaline wrote this chapter as though there was nothing between me and Kay, like there was no tenderness. But there was that on the swings. Our mouths crackled with popping-candy as we swung wildly back and forth, never falling out of sync. We held each other’s gaze just as the sun set. We laughed as friends do, as we always did, but there was something else, something more. We fell silent. She licked her lips. My tummy fluttered and I looked away. 

Afterwards, when the affair came out, I realised that that was the last time I’d ever see Kay. I cried for days. But that wasn’t in the book either. 

Evaline tries again to mimic Venus, placing one arm behind her head. ‘If you think there’s something missing,’ she says, glancing provocatively over her shoulder to face me, ‘it’s because you’re remembering an event that doesn’t have any bearing on the trueshape of the story. Or you’ve remembered wrong. Don’t let yourself be swayed by unimportant things. Keep your eyes on the prize.’ 

But I’ve always had my eyes on the prize. Perhaps that’s always been the problem. I start doubting whether the moment on the swings ever happened. Maybe it was a dream. I look at Evaline more closely. One of her ears appears to be melting off her face.

VICTORIA BROOKS (they/she) is a writer interested in trauma, time travel, ethics, and trans-dimensional sexuality. They have published two non-fiction books, Mistress Ethics: On the Virtues of Sexual Kindness (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Fucking Law: The Search for Her Sexual Ethics (Zer0 Books, 2019). Silicone God (originally published in the UK by MOIST Books, 2023) is her debut novel.