"A feat of fabulous creativity." --The Independent Book Review 

"A brilliantly imagined and transportive collection of surreal bedtime stories." -- Kirkus Reviews

“A physical wonder, gorgeously produced." —Ancillary Review of Books

The Villagers is a work of 37 fictions by Derek Owens, each inspired by a work of art by Caroline Golden. Published by Animal Heart Press, 2022. You can hear Caroline Golden and Derek Owens discuss the book on Radio Free Galisteo with John H. Shannon here, and also on the Beyond the Zero podcast here. To see more of the art in the book visit Caroline Golden’s website.

Awards

·       Shelf Unbound 2022 Best Indie Book, Notable Indie Award

·       One of the top ten “notable works” selected by the Ancillary Review of Books.

·       Finalist, Indie Book Award, Art Category, 2023

Reviews

“A writer conjures tales in response to an artist’s surreal images in this collaboration by Golden and Owens. A girl who was born mid-flight—not on a plane, but to a winged mother—can never sit still but instead feels compelled to swim constantly through the air in the story “The Itinerant.” In “The Mainer,” a shipwrecked cabin boy is swallowed by a whale, only to have a strange sense of déjà vu. A princess, in “The Sister,” demands her servants make her a doll replica of the twin she absorbed in the womb, while her old brother communicates with the ghost of the subsumed twin to plot revenge. In these fabulist micro-fictions, Owens introduces readers to such otherworldly characters as the Town Crier, the Mischief Maker, the Lunar King, and the Handmaiden. Each is inspired by the accompanying portrait made by artist Golden, whose surreal visages evoke rich personalities and vast worlds. The Scout, for example, has a spotted, river-stone-shaped head of midnight blue, wearing a crown reminiscent of fingerling potatoes, held up by a neck that might have been made for an ornate porcelain vase. “The Scout floats suspended at the center of The Constant Sphere,” begins Owens’ accompanying story, “gazing into a seamless 360 degree spinning cyclorama of the heavens crafted by winged innocents.” Golden’s images are arresting: The textures suggest analog sensibilities of an earlier era, and while there’s rarely a traditional face to be found, there’s always the suggestion of a thoroughly human countenance. They’re complemented by Owens’ dark, dreamy fairy tales in the tradition of Russell Edson, Donald Barthelme, and Lydia Davis. Just as Golden’s collages bring together disparate materials, Owens’ stories take a number of different forms and voices, each one resetting readers’ expectations for what a story might be. The final character, the Storyteller, reveals that he works in a “story bank, ever echoing with tens of thousands of nearly subaudible voices constantly murmuring....” These murmurings effectively follow readers through the book—and may do so for quite a while afterward. A brilliantly imagined and transportive collection of surreal bedtime stories.”

— Kirkus Reviews

"Owens wrote 37 vignettes in response to Golden’s surreal collages, bidding the reader enter a phantasmagorical world reminiscent of Alice’s, of Une semaine de bonté, of fairy tales, of Dadaist theater. Whimsical and grotesque by turns, The Villagers is a “read one chapter every night before bed” (and then record your dreams the following morning) sort of book. We need more such inventive collaboration between writers and visual artists. Word and image are each powerful in The Villagers, and taken together they moved this reader still further. In a digital world, this book is a physical wonder, gorgeously produced."

— one of Ancillary Review of Books’ “Top Ten Notable Books”

“A playful, brutal, dreamy, sticky slideshow of fables and images told with the eye-winking charm of an impromptu bedtime story….A feat of fabulous creativity.”

— Independent Book Review (Read the full review here.)

“With The Villagers, Owens and Golden have created four books in one—a fablage: A book of dangerous fables, and a book of unsettling collages; a set of works engaged in a carefully orchestrated conspiracy, and a procession of texts and images that refuse to acknowledge one another. In this out-world, the ‘villagers’ are us.”  

         —Michael Blitz, author of Jon Stewart: A Biography and On the Surgeon’s Knife

  “It is hard for a creator to maintain the depth of vision required for the visual and written works contained in The Villagers. Hard to create artwork and written fables filled with nooks and crannies and textures and layers flying up to heaven with its “celestial choirs” and down into the depths of the “singsongy” sea. But Caroline Golden and Derek Owens prove themselves up to the task. This book is the result of both creatives’ heavy lifting and light touch. The result? Pure enchantment. The reader often feels that she has stumbled upon some universal truth, a gravitas, only to find the text and artwork skittering trickster-like into dry wit, humor (both light and dark), a guffaw or a quick punchline: “So I ate my twin brother. In the womb. It happens.” Frankly, I’ve never read anything quite like this. Each brief chapter is about a different resident of a fairy tale village. But this is more than a mere collection. Overall, there is a sense that these villagers are relational and familial. Not a “solitary entity but a collective, a hive mind, channeling one voice.” You can read this book front to back or choose a chapter here and there. The cumulative effect will be the same: The discovery of a book that is effervescent, wise and at times deeply poignant as it explores the human condition. But just try to catch this comet of a book by its tale. You’ll be in for one wild ride. Through “networks of circulatory systems within systems of systems.”
This is a masterful work. Haunting and artful and deeply accomplished. I highly recommend it.”

— Nancy Dunlop, author of Hospital Poems

  “Golden’s images and Owens’s words result in alluring tales and caricatures from both core and fringes of a marvelous village, though what you’ll see here exists far away from any sort of normal taxonomy of a town’s citizenry! If you want to observe a place outside realms anywhere on Earth, yet simultaneously including practically everything Earth does, read this book.”  

         —Christopher Funkhouser, author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry and Contributing Editor at PennSound

  “The dazzling collages of Caroline Golden meet the splendid modern fables of Derek Owens in The Villagers, a sublime collaboration where the mystery of who inspired whom is part of the magic. Wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful, the worlds that The Villagers open are deep and contradictory: startling yet safe, sparkling yet darkling. With truths that only the surreal can reveal, and insights into human foibles that only fables can provide, Golden and Owens waltz their readers from dream to waking and back again. A keep-on-your-nightstand book to treasure. ”  

         —Molly Peacock, author of Flower Diary and The Analyst: Poems

Though populated by otherworldly personages and almost-human entities, this is no freak show. Instead, The Villagers is an amazing amalgam of vision and voice. Caroline Golden's collages are not afraid of being grotesque and not ashamed of being at the same time quite charming. And Derek Owens' accompanying fables take us off to places where childhood fantasies meet the fractured worldview of the eupeptic dreamer. At its best, his prose evokes Nabokov at his most sumptuous and Borges at his most oblique. This is surrealism in the truest sense of the word: not mere bizarrerie, but three dozen glimpses of that greater plane of existence which contains both the waking and sleeping worlds.

-- Th. Metzger, author of This Is Your Final Warning!!, Shock Totem, Big Noise on the Astral Plane

  “Derek Owens constitutes an intractable independency which you may find on the map of the imagination somewhere between the Duchy of Donald Barthelme and the Principality of Jorge Luis Borges. One’s passage through these landscapes has been rendered yet more hallucinatory by the collages of Caroline Golden, who has done for Owens what Magritte did for Belgium. Her portrait-like images are at once cozy and disquieting, playful and grotesque, like a set of Toby Jugs acquired as souvenirs on a holiday in the world of the dead.” 

         —Jacob Rabinowitz, author of the Beat generation memoir Blame it on Blake