Paracusia

I have always heard the voices in nature; the babble of running water and the rustle of wind through trees; sounds taking on the cadences of conversation, to the point where I can picture the speakers and almost make out words. As I’ve grown older, even the constant low hum of fans and large appliances sound like people milling around in the distance. I frequently hear far-away games of basketball, sometimes overlaid with sportscasters voices.  Sometimes the voices of women cloak themselves under the whistle of tinnitus or the patter of raindrops, only to come whispering like bashful angels or sneaky succubi as I drift toward sleep.

Articles and definitions on the internet say auditory hallucinations can be precursors to dementia, harbingers of madness – but I’ve been having auditory hallucinations like these since I was a child and they’ve never, to my knowledge, manifested in any certifiable psychosis.

“It is not I who am crazy, it is I who am mad,” said a certain crazed chihuahua in a perfect Peter Lorre imitation on The Ren and Stimpy show. His next line was “Dincha hear em? Dincha see the crowds.”

Din-eye-tell-ya? The auditory hallucination is a natural precursor to “psychotic breakdown.”

Unless of course my parcusia is something else entirely—a trick of the auditory canal, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were related  to my sinuses. Not that there isn’t evidence to support the notion that my marbles have come a bit loose. My partner, Laura says I’m more scatterbrained than ever. As I get older, some of the voices are sounding more purposeful and strident, like good telemarketers trying and almost convincing me to buy an unknown bill of goods.

I hear snatches of music in the walls, the halls, the basements and the shower stalls. Especially shower stalls. I spent a few nights guarding some huge abandoned warehouses and the showers make the locker room officially the spookiest place I’ve ever encountered.

Even in the most mundane places, shadows lurk around me, outside my skin, but I’m still umbilically attached to the shifting darkness.

I have to admit, I’ve been feeling a bit crazed.

But mostly its been a good kind of crazy. The ultimate lunacy; as Nick Cave called it on “Red Hand Files” his agony aunt/fan blog, What I’ve been feeling is “absolute confidence.”  I never felt anywhere near this confident in any aspect of myself when I was young, and felt it only occasionally as I passed through middle age.

It’s because I am writing to my full potential for the first time in my life. And as I continue to write stuff I would be eager to read, my confidence grows.

I am now comfortable saying I routinely writing fiction that is as good as most of the writers I idolized as a younger writer. And I have always been a demanding reader. I can’t claim that everything I write is of a consistent quality – certainly not in the early drafts. But as I apply the most important talent I have learned – patience – the weak spots get exposed and expunged.

I have finally found my authentic voiceand it describes a singular vision. To be truthful, the stories I tell are like waking hallucinations. The trick is making that equally appealing for readers who are seekers and who live for such experiences  – and people who have no time for dreams and no experience navigating through them.

My stories take the manifestly impossible and make it not only possible but inevitable. And it’s not really a Dale L. Sproule story unless it works on several different planes of reality at the same time. As the review from Amazing Stories points out – my novel (and all my stories) are about us.

And at the same time it’s about a pantheon of characters as they achieve godhood. Presupposing that everything happening after the singularity is part of a new wilderness and what we thought we knew about sentience and awareness is just the behinning, the Gods of the New Wilderness series is about the delightful madness of being human and what happens after we supercede that state—and the rush of realizing our potential as a species in ways that we never imagined.

I have been quietly carving this niche for forty years, biding my time until my skills are up to the task. I adopted the moniker Psychedelia Gothique for my dark, trippy paintings 30 years ago and then used it as the title of my first story collection and for my personal blog. It’s the gallery in my mind where all of my writing and artwork intersect. My landscape is built out of pixels and pop culture, iconography, music, dream and metaphor. Gods of the new wilderness was the title for an art show I never gave – the subject of my paintings, my sculpture and my fiction.

Remapping The Human Template is essentially the backstory for book two: In the Dominion of the Executrix which is coming out this winter and book three Escape to the Carnivorous Forest will follow during 2024. The series will wind up with the epic Avenging Glory in 2026.

All three of the books are complete – but are undergoing significant revision before they are released.