Arreshy Young is a disciple of Jorge Luis Borges, if not one of his doubles, his posthumous golems. Yes, Young’s debut collection Codon (Calamari Archive, 2025) combines Greek mythology and Golden Age Islamic philosophy, or revised inventions thereof, such threads twisting into the double helix of Dalí’s nuclear mysticism. Rather than a mere replica of that 20^th-century Argentine, Young makes use of the minutiae and buzzwords more common in our modern age, such that it is—GIF, beta-testing, CGI, deepfake—with mixed results. ‘Tis true, Young’s fictions are at their strongest when they fully indulge in the proper nouns of a bygone era, his style akin to a para-consciousness that taunts and titillates the sub-one, and vice versa. One exception is the story “The Patchwork Compendium,” which brings in a much-needed pathos in the form of a cancerous sister to balance out the sometimes papyrus-dry histories and epistemologies. Still, the overlapping fragments that form this collection aren’t without instances of humor, as with the Jesus party that features a menagerie of that manger baby, including a “Cinnamon Toast Christ.” “The Girls Guide to Ghost Fucking” is also an exercise in absurd and irreverent humor, topped with enough viscera to please this high-tolerant reader. The numinous isn’t in short supply either, for the Icarian author soars sunward with certain sentences that refuse to melt despite their waxing cosmical:

This time he dreamt he murdered his other selves, broke the Wheel of Incarnation to become the dreamshape of his choice, ascending in defiance of mutation canon law, from worm to flower to butterfly to storm, from thunder dogs whining to puppicules up to the helium of the magnetosphere to the asteroid belt, his body dividing into the dust of Andromeda, the grains dividing into those atoms which so horrified Democritus.

I published in The Collidescope one of the longest and most abstruse stories, “The Stars in Middle Age,” which in the context of this collection acts as an anti-skeleton key, a decorticated chorus, a genie’s genome. Instead of taking the story as a list or catechism, you would do well to read it as one would an aurora borealis:

Her Mollitude in Middle Age means wartime ambassadors; nattering nudniks; frugal frenemies; headless mobs; headless anarchs and demagogues.

Her void portends disease ambassadors; gonzo participation parties; invertebrate sugar babies; ormach theater, whose pathos is not due, as the critics accuse, to the lucid musculature of the headless actors or their tremulous body language but to the pity the audience feels knowing that the ormachs born and grown just before the opening curtain will be promptly recycled after the curtain drop (dropping like a redundant guillotine).

There’s no doubt that Codon is in the Library of Babel (its corresponding tower graces the book’s cover), although you’ll likely need a step stool or ladder to reach the book’s place on the shelf. At ten pages longer than Borges’ Ficciones, Young’s debut falls in line with Borges’ injunction that “writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.” I challenge Young to defy his metaphysical maker and risk being a fool by spending a decade writing a tome that is equally as dense as his impressive debut yet without boundary.

George Salis is the author of Sea Above, Sun Below. His fiction is featured in The Dark, Black Dandy, Zizzle Literary Magazine, House of Zolo, Three Crows Magazine, and elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in Isacoustic, Atticus Review, and The Tishman Review, and his science article on the mechanics of natural evil was featured in Skeptic. He is currently working on an encyclopedic novel titled Morphological Echoes. He has taught in Bulgaria, China, and Poland. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. Find him on Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter, and at www.GeorgeSalis.com.

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