I would like to start this review of VITIATORS with a disclaimer. Manga does not figure as part of my reading. Not just my usual reading, but any reading at all. And so I approach VITIATORS without the lenses of what a work of manga should be. The book opens up to me in the way all art does. A communication through a series of symbols. Events, characters, places, objects. These are all but symbols. Anything exterior to your mind, and perhaps even your mind, remains a symbol for you to interact with.
Typically, you would hear people talking about analyzing symbols. Psychoanalyzing the content of dreams. Useless hogwash. Boring, useless hogwash. Instead, we take the post-Jungian route of Ira Progoff: we can interact or even converse with any object extracted from that symbolical world. We do our best to settle before the work and let it speak to us. Which in any case probably amounts to talking to ourselves, except more sincerely, more openly.
VITIATORS thrives as an orgy of disgust. A disgust that reveals itself as more spiritual than physical despite the intensely visceral imagery. The characters cry. They are either mindless in their sadism and their masochism, or they are so acutely aware of the suffering of the world that they choose to become its receptacle to then dish it out in condensed form to whatever crosses their path.
What soon strikes us, too, is the black humor throughout the whole work. Even as you flinch at the violence, you partake in the twisted delight of the author and illustrator (two different people in this case). Pushing the envelope so much that we enter a surreal world of happenings and unreal personages, the author steps deeper and deeper into a dark forest of melted buildings and ultra-dimensional creeps, placing marvelous locutions in the mouths of bodies tearing apart and inhumanely violated.
If you’ve ever read William S. Burroughs, the world of VITIATORS will not seem foreign to your already mutated mind. The mind, your servant, who calculates, who filters, who creates realities, steps into this landscape as a spectator. The story as it appears in your mind is alive and is part of your reality. You cannot get rid of it anymore. What has been seen cannot be unseen. Now you have to live with the fact that the filth has inundated your system. That your husk now crawls with as many obsessions and fancies you elect to pick from the novel.
VITIATORS can also be seen in the light of Chaos Magick. Not a few Sparean sigils are to be seen painted in corners, walls, and carnal debris of the novel. Even more fascinating, there are countless sonic sigils to play with (at your own risk). We encounter these more often the deeper into this parallel universe we are sucked. We find them in the mouths of monsters, of vitiated minds too far gone into the infinity of thoughts of the author to do anything else but carry out his bidding.
The Daemons of VITIATORS are harsh beings with cruel intentions. They lurk in the unsuspected corners of your universe. The growl that you hear behind your ears in the night when you look at the moon a certain way. They are the spirits of revenge that plague the body and impel the avenger to quench their thirst lest they consume him. And so after you imbibe the poison Elytron Frass has poured here in copious amounts, you can no longer not see the cruelty of this world nor cease to desire horrible deaths upon the sadists of this world. The vast majority of humanity.
The parallel universe that opens up at the beginning of the story signifies not a stepping elsewhere, nor the infecting of our world by an alien force. Rather, we contemplate the horror of humanity’s darkest desires. Raping fathers, enabling pseudo-mothers, predatory mutants whose bodies change according to the perversions taking shape through the astral field surrounding them. Every opportunity was taken for carnage and to cause wanton suffering.
As I read VITIATORS, moment to moment Elytron Frass & Charles N. presented me with humorous over-the-top happenstances, insightful philosophical remarks, extemporaneous declamations worthy of Christopher Marlow, and delightful post-modernist directness. As my perusal of the book came to an end, however, a very different feeling came over me. It was not the fear and disgust rampant on the surfaces of the pages that got me. Rather, a fathomless sorrow.
