Terminal Park by Gary J. Shipley

Review by S. D. Stewart

In Terminal Park, Gary J. Shipley takes overpopulation as a starting point to an even greater abomination—the ‘fissioning’ of the human form, whereby humans spontaneously ‘split’ into multiples of themselves. Shipley’s vision is informed in part by Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’ where we reject the repressed part of ourselves perceived as Other—casting it out as something that then exists separate and disturbing in the liminal space around us. In Shipley’s nightmarish world, ‘splitting’ is an extreme physical manifestation of abjection—the repulsive within is actually ourselves—resulting in a human population literally drowning in copies of itself.

There are parallel storylines operating here. As he waits out the rising tide of writhing, self-cannibalizing humanity from the heights of his illegally obtained tower apartment in Mumbai, Shipley’s protagonist Kaal begins watching a video filmed by a guerilla artist (NB) who has squatted in Cornelia Parker’s (irl) art installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) on top of the Met in NYC. In the course of his obsessive filming of his surroundings, NB observes a number of disturbing violent acts in the city below. This leads to a gradated series of startling realizations and revelations on the parts of both NB and Kaal, whose experiences begin twinning in an alarming way.

I wasn’t quite sure what a truly post-Ballardian apocalyptic novel would look like, but I think this must be one. As a start, imagine High-Rise but even bleaker and stripped of Ballard’s concessions to literary convention. Shipley understands there is no point to dressing up a horrorscape of these monstrous proportions with potential love interests and the banality of irrelevant expository details. Instead he bolsters his apocalypse with a philosophical underpinning that accentuates rather than distracts from the devastation, even as the novel attempts to explicate and enter into dialogue with what is happening and with certain cultural totems (Psycho, in particular) possibly pointing toward its inevitability. With eyes open wide enough you will see the searing possibilities ahead.

Humans ran and ran until there wasn’t room to run, till the gasses of the dead pinched at their lungs, till the planet was an open grave, and its topographies precluded anything but staggering or crawling.