Hollowmen

By Susan Maxwell

Stranded in Quettopolis, the capital of Bakhtinstan, Cuffe spends her days surviving the destabilized city, distributing her writing through the ancient Forest, and recollecting her last job as a ‘corporate orator’. An archivist is on her way to steal Cuffe’s writing. A writer is hiding out, with the papers they stole from the archivist. A murderer is in pursuit. The disregarded Forest is reasserting itself.

The Mothman Institute’s mission is to protect endangered moths, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the Institute’s ‘Players’ and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. A senior Player, Caius, recruited Cuffe to create the rhetoric to underpin this new corporate vision. Cuffe, contemptuously confident, is disturbed by the oddnesses of the Institute—the punitive process with its absent defendant, the quarterly Hunt, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry.

Then comes news that a breeding pair of a moth thought to be extinct has been discovered in a country in the midst of a military coup. The Institute is riven by competing goals—the experts' to save the moths, the Players', to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement…

Hollowmen uses disjunctive temporalities, narrative shifts, and intertextual polyphony in depicting a psychotic corporation and the irruption of the margins into the centre.