Z213: EXIT

Poena Damni Book 1

cover Z213: EXIT
Title: Z213: EXIT
Publisher: Shoestring Press
Translated by: Shorsha Sullivan
Published: Oct 2016
Edition: 2nd Edition
Pages: 152
Format: paperback or kindle
ISBN: 1-907356-05-6

Z213: EXIT is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy: a camp, a train, soldiers, a Bible with notes inside, encroaching darkness, the struggle to remember, the struggle of hiding, physical pain. As if waking up in a nightmare an escapee recounts his fleeting experiences in a series of fragmented diary entries in a hide-and-seek game with Death or even God. Written in a unique prose style, at times bordering on poetry and conveying a "pilgrimage of the soul" through a series of increasingly haunting pieces, Z213: EXIT creates the feeling that reader and narrator are led together through an eschatological experience. Horror is created by the scantiest vocabulary craftily combined to form a broken, unstructured syntax, seemingly tight, but leaving enough loopholes through which the reader's subconscious fears can pop in and out. Although evidently postmodern, this is a book that does not undermine or shrink the traditional Grand Narrative themes; on the contrary, it thrives on them.

Book Reviews

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Excerpts I, VI & XXIV
Trad. Shorsha Sullivan

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From Poena Damni z213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ
Excerpt in various languages | Jan 2020

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Latest Review see all

Dimitris Lyacos' Z213: Exit (vol. 1 of Poena Damni trilogy)
The temz review | Apr 2021

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