Monsterpieces: Bloomsday

Guillermo Stitch's The Coast of Everything

[Today is Bloomsday, and the Irish writer, whose pseudonym is Guillermo Stitch, is releasing his long and highly literary (but not really all that Joycean) novel The Coast of Everything. It could be a monsterpiece—or a folly. If you want fantasy and scifi in your Big Books, the novel might be for you. You can learn more about Stitch and the book on his Substack, where he has been posting on the 16th of recent months. The novel is published by Sagging Meniscus Press. My review is below.]

In The Coast of Everything, some characters in different and distant eras are seeking the source of stories, all stories. Other characters, also in different eras and places, are telling stories. And yet other characters in several futures are attempting to suppress all stories. One of the telling characters is named Sherry Zade, and The Thousand and One Nights is mentioned in several of the many fictions that make up this 749-page novel—or collection of stories.

The Thousand and One Nights has no single source or author. The versions are compendia from different eras, cultures, and authors. The versions are also, I found when reading about them, wildly various in the genres and narrations the books contain. One even includes, like The Coast of Everything, science fiction. Some of the stories have concrete relations; most do not. To imitate the Nights as a model of creative multiplicity and still, maybe, manage a novel must have required from Stitch something like the long heroic effort of Scheherazade.

One method of connecting some stories in the Nights was embedding or nesting, and Stitch uses this device throughout The Coast of Everything. I found that the often unlikely handoffs from one story to the next diminished the plausibility and effect of even those stories set in something like a realistic present. But the embedding does create a challenging paper chase for literary detectives. If you follow numerous segues and clues all the way to page 654 (my ARC}, you will find that Sherry Zade, the genius daughter of the founder of the Zade information and media empire, is the probable source of Stitch’s first story—and maybe all the rest. This is not a spoiler because of the “probable” and “maybe.” Elsewhere, Stitch offers clues that two (I think) other characters may be the source. Or maybe there is no single source besides Stitch who, by the way, incorporates his own previous work into this new book.

The Sherry Zade revelation comes at the end of the book’s longest story, a contemporary tale about a bumbling Irish private eye named Liam who is hired by one of the Zade twin sisters to find her sibling. This “Tale of Three Voyages” is 324 pages and moves Liam from California to Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt, three locales where he undergoes or imagines or dreams some improbable, even fantastic tests of his gumshoe resolve. The tale has some parallels with the history-rooted missing-heiress-in-a-foreign-land story in Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, but Stitch’s story is an over-the-top and over-long parody of both detective fiction and what might be called “exotic quest” stories with their globs of travelogue. The tale also has a long and awkwardly inserted Zade backstory told by the twins’ mother. Unfortunately, the “Tale of Three Voyages” occupies almost half of The Coast of Everything.

Sherry’s last word takes readers with good memories back to the second word of Stitch’s first story that is untitled and may, therefore, be the frame tale of The Coast of Everything. Here a young woman named Clara, an invalid like Sherry, is being carried up a mountain to see, we find much later, a glasshouse from which Clara can view the world or replicas of it. The era appears to be the late 19^th century. To amuse the people carrying her, Clara tells “The Tale of the Enchanted Road,” set, perhaps, in our too near future when literature is outlawed and when stories are being mass produced and used, apparently, to surface highways or propel cars. The tale has a plot featuring two resisters to book destruction--Billy a journalist and Vince a bellhop—and has the most satiric point of all the stories in The Coast of Everything. It’s almost “realism” is somewhat undermined, though, at the end when Vince tells Billy “The Tale of the Porter and the Gin” about waking up one morning and finding the ghost of Charles Dickens in his room.

Stitch’s Dickens, a drunk who speaks like a contemporary bro, reads a manuscript by Vince, dismisses it, and insists that Vince listen to his newly written “Tale of the Isle of Truth,” which has a small verbal connection to the tale about Clara. At 210 pages, “Isle of Truth” is the second longest story in The Coast of Everything and required astonishing imagination from Dickens because it is set in a far-off sci-fi future that extends the theme of story suppression…and begins the theme of source investigation. A few characters are exiled to an island where they review a governmental archive to see if there are stories (“toxins”) to be removed. In an act of modest resistance, one character is searching for the “paradigm” of stories. After he is relieved of his duties, his daughter listens to fragments of a transmission from a distant past or very distant future about a man searching for the “Stone,” the bedrock and source of all stories including the ones held sacred.

Like the detective story, “The Isle of Truth” has a plenitude of dramatic events and plot twists, along with Dickensian melodrama. There are betrayals, romances, a murder, two apparent suicides, a plucky female protagonist, and a villain described as “monstrous.” The ghost of Dickens must have been reading modern fiction (his story mixes third-person, first-person, and stream of consciousness perspectives and styles)—and science fiction for help with the embedded transmission that reminded me of Poe’s hoax novel, The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, which revealed a polar truth or mystery on the coast of the known world.

In the nested transmission story, the searcher recounts his adventures to his mentally ill wife and then somewhat improbably segues backwards in time to “The Tale of the Three Voyages,” the detective story that takes the reader to Sherry Zade and eventually to further short pieces told by Clara that conclude earlier stories with mostly happy endings and give The Coast of Everything a circular structure. The endings imply that Clara is the source, but maybe she is invented by Sherry. A detective within the stories would want to know who the party guilty of all the storytelling was, but, like The Thousand and One Nights, Stitch’s book has several possible perpetrators of fictions.

