Rejoice everyone, for manifest are the signs that herald the avatar of change. Rejoice everyone, for the eyes of her children shall open as they're freed from a prison of worldliness. Rejoice everyone, for the benevolence of the mother shall wash away all delusion and fear. Time sees all and rules all, and so enjoy the smile of serenity that grows from understanding how kingdoms rise and fall like the strokes of a pen held in the hand of a humble scribe with one simple message: Maa Kali has returned to reveal the truth! 2026, Kali Ascendant is a contemporary/very-near-future satire that uses fragments of writing from three different narrators to describe a dystopian society and the Dostoevskian descent and subsequent spiritual rebirth (perhaps, depending on the reader's interpretation) of a morally engaged individual who experiences an emotional and intellectual crisis under the stress of significant political and cultural change. The novella is both a 'serious joke' and a warning presented in the form of a multi-layered 'construct in words' that paints strange, provocative pictures in the mind's eye of a reader, similar to a Rorschach test. Over its course, and as a metaphor for the overall story, the text transforms from long-form prose to more abstract and lyrical structures that, when viewed after completion and 'from above', seem like a heady, psychotronic mash-up of Machiavelli, Kafka, Bresson, Jodorowsky, and the Sex Pistols. Always challenging, sometimes amusing, and sometimes frightening, the universal concepts the story addresses are tackled head on but appear like distorted, surreal reflections in a fairground hall of mirrors, alternately veering between profoundly bizarre and bizarrely profound. Interpretations may differ, but within all the imagery it's impossible not to encounter some uncomfortable truths regarding the tragic absurdity of what our everyday lives have become. But, as the story suggests, it doesn't seem possible for us to experience liberation without an act of destruction. And so you should decide for yourself: is it all just a flim-flam man's three-card trick? A naïve literary equivalent of George's Marvellous Medicine via Jackson Pollock? or in fact a signpost indicating the start of a wonderful new path forward?
