Contemporary Authors

• The Sea Beast Takes a Lover: Stories Dutton (New York, NY), 2018

1. The sea beast takes a lover : stories LCCN 2017013525 Type of material Book Personal name Andreasen, Michael, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title The sea beast takes a lover : stories / Michael Andreasen. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, New York : Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2018] Description vii, 227 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781101986615 (hardcover) 9781101986639 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3601.N5497 A6 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Michael Andreasen - https://www.michaelandreasen.net/abouttheauthor/

  Michael Andreasen holds a Masters degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He lives in Southern California. His first book, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover, was published in the US by Dutton Books in February 2018 and will be published in the UK by the Head of Zeus in March 2018.

• Michigan Quarterly Review - https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2018/04/something-familiar-in-the-astonishing-an-interview-with-michael-andreasen/

  Something Familiar in the Astonishing: An Interview with Michael Andreasen
  Apr 12, 2018by Rachel Farrellin Interviews
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  “I have crockpots,” Michael Andreasen tells me, almost apologetically, when I first ask him about his writing process. He proceeds to dive into a seemingly depthless metaphor that involves multiple stories simmering on a busy stove, sometimes for years, while he dashes around adding ingredients, stirring, and checking constantly to see if something’s come together. This explains why interviewing Andreasen feels a bit like carrying on about twenty different conversations at once — which would probably be daunting if it wasn’t so terrifically fun.

  In person, Andreasen radiates the same energy and inventiveness that he packed into his debut story collection, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover (Dutton Books, 2018), released earlier this year. The stories are fantastic scenarios with emotional soft centers, described by Ramona Ausubel as “explosions of magic, aching tenderness, and star-bright writing.” Mermaids, alien voices, and headless teenage girls abound, but that’s only scratching the surface. These are stories that dare to be about love — familial, monstrous, erotic, unrequited, doomed — and their refusal to approach the subject by anything but unconventional means is a posture of deepest reverence.

  Andreasen holds an MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine and lives in Southern California. Drawing comparisons to George Saunders, Aimee Bender, and Karen Russell, his fiction has recently been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story. We met up over coffee to talk about the unsayable centers of stories, tentacles, and liquid Coffeemate.

  Each of the stories in The Sea Beast Takes a Lover features some fantastic element that feels absolutely essential: hapless sailors fend off an amorous sea monster and one another; grieving families load their fathers into crates and drop them into the Atlantic Ocean when they’ve grown too old. What’s the impulse, for you, to venture into fantastic territory?

  I think that most realism tries to show us something astonishing in the familiar and mundane. The fantastic, on the other hand, tries to show us something familiar and mundane in the astonishing. Think of it this way: A package arrives at your doorstep. It’s nothing special, just a plain while mailer or a slightly dented cardboard box. You tear it open without much thought to get at what’s inside, which promises at the very least to be more interesting than its container. But with the fantastic, it’s the packaging that’s interesting, the unusual colors and patterns, the unfamiliar symbols, the strange sound it makes when you squeeze it. You take your time unwrapping it as each layer reveals its own little marvel, but when you finally get it open, inside are the things you see every day: your own boring grief or fear or jealousy, your own stupid heart.

  But now, in all this weird wrapping, you’re seeing it a bit differently maybe. You notice all its contours and tiny beauties. It plays with the light in an interesting way. It’s heavier than you remember. It’s possible that the way you look at it from now on has changed a little. I think that’s why I turn to the fantastic — to see these relationships and feelings outside of their natural habitats, under the light of strange new suns.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that we might not even notice what’s familiar to us until we encounter it in a totally unfamiliar setting. I have this vague memory of stumbling across a box of Oreos in a supermarket in Europe and realizing that I had deep, complicated feelings about Oreos.

  Careful. We could easily turn this entire interview into a long discussion of the cultural and/or deeply-rooted personal significance of the Oreo.

  How do you start a story? Do you begin with a character, an image, an event? How do you know when you have a story at all?

  Each one begins differently. “Jenny” came simply from seeing a headless mannequin in a store window one day. “The Saints in the Parlor” was born from a series of images (specifically a picture book of saints I had as a child). “Rite of Baptism” emerged almost entirely out of that very rigid and precise liturgical form. I heard once that Raymond Carver got the line “What we talk about when we talk about love” from a conversation he overheard in line at the bank. This stuff is everywhere, floating around free as air. You just have to reach out and snatch it up.

