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denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025)

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"Donovan Reyes' domain is that of the illuminated store, the lonely places on the outskirts of town, the back rooms of an American in thrall to the failure of its own myth. With denouement Reyes envisions a peripatetic slumberland, surroundings subject to abstruse moods. Nowhere addicts succumb to an anesthetized pulse, ensnared by the numb rhythms of a society gone ill on its symptoms."

— Rebecca Gransden

"In denouement, what begins with coolness turns into calculated gratuitousness, then softens. It's a page turner with no discernable objective. Three girls move through a very dark night- I couldn't quite keep the darkness of the Lost Highway opening sequence, and the shots of a frozen Polish street from Inland Empire out of the picture. Donovan Reyes is a kind of verbose, cinematised poet.

"It's sad, but perhaps hopeful - there's a sense of survival and love. But a great deal of damage, and a shudder runs down my spine as I reflect the *attraction* I felt to a kind of burnt-out nihilism as a young woman back in the tens.

"This novella paints the gaudy futility as the egregious waste it really is. There is wisdom driving the narrative. I suspect Juliet, Ash and the nameless girl are set to achieve redemption via their rich inner worlds, should Mr. Reyes extend the saga, although the title "denouement" suggests that's a wrap."

— Ellen Peden

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“In Donovan Reyes’ “little slum Eden”, the twilight hour reigns supreme in a collection of ghosts and blood and noir Americana. Reyes is a true romantic, and his words oscillate between lyrical verse with admirable poetic form to the trance mutterings of a street-corner prophet. This is a collection where the River Styx meets suburbia. Intriguing and raw and beautiful."

— Juliette Sandoval, E.I.C. of Orpheus

“A postapocalyptia glissement on a necronomic bodi3. It is a maudit, "neon-gnostic" slash of rogue Americana, a "bête noire" as a fin de siècle kahrkãs-a decheoir poison for a dead theosis. Lycanthropic festerboils curse "the blood of Abel," here in the"sweltering Nazarene sun." Mix formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde and methanol-the trochar's in the bodegic cavity, ready to be devoured."

- Daniel Y, Harris, author of The Posthuman Series (Volumes I-VII, BlazeVOX)

“Donovan Reyes’ collection brings us deep into the 21st-century spleen; a Baudelaire for the suburban American nightmare. Reyes channels symbolist and decadent poetics, weaving doomed and romantic beauty through "flaneurial nights scorched by hot neon": a world of shattered glass, empty dive bars, motels, fluorescent lights, and all the other detritus of contemporary life.

— Joshua Martin