Acceleration is a collection of forty-one fragments (descriptions, vignettes, and dramatic monologue) ranging in theme from a racist neighbor, a roadrage motorist, a concerned citizen seeking censorship, a politician’s election-time speech, a mall proprietor’s exaggerated sale advertisement, a meditation mystic and (among others) a final, visionary and exuberant voice that suggests hope in the face of supposed absurdity and which sums up the suffering, doubt, and illumination of an age.

Acceleration

Literature & Fiction

MILLER, TIM

Poetry

Six Gallery Pr

Solid As Echo

M., A. E.

The Valley of Ashes is a collection of six short stories, one poem, and the final piece, Acceleration, a collage of poetry and prose voice fragments and vignettes. 
The book begins in childhood with Icarus, which describes a young boy's realization of death and the insufficiency of his parents or religion to sustain him. The story ends with an almost apocalyptic depiction as the boy enters adolescence, which is covered in the next story, The Confessions of Cain. 
In the author's own words, 'The Confessions of Cain' was born of this question: what would the diary of someone like Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris be like in the months and days that led up to their massacre? From this premise The Confessions of Cain becomes one of the most brutally disturbing and honest pieces of fiction in recent memory, the diary of the numbing of the moral sense. 
This is followed by an excerpt from Tim's forthcoming novel Death by Water, a chapter that details the ascent out of adolescence and into adulthood. It depicts the wandering twenty year-old Orestes as he hitchhikes over surreal landscapes. On the way he decides to briefly unite with the chaos he sees around him and participates in a symbolic orgy of selfish satisfaction. As this also proves spiritually inadequate, he finally overcomes his physical impulses and emerges in control of his irrational desires. 
The poem Ash follows, a Waste Land-inspired piece about a unnamed narrator who again rails against the spiritually empty society he sees around him--members of which are given the stage in the last three stories. What Wasn't Possible is about a quiet and tormented day-laborer who is ridiculed at work and who lives alone. When he decides to visit his elderly neighbor out of pity, their brief dialogue rises to almost Biblical tone in its discussion of God and the meaning of suffering. Angels With Envy is the regret-laden sketch of a middle-aged man who can't forget an affair from twelve years before and who is willing to do anything to feel alive in stifled suburbia. Petronius Applauding is the final, brutal tale, which imagines the debauchery of Nero's Rome brought up to date in a town empty of all morality and full of orgies and mass violence. Interspersed between these horrific descriptions are philosophic pronouncements assuring the town of the death of God and therefore of morality and all other institutions (religious, political, and otherwise) that are now held up as contradictory establishments seeking only control. 
The final piece, an answer and compliment to the whole, is Acceleration, a collection of voices and vignette fragments ranging from a racist neighbor, a road-rage motorist, a concerned citizen seeking censorship, a politician's speech, a mall proprietor's exaggerated sale advertisement, a meditating spiritualist, and (among others) a final, visionary and exuberant voice that suggests hope in the face of madness, that sums up the suffering and doubt and illumination of an age.

The Valley of Ashes

Doré, Gustave

Continuing the tradition of such novels as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Demian, Tim Miller's debut novel is about the education of a soul. Innovative in its style and structure, and spanning the growth from cynicism to affirmation, Death by Water tells the story of Orestes as he dives to the extremes of both debauchery and intellectualism before finding peace beyond even those. Add to this an insightful afterword from the auth on the book's genesis and composition, Death by Water becomes as daring and moving a first novel as any in recent memory.

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