  Photo by Andrea D’Agosto

  Case in point: after watching all the horrible pain and uncertainty my father was navigating as my grandfather was dying, there was an evil, selfish flash of a voice in my head that said: “We could avoid all of this if we just dumped old people into the ocean.” Immediately, the dutiful grandson / decent human being voice said: “Well now, that sure is an evil, selfish thought.” But then along came the writer voice, which said: “For sure, I hear you. Totally evil. Hundred percent agree. But just out of curiosity, dump them into the ocean how, exactly?”

  So they come from all over the place, which is good, I think. If a story comes at you from a different angle than the last one, it forces you to throw out the tools of the previous story and approach it on its own terms. Each one inevitably presents a unique set of joys and disappointments. With any luck, the former are enough to weather the latter.

  That makes me think of something Laura Kasischke once said, “I guess you use the tools you have at the time, and maybe use them up?”

  I like that, but I think you’re also inventing new tools as you need them. Or sometimes, as in the case of the set form of “Rite of Baptism”, the tool is basically handed to you, but you have to teach yourself how to use it.

  As for knowing when you have a story, you don’t really know that until you get it onto the page. There are times when a story collapses under its own weight, or, even worse, has no weight at all. You’re always balancing. How much weirdness can this story bear? How much emotional gravity? How much humor and lightness, and distributed how, and where? These questions might seem abstract, but they become real and measurable when looking at a piece of writing, and different writers weigh them differently. To me, fine-tuning those sensitivities is an enormous part of finding your voice and what you value as a writer.

  Going off your point about fine-tuning sensibilities — when I try to teach my students how to revise their writing, I lean a lot on Marie Howe’s idea of locating a piece’s “organic heart” and “unsayable necessity.” When do you know that you’ve found what a story wants to be about?

  I like “unsayable necessity.” I once heard the writer Brad Watson call it the story’s “black hole” — the invisible thing in the story that has so much emotional mass it pulls everything else toward it. I usually don’t see this until very late in the editing process. It can be dangerous to go looking for it, or, even worse, to know what your story is “about” before you’ve even written it. Every time I’ve tried to do that, the story inevitably implodes under the pressure. Occasionally you can tease out a theme without letting it take over. There was a moment when I was editing “Rockabye, Rocketboy” and realized that there sure were a lot of people watching other people do things in this story, and maybe, from a certain angle, this was a story about voyeurism and the distances we create for our own safety, but I think all I did after that realization was add a few more binoculars and viewing devices. It didn’t need much more. It was already in the story’s DNA. I think you’re right to say that stories have their own ideas regarding what they want to be about. You can disagree with them, of course, but you’ll need to be ready for a fight.

  What was it like going from individual stories to crafting a whole book? Did you have some kind of core organizing principle? Was the recurrent sea imagery something you were pursuing from the outset? I hear you’re a sucker for Cthulhu.

  Naturally, I’m a fan of all the eldritch beasties. Who doesn’t love a good tentacle? Lovecraft had that bit right.

  They’re like the iceberg of creatures.

  Exactly! A blind, unnerving reminder of the much larger menace lurking below. For a while I was actually writing them into scenes when I got bored. They’d get nosy, root through the cupboards, find little secrets. Usually they’d draw my attention to someplace I wasn’t looking. Just another way to inject a bit of energy into a story. You can always get rid of them later. Or you can’t, and you end up with the book’s title story.

  I’m not sure it was recurrent imagery that brought these stories together so much as a recurrent mood. I think even the stories in the collection that are technically disparate have a common feel to them, like listening to a choir of yodelers as you wait for your malfunctioning ski lift to catch fire and tumble into the gorge. Every writer has a lens. Mine happens to be all cluttered up with mouthy ghosts and bored mermaids. There were one or two stories that we took out late in the process because they didn’t quite fit with the others, but in the end it pretty much felt like all of these odd little worlds could be spiritual neighbors, or at least in the same zip code.

  I laughed out loud during the scene in “The Sea Beast Takes a Lover” where two doomed sailors are fantasizing about drinking a real cup of coffee, and one of them muses about adding a little liquid Coffeemate to it. The other promptly slaps him across the face. “How dare you,” he says in a low, hateful timbre. “In my coffee. How dare you.”

  Hah! I like that scene too. Since everyone in that story is more or less over the whole dying thing, it was difficult to create scenes with anything resembling stakes. (Ugh, I hate that word. It’s such an overused craft word. But never mind.)

  What do we talk about when we talk about stakes, anyway?