For Scheherazade, the stakes of storytelling were existential. In several of Stitch’s longest stories, the stakes are very high for characters who write or disseminate or just possess stories: imprisonment, exile, or execution depending on the time frame. And yet for this reader the stakes of The Coast of Everything are low because of its fantasy genre. Even to the story supposedly written by that old sentimentalist Dickens, I had little response beyond “Yup, I see what you’re doing here, Stitch.” I’m not sure why. Maybe because the plot is repetitive. Perhaps because the situations and characters are too distant, or the author lacks the craft or disposition to bring them near. A character in the story says, “Recognizing patterns is what I’m good at after all.” Because of the book’s formal and stylistic artifice, I was concentrating on the patterns, was not feeling immersed in the stories. I had a similar reaction to another highly imaginative, Thousand Nights-influenced series of stories, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. But those stories are short, and Stitch’s are long, requiring more engagement to succeed independent of the patterns.

Stitch partly anticipates my complaint in a passage about his detective Liam:

He was becoming acquainted with a cast of characters all of whom he found unrelatable and none of whom he could bring himself to like. Why then was he so sure that his problem wasn’t with any of that—it was with . . . the perspective. With the storyteller. But which one?

Liam is not the brightest bulb, so maybe his problem—to some extent my problem—is being mocked by Stitch who seems to believe that artifice is evidence of art and that aesthetic risks are proof of the imaginative freedom that The Coast of Everything wants to—and sometimes does—present and celebrate.

Scale may be more of a problem than Liam’s “perspective.” If the two long tales had been published as separate novels, the fictions might have managed more friction with the reader, more emotional and then intellectual rub. But the fictionality of the long tales is magnified by their context, their inclusion in The Coast of Everything. Stitch seems to want unfettered imagination and fettered readers. But I was tied to The Coast of Everything mostly because I wanted to see how it turned out. Not how the stories within it concluded but how the monument-sized aesthetic object Stitch was creating turned out. His first novel, Lake of Urine—with its wacky characters, one of whom has eight husbands—was an absurdist satire of village and city life, a punchy fiction that landed its jabs and moved on to the next flurry, keeping the reader curious about what foolery the characters would be up to next. The Coast of Everything is more grandiose, less consistently compelling.

One of Stitch’s major and representative characters is repeatedly described as a monster, but I don’t believe Stitch tried and failed to write a monsterpiece, a work using length and unusual means to produce a profound cultural effect, a work such as Gravity’s Rainbow or The Public Burning that mix Stitch’s fantastic with the historical and, ultimately, the political. Monsterpieces like these two novels are imaginative interventions in culture central. The Coast of Everything is more an imaginative manifestation, not central but peripheral, coastal. Stitch might well differ and assert that imagination is central, the fundamental human power that creates the various cultures in the novel and our own. His most heroic searcher of the source ventures deep into the anthropological past where he finds the edge—the coast—of the world where life after death is imagined. Even in this Arcadia, though, is imagination’s possible guilt: natives engaging in child sacrifice (or mercy killings) and suicide.

Stitch recognized that imagination can be monstrous, but he still chose to be its defender, be the source—the architect and builder--of a multi-storey, multi-story work, not so much a monstrosity as an imaginarium, a fictional “folly,” a non-functional but entertaining architectural form he refers to near the book’s end. Stitch has a crazed artist—who has built a mountaintop glasshouse from which he claims visitors such as Clara can see the world—say, “`Did you really think I’d content myself with a glasshouse?’ . . . `A folly?’” Most of the worlds Stitch presents can’t be seen from a mountaintop. For him, “non-functional” is the essential quality of storytelling. The enemies of stories in the novel first want to make stories functional—operational, pragmatic—and then want to expunge stories because they are functional in a deeper way, encouraging freedom of consciousness. Sixty pages before that reference to the folly, Stitch throws a voice hectoring the reader to “cleanse your mind of these follies, these heroes and villains and their fanciful tales,” but that voice is one last gasp of suppression. In a Substack post, Stitch calls the books on bookstore shelves “follies.” Nevertheless, he constructed the extravagantly varied folly that is The Coast of Everything.

Pynchon describes a “classic folly” in Gravity’s Rainbow:

Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most unhealthy extremes. The rooms are triangular, spherical, walled up into mazes. Portraits, studies in genetic curiosity, gape and smirk at you from every vantage. The W.C.s contain frescoes of Clive and his elephants stomping the French at Plassy, fountains that depict Salome with the head of John (water gushing out ears, nose, and mouth), floor mosaics in which are tessellated together different versions of Homo Monstrosus, an interesting preoccupation of the time—cyclops, humanoid giraffe, centaur repeated in all directions.

This passage, part of a much longer description, could be a metaphor for the imaginative excesses and cultural penetration of Gravity’s Rainbow. Stitch’s folly novel is less grotesque, less threatening, less monstrous.

Stitch has been writing monthly Substack essays about The Coast of Everything. In his November (2025) post, he says:

It’s a failure of a book because it’s a book of failures, of bleeds and leaks and lapses and breaches, remembrances and forgetful redundancies. It was in its nature from the off to end in failure just as I suppose it is in mine, and in the nature of all quixotic efforts—which is to say, all art.

Stitch is too harsh on himself. I admire his ambition and respect his small publisher’s investment in such a big book. Pynchon ends his description of the folly with a view from the outside: “from a distance no two observers, no matter how close they stand, see quite the same building in that orgy of self-expression, added to by each succeeding owner.” This “observer” of The Coast of Everything hopes it’s a success for other “observers,” those readers who are more likely to enjoy a traditional folly—fantastical heterogeneity and whimsical connectivity, complicated mazes substituting for amazing complexity—and who want fictions—like Scheherazade’s but unlike Pynchon’s and Coover’s—that won’t interfere with a good night’s sleep. Her stories did delay and ultimately tame a monster. I wish I had faith that Stitch’s fanciful stories in The Coast of Everything could have a similar effect on the current American enemies of books, literature, and imagination.