COUNTERFEITERS OF KINGDOM
INTRO TO THE FOREST (2026)
BLURBS ARE DEAD! . . . a hyperbolic hype sentence that doesn’t even require U to read the book is NO WAY to champion a work U admire. So I wrote an introduction to the best novel so far by the grievously underrated Jack Houghteling. THE FOREST is out today by Alien Buddha Press; also, Jack dropped the whole book, including audio, for free on his substack. The link is at the bottom of the page. . .
1. “A CATHOLIC MAN OF EXPERTNESS”
ENVY : — HOW I BECAME FRIENDS WITH JACK HOUGHTELING.
I got rejected from the literary journal Socrates on the Beach ; I threw them an early excerpt of my novel then-called Steubenville. . . when the issue was out, I saw they published something called Sunnyside.
Eager to see what CRAP they published instead of me, I clicked it. . . Talent screamed out immediately : the prodigious voice of quarterback Montague Yazzo trying to untangle the question at the heart of all Jack’s work :
WHO ARE U ?
Expecting to read a few lines, stop & scoff at the injustice, toss Sunnyside into preterition’s dump, — I flew thru to the end ; thought : SHIT, this dude is writing circles around me. . . I had never read something so dense & propulsive from a contemporary.
I send him a peer-vanquished email :
“DEAR JACK,
Just read the excerpt from your Sunnyside in SOTB : all I can say is WOW. it blew me away; started reading with a casual dilettante’s dawdle and was sucked into a vortex of this unique-rhythm’d prose (w/ these unusual little words peppered in like speedbumps to slow u down to savor the whole construction). I LOVED it. the memory flow. the football. the everything. . . impressed & eager to read the whole thing!”
He hit me back right away, warmly,
“Dear Harold,
Hard to describe how much your words mean to me: was just reflecting (not to be too maudlin!) on the occasional discord between things you work on for what seems like forever - and which you ascribe incalculable layers of multi-dimensional meaning - and the way they quietly whisper into the afternoon; that what felt like a boulder now feels like a pebble. Alas, we do it because we do it, but generous, keen, heartful words like yours - I do hope you know! - are so valued, cherished and fueling.”
Since then, I’ve been trying to ensure Jack’s work doesn’t quietly whisper into the afternoon. . . ;
thru 3 novels : Goodman (2022), Sunnyside (2023), & now The Forest (2026), Jack is building one of the most fascinating edifices in contemporary American literature : a body of work worth our awe & attention.
Jack Houghteling’s novels are kinetic anatomies of the Self & Time in America.
Kinetic is the operative word : his work is pure ENERGY.
The form du jour in contemporary American fiction is soporific STASIS : flabby subjects, dull thinking, readymade architecture ; the most salient (and ostensibly desired) reaction : this could be on Netflix!
Jack pares away all the inessential baggage of telling : these are micro-novels that could be 100k-word tomes.
And his early-career work comes to a stupefying culmination in The Forest.
2. “A WORLD PRINCIPALLY MADE FOR SURVIVORS”
WHAT’S THE POINT OF COMMEMORATION?
Samuel Kip, — the narrator of The Forest, on the eve of 1724 : the centennial of New York’s founding, — is commissioned, by three bigshots, to write a disquisition on the colony’s first 100 years. . .
But “the founding of New York” is a counterfeit idea ; Kip is living in the place his Walloon & Dutch ancestors once colonized as New Amsterdam ; he balks at the commission,
“I can only gather you’ve so written to me. . . on the part of my passion for those predicaments of Origin and Motion. For why would men of such arete and peermanship bid me?”
Placemaking is a game of creating legitimacy. A celebration of 100 years of New York from Kip’s pen will legitimize the bloodless conquest from,
“that agglomeration of Saxons, Normans, Britons, and the Gallic evanescent we call England, emotionally inhibitive and tyrannic in ways native to the unconquered (it practices like guilt).”
History is a parade of dispossession. . . Remember this is not yet America : we forget the desperate contingency of our primordial magma. Kip feels belated. The centenary is not a happy occasion,
“my genuine feeling when I divine the Centenary: for is a semi-centenary not made of Combat and Stripe and a centenary of Orientation and Melancholy?”
The semi-centenary was a much happier occasion because the land was still New Amsterdam ; Kip is obsessed with the “vari-deported Wilden” (what everybody else calls the Native Americans) because he too feels bereft in this whole colonial business.
. . . the word “Wilden” ends page one. Jack writes in crystalline bursts : pay close attention to the final words of each paragraph : usually there lies the conceptual punchline. . .
But the sense of loss is much more metaphysical than material ; — Kip sneaks up on the reader, by the end, U realize he is no mealy-souled scholar, but an eschatological prophet of preterition, shouting :
We are all DAMNED because we must live in time :
“I shall take and analyze those some-centennial acts, which, to state prefatorily, can serve only as temporal ceremony for quintessence (and quintessence seeks time only in that time occurs within).”