  I don’t mean to dismiss the whole idea of stakes out of hand. There are times when it can be useful to examine the relationship between what characters need and how they’re responding to that need. But I think more often than not, when “stakes” are invoked in a workshop, it’s because the reader isn’t really interested in the writer’s point of focus. “I wanted the stakes to be higher in this scene” usually means “I’m not interested in understanding what’s meaningful to you here. I need you to make it meaningful to me” which is rarely a useful way to approach a story.

  Getting back to coffee: It seemed like all these sailors really have left to get worked up about were the unimportant things, and coffee is one of the most important unimportant things there is. It’s one of those marvelous inconsequentials that everyone is permitted to be very particular about and everyone else is permitted to mercilessly judge. A friend of mine once watched me empty a thimble of hazelnut flavored creamer into my mug and audibly gasped.

  That’s my lamentable preference, by the way. I’m one of those philistines who adds way too much cream and sugar. My coffee is basically dessert. I feel an enormous amount of shame in even telling you that, which I guess proves my point.

  [Interviewer’s note: At this point, Andreasen is so overcome by reminiscing about coffee that he scuttles off for a refill.]
  Nerdy craft question —

  My favorite kind.

  Nearly every story is in the present tense. What went into making that choice?

  I like the immediate, wrecking ball-ness of the present tense, the way the scenery whizzes by and the subtext of every sentence seems to be C’mon man we gotta go!, so hanging out there tends to feel the most natural to me. If I do use the past tense, it’s usually because the vantage is important. Someone who knows this story, who lived it and survived it, has decided to tell it again, and that always brings with it a bunch of interesting questions. Is there something this narrator is trying to understand? Something they need to get off their chest? Are we just reminiscing, and if so, has the interim provided our storyteller with any clarity? Future narrators can access anything, reflect on anything. They have the luxury of a more perfect knowledge. Present narrators are trapped. They’re armed only with whatever thoughts and feelings are handy, and the only way out is through.

  Spoilery story question: One of the most stunning moments in the collection comes at the end of “Bodies in Space,” a story about infidelity and the elusiveness of genuine relationships in an age of internet fame. It ends on this frightening image of the main character pulling wires out of his forehead, endlessly. And then there was the line that took my breath away, when the story suddenly gestures to the man’s lost wife: “And here, under his forefinger, this could be the wire that connects him to her, the line that knows where she is and how to bring her back.” How did you get to that image, and that ending?

  That story went through a lot of revisions, but the penultimate scene was always a desperate act of entreaty and apology that was ultimately in vain. At the risk of musey-mystifying again: there are always questions that our stories ask as we write them, and to make it through the draft we often have to resign ourselves to figuring them out later. By the end of the first page I knew this guy had an alien implant in his head, the purpose of which he didn’t really understand, and to be honest, that was because I didn’t understand it either. I didn’t know what it did besides blink. Early in the story, when the most-likely-alien narrator muses about what its function or purpose might be, that was really just me reminding myself to figure that out at some point. After our protagonist tries to contact his wife and fails, in light of everything he’s been through, a little bit of self-destruction felt inevitable, and suddenly you’re in one of those rare instances where you realize that this is why you asked the question in the first place, so that you could do that work here and now, in this moment. I usually have a good amount of a story worked out before I sit down to write, but those little bursts of discovery, where the answer comes from the thing you didn’t know until you came to that exact point on the page — there’s nothing like that feeling. Your hair starts to vibrate. Your fingers twitch against the keys. That’s the good stuff, right there. That’s why we do this.

  Lastly, can you tell us a secret that went into the making of a story, or the book?

  I don’t know if this qualifies as a secret, but there are some things you don’t notice about your writing until you combine all your stories together into a book. For example, I didn’t realize until we were deep into editing that at least five of the eleven stories in the collection feature one or more characters vomiting, which strikes me as kind of a lot. I don’t know what that says about me (nothing, I hope), but it’s certainly something I’m aware of now. Also, I’ve been doing this thing recently where I’m trying to find ways to love words that I hate, and “barf” is one of them. It’s such a gross, juvenile word, but I’m coming around to its charm.

  How do you feel about ending this interview on the underappreciated charm of the word “barf”?

  That sounds about right to me.

  Find out more about Andreasen’s work at michaelandreasen.net.

  Inez Tan is a fiction writer and poet based in Singapore and California. Her writing has appeared in Rattle, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of California, Irvine. Find out more at ineztan.com or on Tumblr the-end-of-art.tumblr.com.

