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If AIDS is the metaphor for our sexual and political times, then the movies make for a political arena in which we confront the danger of sex and witness the demise of our psychological well-being in the nineties. In James Chapman's new fiction Our Plague film is a vehicle of death and AIDS, unspoken by name in the text yet the ironic mover and shaker of this narrative, the substance of death's journey. In Chapman's (anti)novel, nothing is so certain as death and the movies--both being the way we are psychically taxed in this day and age. The poignant hero of the text lies dying, imagining at first that his body is moving in and out of the walls as his imagination attempts to make sense of the plague that has now swept him up into its vortex. His imagination, more specifically, sees red, sees the frightening and passionate hue that literally means blood and figuratively signals his will to survive his journey in blazing intensity. Yet ultimately this hero's life--that is to say, his understanding of death--is a movie for all times. The novel takes on the form of a film script and mythic names begin to appear on the scene. Bette Davis, the heroine of Dark Victory, exchanges identities with the hero for a brief time, because her eyes, too, are "glittering, exuberant," in her confrontation with death. In another scene, "Disease [née "Death"] Takes a Holiday," it is mentioned that "Grief and guilt are just forms of film" because, for certain, film here is a fantasy of dying--dying heroically, dying mythically, dying where language makes a collective, public appearance. In this spirited novel James Chapman boldly splices words until their meaning figures as film language and is shared on the big (and often frightening, larger than life) movie screen. "Where there's life there cannot be cinema," says Chapman. Cinema is a political tool, a political project, and death in the age of AIDS is the substance of its urgent artfulness. Our Plague is an experimental work, an avant-garde writing in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon's V, which also investigates the disintegration of the sign and the ontological boundaries of the metaphor. Chapman's images are often ambiguous, and sexuality is presented in a contrary, if not subversive manner, similar to the short fictions of Djuna Barnes, and in the work of Jean Cocteau. Chapman draws upon the structure of experimental film as well, and he openly alludes to them, specifically Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. The quick cuts, jump-cuts, and the calling-into-question of symbolism are evocative of the art films of Maya Deren, particularly Meshes of the Afternoon. One last film: Burroughs' Ticket with the anger of Maldoror. Rewriting of Daudet's La Doulou not as description of sensation, but rather opium--the images that override the 'I'. 
Our Plague: A Film from New York
by James Chapman
$10.00 302 pp. ISBN 1-879193-00-0
James Chapman's Our Plague: A Film from New York is an experimental novel glorying in its own esthetic while smashing to bits all conventional narrative rules. More power to him! Edited like a film with quicksilver connections to places often totally unexpected but absolutely right, Our Plague is equal parts journal, prose poem and elegy that sweeps through the world of self-absorbed artistes, conflicted lovers, smart-mouthed hustlers and scene-crazed wannabes of New York's East Village.
...Chapman spins out his tale extravagantly but never forgets that extravagance can be fun too....The combination of Chapman's feverish style with collage and montage techniques makes the experience of reading Our Plague almost hallucinatory, as if you found yourself simultaneously inside a film projector as celluloid frames race past the arc light and behind the scenes during the making of the film.
If William Burroughs had a more reality-based sense of humor, if Thomas Pynchon could get past adolescent hijinks, if David Cronenberg were gay and a novelist, then maybe there would be a literary predecessor to compare with Chapman's book.
Being out in unexplored territory doesn't seem to faze Chapman one bit. He is fearless....
--John McFarland, Puck
--Marilyn Moss, Review of Contemporary Fiction
--Susan Smith Nash, Juxta
--Petger Schaberg, American Book Review
