Book Reviews	Dreamworlds of Alabama by Allen Shelton by Laurence Shine

I brought a friend to Georgia to find the Cherokee Center of the Earth. We searched for an hour in the ruins of a Methodist camp meeting ground, and in a tangle of rose and kudzu we saw a metal pole with a small plaque in Cherokee and English that told us we’d found their omphalos. My friend looked at the desolation around us. “Even the ghosts have been erased.”

Not so. Someone in our neighborhood with the mind of a werewolf has been digging ghosts out of the Southern dirt, himself, and Benjamin, Proust, Marx, Kafka. I left Talking Leaves with the book that has a human pupa on the cover, an ominous preface, five translucent episodes, and a lush coda of notes. I read them all twice. I didn’t know until I began to read the book that there was anybody in these parts who could write prose this good. Is it a Southern thing—the gravedigging, the Bible, the pastoral Apocalypse?

This is no simple narrative. Shelton is a “monastic insect knight on the run”—a migrant professor trying “to reconstitute the very place he initially sought to escape” And it’s an “ensectuous” book written by a “gracehoper” (Finnegans Wake—another dreamworld). In a magically real way, Shelton, exoskeletalized by the demon of unbelief, renders in pentacostal tongues the phantasmal world of modernity in an eloquent, sinister, metamorphic and at times downright funny prose. You’ll find in this unique and genre-bending book a caduceus inside a pupa inside cotton bales inside trading ships inside oceanic distances inside old religions inside the Mystic Writing Pad inside the labyrinth of the universal commodity where the wounded hero meets the monster with a bow saw.

The voices in Dreamworlds of Alabama go with the territory like ghosts that haunt the abandoned dogtrots or they speak in the scar tissues that snake off Shelton’s body down Piedmont valleys into the woods where you dig up an old black toe and bring it home to your grandfather’s house and put it in a pot of simmering greens: “How the dead flavor the living’s world.” And then the dead come looking for the old black toe.

Shelton tells us that Max Weber was in Tonawanda in 1905, interviewing German laborers on the docks. Maybe in these parts Shelton can learn to hear the lone cry of the Northern Buffaloon whose habitat is all but erased. These things take time (“filling in the absence with a reverence of absence”). And digging (with a handheld Waterman tool into what Perec calls “the fabulous arborescence within”). And writing like this. It lasts a lifetime.