• The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-michael-andreasen-2016-07-11

  This Week in Fiction
  This Week in Fiction: Michael Andreasen on Writing with Solemnity and Humor
  By Willing DavidsonJuly 4, 2016

  PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREA D’AGOSTO
  In “The King’s Teacup at Rest,” your story in this week’s issue, a king and his retinue arrive to inspect the king’s newest property—or perhaps that should be “demesne.” But the property is an abandoned amusement park, and his retinue includes a dancing bear that rolls along on a ball; a young boy scout in search of his people; and a royal steward, who is something like the conscience of the story. How did you decide to combine all these elements, which are a mixture of both personalities and archetypes?

  I’d love to say that the story started with a crystal-clear vision of the king and his “kingdom,” or the scout and his quest, but the truth is that it all started with that ridiculous bear. Sometimes all you need in the beginning is an amusing character or an intriguing image to get your foot in the door. For me it was this huge creature on his ball, rolling all over the place but never touching the ground. He was just too much fun not to write, and the world and vocabulary of the story more or less materialized around him, springing from both his inherent silliness and his grim earnestness. When the king finally popped up, I felt like I had permission to make the story a little more fable-like, hence the archetypal feel of some of the characters. Once I had a good quorum of weirdos who irritated each other enough, it was just a matter of getting in there and describing the skin as it chafed and blistered.

  There’s something extremely affecting about the king’s quest. As far as we can tell, he’s a collector of amusement parks and also a jilted lover, his queen having run off with the guy who used to fix his rides. Now he eats rancid hot dogs and sits on broken-down rides. Do you get the sense that he’s doomed to do this forever? What is the drive that keeps him going? And why is the steward so loyal to him?

  I think he’s pretty staunchly committed to his path (we get a little glimpse of this at the end of the story with him carrying on alone), but I’m not sure if “doomed” is the right word. Or maybe it’s exactly the right word. He’s the king of doomed things, really—doomed places, doomed relationships—but I doubt he perceives it that way. It’s his natural state, and the natural state of his “reign.” In a way, it wouldn’t make sense for him to be anything but doomed. I doubt he would recognize success if he found it.

  As to why the steward is so loyal, what is it that makes us follow our leaders in spite of their obvious flaws? What keeps us from forsaking them, even when we know better? It’s interesting that you called the steward the “conscience” of the story earlier. There’s certainly a kind of steadfast devotion at work there, but I think it’s a devotion to an antiquated sense of duty more than anything else. He’s operating under a set of assumptions about what it means to serve. I think we’re catching him just as those assumptions are beginning to break down, which ultimately turns his service into yet another doomed thing.

  The scout could be considered, in some measure, deracinated. He didn’t even know he was a scout until the dancing bear told him. Now he, too, is on some kind of quest. Like the king’s, the scout’s quest doesn’t seem likely to end well. What would the scout do if he found his people?

  I’m not sure he ever will. His quest, like so many other things in the story, has been abandoned by the end. Everyone’s leaving something behind here. To me, the scout is at that moment we all face when we first begin to question seriously our inherited beliefs and practices, an act of interrogation that invariably makes the interrogatees (our parents, our teachers, our priests) uncomfortable, either because these things don’t make an abundance of sense to them, either, or because such close scrutiny can give way to some uncomfortable truths. The ancestral spirit in the story certainly isn’t having it. Nor, I suspect, would the scout’s people. If he ever did find them, I think the scout would likely see through the insatiability and superficiality that drives his people on. But, then, he has the benefit of an outsider’s perspective. It’s much more difficult to recognize these things from the inside.

  Your writing has a remarkable mixture of solemnity and humor. Who are some writers whom you admire who achieve similar effects? And what are you working on, or toward?

  VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
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  I don’t think you can talk about writing that combines solemnity and humor and not immediately think of George Saunders, whom I admire down to my socks. Donald Barthelme is another master of that playful, deeply inquisitive form, with stories that always have the feeling of keen scalpel work. I return to both of them regularly. Their books are humorous and heartbreaking in a way that makes one feel essential to understanding the other—the joke that draws tears, the wink like a knife.

  Right now I’m working on finishing up my first collection of short stories, which will include “The King’s Teacup at Rest.”

  More:Fiction

  Dive into the world of literature with The New Yorker’s weekly fiction newsletter.

• The Masters Review - https://mastersreview.com/debut-author-spotlight-get-people-michael-andreasen/

  The Masters Review Blog
  MAR
  9
  Debut Author Spotlight: Get Yourself Some People by Michael Andreasen
  Today, we are excited to debut our Debut Author Spotlight series with a contribution from the wonderful Michael Andreasen, whose first collection The Sea Beast Takes A Lover came out from Dutton at the end of February. Our Debut Author Spotlight series aims to illuminate the work of exciting new authors as their first releases hit the shelves. Authors contribute essays that talk about their path to publication; whether it be the inspiration for their book, finding motivation, connecting with an agent, or designing their book cover—these personal essays help demystify the publishing process. In our inaugural installment, Michael Andreasen talks about the importance of finding a group of writers who will give you valuable feedback and hold you accountable. Sometimes a little pressure is a good thing.

  “Writers will tell you that they write for themselves, that they write to see worlds born and dreams realized, and I suppose that might be true, but that ain’t all of it. At least not for me. I write so that the people I love and admire will say, ‘I liked that story. Tell me another.'”

  I don’t remember how long I had quit writing for, but it was long enough that I remember thinking: I guess that’s it. I guess I’m done with writing.

  I was maybe a year out of an MFA program—a program which had been great, by the way. Great teachers and smart readers and a handful of dedicated, insanely talented friends—everything you could want, which made the quitting feel that much worse. It wasn’t writer’s block, which has always been described to me as a kind of artistic constipation, all those pressurized ideas desperate to get out. What I felt was the opposite of pressure. Nothing was coming because nothing was expected, least of all by me. I’d never encountered this in my conversations with other writers. For them it always seemed a lack of time was the problem, or a dearth of ideas, or a demoralizing parade of rejections. I wasn’t getting rejected for the simple reason that I wasn’t sending anything out. There didn’t seem to be any reason to. You hear about muses leaving and lives changing, but no one ever tells you that you might wake up one day and feel that most crucial desire—the desire to tell someone a story—gone as the goddamn ghost.

  Flash forward farther than I’d care to admit: I’m at a party with some friends from my writing program, because we’re all still in the area and we’re all still friends. We reminisce about workshop. We admit that the things we used to dread about it—the deadlines, the critiques, the obligation to dig deep and excavate the very best within us—we miss those things now. We want them back. We hatch a scheme to start workshopping again, just the four of us, just a little, just to see. We propose a meeting the following month.

  I hadn’t had the heart to tell them I’d quit. I didn’t want them to think I’d gotten soft and atrophied. Oh god, had I gotten soft and atrophied? Was I about to embarrass myself in front of these dedicated, insanely talented people whose work I adored? I needed to get home. I needed to get writing…

  And out of nowhere, there it was: the pressure. I was an idiot. I hadn’t wanted to write for so long because I hadn’t had anyone to write for, no one who knew me and knew my stories and wanted to see more of them in the world. And not just anyone, but these amazing people whose stories I loved and whose approval I craved. Writers will tell you that they write for themselves, that they write to see worlds born and dreams realized, and I suppose that might be true, but that ain’t all of it. At least not for me. I write so that the people I love and admire will say, “I liked that story. Tell me another.”

  It’s been almost a decade since I came back to writing. I still meet with the same friends (again: dedicated), all of whom now have at least one book with their name on the spine (again: insanely talented), and as of last February, so do I. We’re all in each other’s acknowledgements, and we’ve all admitted to each other that we might not have this work if not for the group. We don’t meet as often as we used to, but we’re still writing for each other, and whenever there’s new work, there’s an email, and a discussion, and all the insight and incisiveness that can only come from years of reading each other. They know when I’m off my game, and they tell me. They let me experiment and help me hone. They’re the people I’m writing for, the ones I want to impress, the source of that pressure and responsibility that I need to keep going. “I like that story,” they say to me. “Tell me another.”

  Get yourself some people. Find them anywhere you can. Find one, just one, who reads you well, who can be honest without being cruel, who can notice your strengths and nurture them. Write to impress them. Write to entertain and enthrall them. Give them the best story you’ve got, and then another, and another, and never, ever let them out of your sight.

