Marc Lowe’s collection of fiction, “Sui Generis” from ISMs Press, reviewed for Full Of Crow by Lynn Alexander.
“Sui Generis” And Other Fictions is a digital collection (e-book) available now from ISMs Press. It contains 23 stories that Lowe identifies as being written while he was living in Japan from 2004 to 2006. The stories have been published in various zines and publications around the web but are now assembled in one place, which really gives the reader a sense of what he has been doing as a writer and how much he departs from “conventional” fiction. I really liked the stories he chose, and I think Lowe is one to keep an eye on.
The collection starts with “Sui Generis”, a dabble into the mad pond of situational parallels and Logic, as it was presented to many of us for the first time in high school Geometry class when our instructors-shifting gears or going crazy-suddenly backed off the shapes to start covering the board with directional arrows followed by or preceded by P’s and Q’s.
We see a character trying to make sense of the unlikely with both logic and probability: what are the odds that all of the bathrooms in a three story building would be undergoing “maintenance” at the same time? If this condition is true, this other situation cannot be true, and so on…What is real, what is likely? Things don’t make sense, they don’t line up, but the character is disturbingly nonplussed and simply resorts to piecing together his observations in his head despite the fact that they neither add up nor fit. We see this in many of the stories, characters that remain nonchalant in the face of weird occurrences, things that defy “normalcy”.
Welcome then to the odd stories of Marc Lowe, who weaves scenarios and characters into stories only to slice them up and lay them out on a platter so we can get pictures of his groupings before we start to pick. Some are layered, some disoriented, some straightforward and linear but with their share of twists. He pulls things apart, and puts them back together again in a new sequence, part of the looping strange.
The twists will undoubtedly plunge Lowe into the surrealist fiction column, but don’t be too hasty with the labels as he can hold his own in other columns as well. Lowe does juxtapose fiction with “surrealist” elements (and futuristic synthetic babies and animal jurors) but he does it in a way that brings the format itself into the mix, all aspects are up for grabs. He brings a mature surrealism that thankfully goes past the simple gimmicks of switching out weather men for talking chickens. He gets the entertainment value of doing that, he gets silly and strange -and he is no stranger to either-but Lowe’s work presents with a deeper deliberation.
The difficult thing about discussing a collection, even when all of the stories are by the same author and perhaps even thematically related (these are not, as far as my perception), is that they are unique pieces and the style and execution is not the same for each.
And yet- we don’t want to turn our discussion into a series of micro-review paragraphs. It is for this reason that I wanted to focus on Lowe’s style, while avoiding that kind of a break down.
My personal favorites: “Anchor”, which is just odd and trippy and exactly what I like to read. It almost becomes hybrid fiction-poetry, which is what my favorite fiction reads like.
“Light And Accomplished”, immediately following, is gory and a bit nasty but you won’t turn away from it. It was a different read the second time.
“The Skeletal Bus And The Tunnel of Youth” :
“you and your cohorts, riding your skeletal bus, possessing neither wheels nor engine nor driver, encroaching upon me like a cancer while I take the reverse course, my limbs and organs growing younger with each passing second, growing stronger even as you howl and grind your decayed teeth, your hair falling out and leaving a trail of gray threads behind in the stinking pissandshit water below”
“Strange Things”:
“You never listen, she says. I flip an egg. That’s it, I’m leaving, she says. The yolk oozes out, spilling onto the hot Teflon coating inside the pan, hardening instantly like gelatin. It sizzles, seethes. I’m listening, I say, straining my ears. I flip another egg. It sticks to the side of the plastic spatula. From where I stand I can see the empty baseball field. It is covered in damp leaves: damp, silent leaves. No one is there, but a black crow is perched on a rusty metal can on the (left) side of the field. It is eating something. I approach, taking extra care not to startle the bird. The stick is in my hand, drawing me forward like a magnet. I turn to look at the house. It is still there, obscured by grayish mist. The bird blinks its eye. The eye is like a giant black marble staring back at me. I flip an egg. It breaks; the yolk spills out, bubbles, a trail of smoke wafting up from it.”
Marc Lowe’s Biography:
Marc Lowe’s work has appeared in 580 Split, Big Bridge, BlazeVOX, Caketrain, elimae, >kill author, Farrago’s Wainscot, Pindeldyboz, The Salt River Review, Sein und Werden, Storyglossia, and other publications, and is forthcoming in the anthology Quantum Genre on the Planet of Arts (Crossing Chaos Press). His novelette, “Girl with Smear,” was recently published by the online journal Prick of the Spindle.
Having received an MA in Japanese Literature in 2004 and subsequently been a teacher of English in Japan, he is currently pursuing an MFA degree in fiction writing at Brown University in Providence, RI (graduation date: spring 2010). His website’s URL is www.malo23.com. (here)
This e-book is available as a free download from ISMs Press Here.