Time is the enemy of quintessence : once U fix a thing in place, it becomes a paltry shadow of the Real Thing. . . one of my favorite lines in the book is Kip describing his mother,
“Mother, like a fatidical tide, lacked Granpapa’s early-century vivacity; but such marks the human course once you incise with perspicuity your glade in the forest: one might say that home eclipses dream.”
Home eclipses dream : Mind’s infinite potential terrestrialised, truncated by Action, or “that punctilious assimilation of mind and action we might call placemaking.”
The Forest is the dark teeming wilderness of eternity : every time U incise Ur glade in time, it means death. . .
There’s another De Forest : Jessé, Kip’s great-great grandfather whom he only refers to by his full name, — never as ‘great-grandpa’, — he was a Walloon separatist who was Kip’s ancestor who brought the family to the New World. . .
Kip is so disconnected from this remote past, the relational connection has diminished from “great-grandpa” to a Proper Named stranger. . . when does the link to the past completely disintegrate?
Kip realizes the colony’s anniversary celebration is an emblem of a fake connection with a completely annihilated past.
. . . despite Kip’s melancholy & elusiveness, his account is extraordinarily vibrant ; there’s the sense he pours out molten bronze of pre-America’s formational melting pot, fixing character sketches like baroque statues ; here’s Henry Hudson accidentally ‘discovering’ Manhattan :
“September 1609: through vaporous, alabastrine air the humectant crew and their inward-pointed Louvois, their Augustinian wayfarer, look out upon a fissured bay. Here a waterway, and there - and similar to a game of Gilet, where one empties the stellar purse for one, but possibly the wrong lode, - terrenity. Hudson selects (to cross-coaxing and dog-tired fettle, to dream and apprehension, to flanking viridescence) the western passage as the sanguinity and cupidity of the men that succeeds the river’s distension at the Tappan Zee is soon followed by deviation and taporing, by shock at the sight of animacies upon the riverfront, incredible but for the Anamnesis that you live by that art of God.”
The island emerges from the “vaporous, alabastrine air” like a dream. . . the “humectant crew’s” “Augustinian wayfarer” found “terrenity” like thru a game of “Gilet” : a game of chance.
Culminating in the shock of seeing living beings on the riverfront ; but soon it becomes like something U knew all along “Anamnesis” : the Platonic concept knowledge was already in U to discover. . .
3. “THE PRINTLESS FOOT”
IN THE FOURTH & FINAL CHAPTER, we get a good reason for the darkness haunting Kip ; he addresses Stephen DeLancey, one of the three commissioning bigshots,
“DeLancey, might I ask about when, not two and twenty, your pére died? I was your Third when passed mine. . . that death of parent be the Darkness and the parturition of child (our lychgate to Century Nineteen) the sole joy.”
A fan came to visit James Joyce before he died ; Joyce got news his grandson was born and he was euphoric ; the fan asked cheekily, “why? because there’s another Joyce?” Joyce got mad : another Joyce is irrelevant; what matters : the continuance of life. . .
But like Kip has no tether to De Forest, he lost a lychgate to the 19th-century,
“I feel not that - that feeling of when came the scythe for my dear Albartus, nor for father - when conjuring my poor ancestor upon the torrid beck.”
His son Albartus is dead. . . He has other children, but here is one more morsel of eternity being taken away from him. . .
Seeking Eternity : Kip is a writer.
The Forest can also be read as an elegy for literary belatedness ; there’s nothing for Kip to do, the great deeds have been done ; — as a novelist now : the great books have already been written ; U are left with this irrepressible feeling U are too late to leave Ur mark :
“reflections upon a goods-flown river these are not, but the standing lake and fixed foot - or, as said Shakespeare, the printless foot; Fixed for it lives and Printless because we have not a discernable eye for the object of creation’s past, much less our lone parabolic monogram. . .”
Kip mourns the end of history, but he’s writing this in 1723, the United States of America hasn’t even begun yet! He’s 50 years away from the beginning of our history. . .
The world will churn on without U, but if Kip really thought he couldn’t leave a footprint, he wouldn’t write how he’s writing : and if Jack thought the same, he wouldn’t have written this profound testament.
But a question that nagged at me over the course of my three readings of The Forest : Why does Kip agree to write this document for these men?
I think I realized it ; it occurred to me that the last phrase of the book “Counterfeiters of Kingdom” relates to the allusions thru-out to St. Augustine. But not the Augustine of the Confessions, but rather, his greater tome : City of God. Kip realizes there is only one true City of God : the heavenly one.
Everything on Earth is necessarily a counterfeit of the perfect ideal.
Despite all the ostensible death haunted pessimism, Kip is an optimist! In the original spirit of Candide. It’s not a pie-in-the-sky optimism, it’s terrestrial practicality : I will work with the system and the powers-that-be, despite my resentment, despite what was taken away from me.
It’s an attitude that says : this garden here is all we have, and if we cultivate it properly, we might just make something grow. . .
ENTER THE FOREST :
sold immediately on reading the first sentence of that marvellous prose