Notes from the Fog

Starred review from June 18, 2018
Marcus’s refined and uncompromising third story collection (following Leaving the Sea), dissects the American experience through language that is always precise, unexpected, and alive. In the tone-setting first story, “Cold Little Bird,” a 10-year-old boy’s sudden aversion to affection threatens to dismantle his parents’ marriage. Two married architects attempt to build a potentially unbuildable memorial for a terrorist attack in the excellent “Blueprints for St. Louis,” while a mother leaves her own family to care for the husband and sons of her recently deceased sister in “The Boys.” The somewhat straightforward plots of these stories cede center stage to the brutal strangeness and ominous mood of Marcus’s language, which is best expressed in the collection’s centerpiece, “A Suicide of Trees,” a nightmarish tale of a middle-aged man searching for his missing father. Throughout, each story features moments of considered, lacerating prose (“A husband, these days, is a bag of need with a dank wet hole in its bottom. The sheer opposite of a go bag.”) threaded together by sentences that, like a marionette’s strings, bring the world to full, expansive life. This is a bracing, forceful collection. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency.

June 15, 2018
Domestic dysfunction gets some techno-dystopian twists in Marcus' third story collection (Leaving the Sea, 2014, etc.).For Marcus, a true believer in the austere, skeptical, experimental branches of American fiction (Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Dana Spiotta), outside forces of nature and technology are always threatening to unsettle everyday existence. In "The Grow-Light Blues," a man becomes a guinea pig for his employer's efforts to deliver nutrients via a lamp, which takes a physical and psychic toll. Similarly, the narrator of "The Trees of Sawtooth Park" is a test case for a mood-altering spray, and the story's careful shift in tone from sarcastic to submissive implies a costly kind of success. If high-tech "improvements" aren't the problem, low-tech catastrophes will step in: Two stories, "The Sun" and "Stay Down and Take It," deal with characters whose crumbled relationships are paralleled by approaching massive storms. ("So much of our relationship depends on him being alive," deadpans the latter story's narrator about her spouse. "Almost all of it.") And then there are problems whose sources are harder to pinpoint, as in "Cold Little Bird," in which a 10-year-old boy baffles his Jewish parents by becoming an anti-Semitic 9/11 truther. Pushback against oppressive parenting? Mental illness? Something in the ether? Marcus allows for every allegorical option while sustaining a peculiar seriocomic mood. Compared to his previous works, these are more conventional narratives, though he still admires abstracted metafiction; "Critique" imagines a hospital that's a kind of artistic commentary on hospital. But his storytelling is easier to coolly respect than fall for given how storm-clouded it is: We are "anguished little need machines," he writes, and asks, "Who does not seem pained, finally, when you examine them closely enough?"Richly imagined stories though this fog is a particularly dark one.

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August 1, 2018

Fog, hardly; confounded though his characters might be, Marcus (Leaving the Sea) delivers slightly tilted, sometimes futurist worlds in beautifully, icily precise language. Often his characters are crushed by corporate excess, as when moody, slightly misanthropic Carl is disfigured after serving as the guinea pig for his company's new nutritional supplement or employees clumping together at mournful gatherings realize that "an obituary had just been written for their industry." The pills they are prescribed after regular company physicals ("maybe so you didn't die...and cause a lapse in productivity") are literally hard to swallow and frequently pop out, as if the body knows to reject them. In more personal stories, Martin and Rachel are dismayed by their preternaturally smart, mature, suddenly withholding ten-year-old, while hapless George must deal with his hostile therapist, the randy paramour of his recently deceased father, and the celebrity sister he barely knows. In a particularly effective story, a couple whose marriage is freezing over must continue with their business--building memorials after terrorist attacks. Personality fault lines afflict the latest project, as pragmatic Roy challenges Helen's idealism; she thinks the project should communicate oblivion, perhaps via sticky smoke. VERDICT Excellent for smart readers.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2018
Marcus (Leaving the Sea, 2014) returns with another work of his unique and unnerving brand of fiction. Each story in this darkly prescient new collection immerses readers in distorted but startlingly recognizable realities, like a not-so-distant future riddled with terrorist attacks in less populated American cities, such as Tucson and St. Louis. In Precious Precious, a young woman is prescribed mysterious tablets that seem never to dissolve, and it's not clear exactly what they're designed to treat. In The Grow-Light Blues, perhaps the saddest test subject in literary history is deprived actual food and instead receives vitamins and calories via dangerously experimental waves of artificial light. Marcus is a master of injecting bleak apocalyptic premises with absurd humor and light moments, as when a brother and sister finally reunite in George and Elizabeth, despite Elizabeth's showing up on Interpol's Most Wanted list for aggressively harvesting fungi from the Great Barrier Reef. Marcus instills his fiction with a deep sense of unease, one that is both strikingly strange yet uncomfortably familiar.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)