Citadel
A Reading from Citadel at Village Books on October 13th
Join me and a crowd of Red Wheelbarrow Writers at Village Books in Bellingham for a reading from Citadel
https://www.villagebooks.com/event/litlive-jack-remick-101318
Update on Literary Events
I am now reviewing for the New York Journal of Books. Upcoming is a review of Don’t Hide The Madness a Burroughs/Ginsberg conversation which is slated to publish in October 2018.
Eleanor Parker Sapia, author of A Decent Woman, reviewed Citadel here. Very happy to have this succinct and insightful review. The final words: “The character Trisha says it best: when you finish this novel, you won’t be the same person who started it. And that’s a good thing. Let the discussions begin.”
Citadel is available at Couth Buzzard Books, 8310 Greenwood Avenue, Seattle. Thanks to Theo Dzielak owner, poet, friend of the printed word.
Cassandra Flatt Disney worked up an outré apocalyptic-looking-sounding video trailer for Citadel. Posted on Youtube.
The feature on Citadel is now in eYs magazine. This is a new, Sydney, Australia print/emag publication under the guidance of the talented and dynamic Jasmina Siderovski.
Publication of Citadel
Publication of Citadel, the Novel
Citadel my new novel, is now in print.
Novelist Nicole Disney wrote this—
Citadel is a much needed, unforgiving and unapologetic evisceration of the idea of female inferiority that we have primitively accepted today and throughout history. Remick never shies away from the atrocious acts of violence against women. Citadel is an honest, sometimes savage look at the relationship between men and women, and what the world could be like if women were in control. (Author of Hers to Protect; Dissonance in A Minor)
Evolutionary biologist Irven DeVore tells us that “Males are a breeding experiment run by females.”
What if, in fact, women ran everything? Citadel is a metafictional, apocalyptic story braided into a contemporary post-lesbian novel built on the science of genetics. In Citadel , we see a world where women don’t need men at all.
Each day, the news gives us images and stories of efforts to push back all the progress women have made in the last century. Citadel will be a feature article in the July issue of an Australian publication—eYs (http://www.eysmag.com). Publisher Jasmina Siderovski asked me what I hoped to achieve for the readers with Citadel. My answer:
It’s my hope that, by fearlessly bringing the substance of this novel to the forefront, without ascribing any blame, I have written a morality tale. I hope that Citadel will support women as they continue to resist and say “No More Killing. No More Victims.” Those words drive Citadel and I hope they become a mantra for modern women living in the Niche**.
** From Citadel, the Niche:
“Western women are in the Niche, Rose. We’re pretty little madonnas living in a pretty little Niche. We have a tiny window of freedom. It’s barely two hundred years wide and we think it will go on forever. You’re educated. You have a career. You have clients. You’re independent. You control your money. You own property. You vote. You’re free. Two hundred years ago, you couldn’t have any of that. And now they’re taking it away from you one piece at a time.”
Jac Seery, designer of the cover for Citadel, wrote this after reading the novel:
I feel enlightened–as a woman–ironic to have misdeeds against my gender pointed out by a man.
I feel changed—the way a great journey changes you.
I feel empowered by the reading.
I feel cheated by society.
I feel hungry for all of Citadel, the novel inside the novel.
Ask your bookstore to get you a copy of Citadel from Ingram (available in July). Or you can order directly from Amazon now.
Citadel
Final Scene from Citadel– Bru Discovers C-1
BRU
From the crest of the fossilized sand dune, Bru looked out on the wide desert plain. Wind whispered a gritty rattle as it shushed in her hair. She scanned the desert through binoculars— a tower, a wall circling the tower, vehicles, dozens of them. She stowed the binoculars, set the recorder, opened the scanner then worked her way down the dune. The slope was steep, the rock hot and gritty. Several times, she slid, but righted herself. The only sound the scraping of her boots.
Heading across the plain, she stopped to scan the rusting, rotting vehicles, not surprised to find bones in them, bones in ragged black or sun-bleached uniforms, cracked sun-eaten boots. As she walked, the scanner chimed as it catalogued the bones, dated the age and size of the remains, and counted the equipment. Pushing on into the sun, she came to a stack of skulls. She knelt. She found a hole in the forehead of each skull. Legend said that at C-1, there was a daughter who had six hundred kills, all of them shots to the head. But Bru saw no horse bones. Kaavi had written that there were bones of horses at Foundation, but she saw none. Perhaps Kaavi had made a mistake. Bru closed on the wall that loomed up like a rusted red shield.
A structure of welded metal. Leading up to the wall there were killing channels, machines of all kinds strapped together with rusting steel bands. The channels narrowed into kill boxes as they approached the wall where firing slots ranged. And in the kill boxes, the carnage had been catastrophic. She remembered the text written four hundred years before – The Solerian stands in the center of the Citadel like a spindle in the nucleus of a cell. The Founder had written it down and from the writing came the structure of all Citadels.
The walk was slow and hot as she circled the walls. She counted as she paced—one hundred, two hundred, three hundred units. To her left, the sun now behind her, she saw the gate and at the gate thick piles of machines rusting. Entering the kill box, she threaded her way through matériel and skeletons to the gate where she stopped. The gate, a massive barrier of steel plating, still pocked with the black residue of explosions, was shielded by sharp-pointed spiles driven into the ground and anchored in concrete to create a hedgehog. She entered the gate. Inside she saw the tower tilting to one side. The steel latticework had not yet decayed. Around the footings of the tower there were stacks of bones and weapons. She examined the skulls. From the angle of the holes in the skulls, she judged that gunfire had slanted down on the attackers.
She left the tower and approached the buildings—thick concrete blocks—no doors, all blown open, hinges ripped like paper, and she held up. A half-destroyed sign over the entrance, in faded black lettering, read Dese R se Mote . Her heart beat faster. Was she the first daughter to see the mythical C-1. Was this the beginning of time? Her hands were clammy, sweat soaked her jerkin and rolled down her sides. And she then entered the ruin.
It was primitive—wood chairs, a long wide bar, a broken mirror. In the mirror, she saw herself in her transformed body—heavy shoulders, thin waist, long hair the color of rusted steel. Her arms were thick and muscular. Her beard trained down her chest. She was shocked. The transformation had taken two months. The genetic knock-ins had made her sick, the facial hair turned her into an animal. She had not looked at herself in a year and a half. She turned away from the mirror. Her scanner chimed. Body count—ten thousand Exos. She scrolled through the inventory—a thousand daughters. At Foundation, in C-1, one thousand daughters stood off ten thousand Exos for a year. This was C-1. She squatted and ran her fingers through the dust on the floor. If the Founders died there, there would be DNA.
She reset the scanner. She drew the device from her pocket and clicked talk. The first words she had spoken since she left the team in the dry lake bed came as a rough croak in a dry throat.
“It’s here.”
The Ending of Citadel Reading
The Opening of “Citadel”
As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a sense of dread. I dream, and when I wake, I am sure it will be the day the world ends. Rose, my therapist, tells me more of her clients have apocalyptic dreams like mine. She doesn’t know what it means.Yesterday at the beach as I watched the beach meat in their combat ritual, I had one of my visions of annihilation. There were four of them. Their sandy bodies glistened. Muscle and sweaty flesh silhouetted in an exploding sunset ripe with blood. Their overhand smashes and digs were laced with grunts and howls and the wail of loss. I imagined them still grinding one another to dust in the chaos of extinction. The shaven-headed one, the tall, muscular and vicious one spiked a set-up and the volleyball blasted his opponent in the face and he went down—on his back, on the sand. Bleeding. The fallen enemy crawled off the pitch, his shamed partner beside him.