Taxis Murders Sextet

Sean Farragher

"Taxi Murders Sextet, more than a carnival
and less than titillation, is at its unending
curtain, more love than anger, more joy than
carnage, and no matter how terrible the course,
if you stay it, you could be one more witness for
human redemption"

Sean-Thomas Farragher: March 10, 1999

When I first heard about Taxi Murders I thought it was a murder mystery and was intrigued because the punditry has proclaimed that the murder mystery, being a ritual, cannot be successfully turned into hypertext. Someone be sure to tell Borges about what one cannot do with a genre. But this isn't a murder mystery, not as such, something is going on at a much deeper level here. Sean is an original, an author who has entered the field of hyperfiction on his own without much of the conceptual baggage that is floating around. This in itself warrants a look.

Taxi Murders Sextet is very much a work in progress, there is a great deal written, a great deal that can be written, it has changed it's structure several times since the beginning of this year and I feel it may several more as it evolves. I like what is being suggested by the latest changes. There is also a start at interaction, guest books and email, promise of a CD, one of the characters now has an email address, at least she did last time I looked, can't find it now.

Six books or chapters, a sextet, the sixth being the interactive and hopefully collaborative part, the author welcoming this and implying a desire that the piece continue on it's own.

The content is highly sexual, not pornographic but not erotic either as the subject matter is mostly incest and sexual torture and the breakdown of human personality and identity this implies. Newspaper clippings, diaries, poetry, passages written by victims for the torturers, spirit beings who could or could not be different aspects of a person, gender and sexual identity shift and mutate. Reminds me a bit of Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren but without the strangeness of place, the place normal unfolding within an urban/suburban banality. Maybe that's it, normality a hell of unconscious repeated actions. What better than the net to write such as this, where that being in the chat room could be anyone, where people put up home pages for their multiple personalities and for their spirit familiars. Research is advancing into autonomous characters, I can see these characters becoming autonomous, repeating out their destinies in unending horrors like a fever dream, the first page is a scene of hell, the author promises redemption but does not say when or how far the passage out ...

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