Review: dethrone god by Christopher Owens

By Jack Moody

On the surface, dethrone god, a novella written by Christopher Owens and published by Sweat Drenched Press, is a simple and short story: A man takes a late-night walk through Belfast on his way home from the bar, enduring various encounters along the way. But that is merely the deceptive layer of skin wrapped around an entire living body. Once that layer is torn away, Owens’ writing becomes less a work of fiction in any traditional sense, and more a hallucinatory, and in parts schizophrenic, soliloquy on time and memory.

Belfast serves almost as its own character, and the protagonist as a kind of unreliable tour guide as we’re brought along for his jaunt through a city starkly changed from the one he once knew. We are given detailed descriptions of community hubs, cultural touchstones, important streets, and geographical landmarks as both how they exist now as he travels onward into a dark and oppressive night, and how they used to be—or more accurately, how he remembers them to have been. 

The actual events that occur on his journey are given minimal attention, which is precisely as it should be given the nature of the story itself. What the protagonist is far more interested in is dragging the reader down a memory lane of sorts, albeit one far murkier and convoluted than what is typically conjured when that motif comes to mind. And all the while multiple asides are taken (separated by brackets and italicized prose), wherein the protagonist reverts to a state of near-infantile recollection, describing events—whether real, imagined, or firmly rooted in some dream-induced haze—using fragmented sentences, and cobbling together pieces of events as if written solely from the perspective of a single sensory organ and yet forced to present the full picture nonetheless. Some of these asides feel more firmly planted in a tangible reality, while others are like flipping through late-night television channels one after another before the brain can even begin to comprehend the context of each snippet.

And lurking behind the entire story, almost like the protagonist’s literal shadow as he stumbles between foreclosed buildings and once bustling street corners, is a pervading sense of doom. Of decay and fear and regret. Things are not the same as they once were. The protagonist is getting older, finding it ever more difficult to abstain from escaping into the comfort of memories, despite the fact that some of them are the exact reason he feels such dread to begin with. (The name Philip has stuck with me since finishing the book, and I can’t quite explain why. Like the distant feeling that persists after waking from a nightmare… )

dethrone god feels almost like a ghost story. Or hastily scrawled ravings written within an old, forgotten journal, only to be found by some unwitting stranger years later. It reads like a desperate attempt at recalling a dream, at once utterly foreign and uncomfortably familiar. And I can’t think of a better way to describe memory than exactly that. Owens has succeeded in creating something wholly original, uneasy, and haunting, all from the simple tale of a man walking home one late night in Belfast.