Notes from the Fog, the inimitable third collection of short stories from Ben Marcus, opens with an eerie but familiar shift in filial behavior. "Cold Little Bird" follows a father's slow unraveling as his 10-year-old son retreats into cool reserve and stiff politesse. "I don't want your help at bedtime anymore.... I don't love you." By the time the boy is caught reading 9/11 truther literature to his little brother, the father has had it. "He was shaking his fist in his son's face. Just old-school shouting."
With pitch-black humor and a speculative flair, Marcus (Leaving the Sea) is a virtuoso at isolating the radio static that forms in human relationships. In many cases, like the estranged siblings in "George and Elizabeth," this shortwave interference is intentional: "her spam filter... was probably a group of human people, arms linked, blocking unwanted communications." The stories here are lean, every sentence flexing more than the sum of its parts. Although, keeping with the author's postmodernist inclinations, the fiction becomes more and more inscrutable the deeper one reads in the collection. "Critique," for instance, might render almost entirely opaque were its molecular descriptions of a nefarious hospital-as-performance-art piece not prefaced by the chilling (and telling) opening line, "In the year of I Can't Breathe...."
There are many standouts in this accomplished collection, but the elegant turns in "The Trees of Sawtooth Park" make it rise ever so slightly above the rest. In it, the fog of a pharmaceutical experiment and an unprecedented blizzard gracefully lift to unveil the human condition as absurd. It is quintessential Marcus and what makes his work worth treasuring. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness