SHARKS!

Motherfucking Sharks

By Brian Allen Carr

Publisher: Lazy Fascist Press 

Pub. Date: October 20, 2013

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

There's something to be said for having your own review blog. I reminded myself of that after perusing the Amazon reviews for Brian Allen Carr's Motherfucking Sharks which recently won the Wonderland Award for best novel of the year. Here is a critically acclaimed novel of which Amazon boldly state the title in their pages. "MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS!". Yet not one review on the same Amazon page will have the title in the review. Why? Because any review with obscenity in it is immediately rejected! As of this date, Amazon has not yet admitted to the irony of this.

I mention this just to illustrate how weird our reality is. Logic often flies out the window and the only way to deal with it is to reject logic altogether and go with the flow. It was once said, "Fact is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense". I often think the Bizarro writer is saying "Why?" to that statement. If reality is not logical, why should fiction be logical? Would not a senseless reality be better illustrated in senseless fiction?

I don't know if Brian Allen Carr would agree with the above statements but his novels are certainly loaded with the illogical. Yet they stay rooted in our reality in sort of an extreme magical realism. I have read two novels by the author and I am tempted to call him the Ionesco of Bizarro. There is a bit of surrealistic dadaism in his writing yet placing that in the sparse, unforgiving, and very real landscape of West Texas is just short of brilliant. In Motherfucking Sharks (God! I love that title!) Carr's version of people turning into rhinoceros is sharks swimming in the desert, coming out of puddles in a desert storm and annihilating everyone in sight. Throw in the harsh realities of desert life and a bit of cannibalism ("That's not mule.") and the reader cannot help to think that he has stumbled into a different type of existentialism in which Godot has actually arrived armed with shark teeth. blood and mule stew that isn't mule.

I have been reading a lot of Bizarro fiction lately. I have stated in the past that I predict the best writers of the future may be languishing in the literary ghetto of Bizarro. Of the many worthwhile writers just beneath the surface in the field of Bizarro lit, I have also placed myself out on a limb by suggesting that two writers in particular, Andersen Prunty and Cameron Pierce, are most likely in the future to find themselves breaking through into the literary mainstream. Today I add the name of Brian Allen Carr to that very short list. Read either Motherfucking Sharks or The last Horror Novel in the History of the World and I think you will see what I mean.