Dead Plates

 Dead Plates by David Llewelyn 

I’m not sure if I understood Dead Plates correctly- it really doesn’t make much sense, even if it’s rather lovely and atmospheric, the more it goes on the more you realize it has no intent on being coherent whatsoever. This is the one where Bilis reveals he can just infinitely produce sentient duplicates of himself with absolutely no problems. This is integral to the plot, yet it brings up many questions there are no satisfying answers to. It is not interested in providing you with explanations. You simply just have to accept that, which I think is rather ludicrous, even for Bilis, who has previously been established to be a character who can almost do whatever he wants, from vortex free Time Travel to a mastery over memory. At a certain point you have to wonder - what the hell IS Bilis?? These questions are best when subtle and creeping insidious background stuff leads you to them, not when you’re wondering how an entire plot can take place.

If you can accept that Bilis is killing off fully sentient versions of himself (who are strangely apathetic to this) in order to lead a false trail and has already done so many times already, Dead Plates is a lot of fun. That’s a big fucking if, but it’s true. It takes place at a restaurant where you see four rather distinct and fun characters, interrupted by Bilis, who just sort of decides to torment them by unearthing memories of times they have killed him before. He just sort of talks to all of them and you get this series of frankly chilling vignettes where he’s almost just kind of playing with them for his own enjoyment. He almost convinces them into saying they’ve killed him before, and it’s nicely creepy, seeing this power he has over these poor innocent people, and how they’re just killers now, and they have to live with that, and at least one form of Bilis is going to torment them forever. 

That’s miserably cool and scary stuff, and it works, it works very well, until you think about it. Finishing Dead Plates was a strange sensation, because it ends so suddenly in the middle of a scene that you pause and wonder - “wait, there’s no explanation to any of that?” Part of me loves this as an exercise in the unknown, something that generally works quite well in the horror genre, but part of me finds it an absolutely abhorrent example of story structure. When there’s a final horror twist or you don’t really get to see what the monster looks like in a piece of media, your usual question isn’t “Why??” Bilis has never really demonstrated anything like this before, and I feel he would have. That being said, like most installments of the Bilis MR, Murray Melvin relishes this material, and this is exactly the sort of part a magnificent actor like him deserves. While I leave Dead Plates with a sense of puzzlement, and indeed, every Bilis story will always stand in the shadow of Deadbeat Escape - it doesn’t really matter much ultimately when spending time with Bilis is such a fun and kooky experience. I hope we get more of this creepy self-replicating madman…. I just also hope it makes more sense to me next time. 6/10