"Crackling Skulls" by Roger Van de Velde (Translated by Jonathan Reeder), Snuggly Books
Crackling Skulls is a remarkable collection of twenty stories that take place in a mental institution. Like the scent of nicotine on one’s clothes, the smell stays with you even after leaving the premises. I was going through a website from Snuggly Press looking for something unexpected or new to me, and alas, I found this book, primarily due to the book cover and photograph of its author, Roger Van de Velde. To my moronic eyes and brain, I thought he looked like he could be a friend of Polanski, Krzysztof Komeda, and Marek Hłasko, who are, of course, Polish, but Van de Velde is, from Belgium. To me, he looks handsome and an ideal visual of what a writer should look like. Van de Velde wrote in Flemish and was addicted to the painkiller Palfium, which caused him legal troubles. He ended up in prison and psychiatric institutions and died in 1970 from an overdose of Palfium and a large amount of alcohol.
Crackling Skulls (De knetterende schedels) is a collection of stories that takes place in a psychiatric institution, and it is a dryly compassionate look at Van de Velde’s fellow travelers in Hell. Sometimes funny, but always with a taste of sadness, these tales are reflections of the individuals Van de Velde had some interactions with, but there always seems to be death or hopelessness at the end by the next day. The book is a real page-turner, and the twenty stories here are short (144 pages), so sitting and reading it in one sitting is quickly done. What impresses me is that a writer such as Van de Velde can so effortlessly (or it reads that way) capture these moments of these patients or the criminally insane, yet he is struggling through the system and his addiction. Roger Van de Velde is a great discovery, and one has to thank the book’s translator, Jonathan Reeder, and its British publisher, Snuggly Books.