Notes from the Fog

Stories

By: Ben Marcus

Narrated by: Rebecca Gibel, Charlie Thurston

With these 13 transfixing, ingenious stories, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world - cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

In "The Grow-Light Blues", a hapless corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer's newest nutrition supplement: the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. A father finds himself outcast from his family when he starts to suspect his son's precocity has turned sinister in the chilling "Cold Little Bird". In "Blueprints for St. Louis", two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion in mourners at their latest assignment - a memorial to a terrorist attack.

In the bizarre but instantly recognizable universe of Ben Marcus' fiction, characters encounter both surreal new illnesses and equally surreal new cures. Marcus writes beautifully, hilariously, and obsessively about sex and death, lust and shame, the indignities of the body, and the full parade of human folly. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author's compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor - blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.

©2018 Ben Marcus (P)2018 HighBridge Company

Good but not Great

My chief issue with this collection is that the stories are quiet and meditative. Nothing much seems to happen because the characters spend more time thinking instead of doing. The endings tend to peter out. Even my favorite story, the opening story which I first read in The New Yorker, ends with a whisper. This is not Ray Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin,” which appeared to have inspired it, but a watered down version. I suppose Ben Marcus post apocalyptic writing is what goes for stories nowadays, but I prefer stories that take me places and characters that do something. I would not recommend this collection.