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Print Marked Items
Andreasen, Michael: THE SEA BEAST
TAKES A LOVER
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Andreasen, Michael THE SEA BEAST TAKES A LOVER Dutton (Adult Fiction) $25.00 2, 27 ISBN: 978-
1-101-98661-5
A debut short story collection that treads the line between the speculative and the satirical with vivid prose,
fatalist joie de vivre, and wild imaginative turns.
The worlds of Andreasen's stories are as multitudinous as the worlds of the American experience. There are
space worlds--"Rockabye, Rocketboy" and "Bodies in Space," in which two middle-management adulterers
have been abducted and then replanted on Earth as living recording devices for alien ethnographers. There
are ocean worlds--"Our Fathers at Sea" and the delightful title story, in which a galleon of anachronistic
scallywags is slowly scuttled by an amorous squid. There are fun-house worlds--"The King's Teacup at
Rest," "Rite of Baptism"--and worlds in which the Southern California-flavored constants of suburban
sprawl, lonely interstate connectors, and the isolated interiors of middle-class lives are interrupted by saints
and saviors, headless sisters, and prepubescent psychopaths transformed into living gods of fire.
Throughout, the author's pitch-perfect sense of the linguistic weird--the "sort-of-otters already bobbing in
dagger-toothed flotillas," the "parable of the independent subcontractor and the hornet's nest"--hones the
humor of these stories to an uneasy keen. Andreasen's style is reminiscent of George Saunders at his most
cynical, and yet the collection as a whole is marred by a kind of cavalier misogyny that echoes through even
the most sensitively wrought stories. The women of these fictions are caretakers, porn stars, and whores.
They are absent wives and headless sisters. Erased by the relentless, boisterous boy-dom of the plots, the
potential in the female characters' identities is sacrificed in service to the sight gag, the fun-house parable,
the cautionary tale of male predation. It is a disappointing flaw in an otherwise impressive debut.
Energetic and engaging, these stories benefit from the sheer vigor of their telling but ultimately propose
more than they produce.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Andreasen, Michael: THE SEA BEAST TAKES A LOVER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518491347/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6e0c6dd4. Accessed 1 July 2018.
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The Sea Beast Takes a Lover
Alan Keep
Booklist.
114.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2018): p30+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover.
By Michael Andreasen.
Feb. 2018. 240p. Dutton, $25 (9781101986615).
Andreasen's debut collection brings together a wide variety of stories that merge very real-world subjects
such as love or faith with bizarre and fantastical elements. Fans of Kelly Link (Get in Trouble, 2015) or
other slipstream authors will be familiar with this particular brand of writing that floats between the
boundaries of genre and literary fiction. The stories in The Sea Beast Takes a Lover often wander more
toward the literary, but overall each strikes the balance between fantasy as metaphor and fantasy in itself
very well. Highlights of the collection include the title story, in which a lovestruck kraken holds a ship and
its increasingly depressed crew hostage; "The King's Teacup at Rest," concerning a king of abandoned
amusements and his court as they forlornly drift along; "The Saints in the Parlor," who explore a mysterious
house as well as their own pasts; and "Rockabye, Rocketboy" about a fascinating rocket-powered teen and
those who watch him from afar. Highly recommended for both fans of literary speculative fiction and
general readers.--Alan Keep
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Keep, Alan. "The Sea Beast Takes a Lover." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 30+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185587/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23e097e8.
Accessed 1 July 2018.
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The Sea Beast Takes a Lover
Publishers Weekly.
264.51 (Dec. 11, 2017): p145.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover
Michael Andreasen. Dutton, $25 (240p) ISBN 978-1-101-98661-5
Andreasen's vivid stories favor incident over inner monologue and have notes of adventure fiction, fantasy,
and fairy tales. In the title story, a ship called the Winsome Bride is slowly sinking, trapped in the clutches
of an immense sea creature that mistakes it for its lover, driving the colorful crew to distraction and even
insanity (this is not explicitly a period piece--one character is reading The World According to Garp).
"Rockabye, Rocketboy" charts the impossible, unrequited obsession of a young model with the title
character, a sort of superhero. "Andy, Lord of Ruin" follows, in a formal voice', the literal explosion of the
title character, as witnessed and debated by society. Not only is the premise provocative, the story is also
full of small quirks; one character is fed "a diet of Kleenex and rolled newspaper." Andreasen has the soul
of a poet and the heart of a yarn spinner; he breathes new life into familiar tropes via the ingenuity of his
storytelling and his tendency to color outside the lines. The 11 refreshing stories in this debut collection are
full of delicious detours, and ultimately they're the point. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Sea Beast Takes a Lover." Publishers Weekly, 11 Dec. 2017, p. 145. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521875912/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c0eeaa58.
Accessed 1 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A521875912

"Andreasen, Michael: THE SEA BEAST TAKES A LOVER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518491347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 1 July 2018. Keep, Alan. "The Sea Beast Takes a Lover." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 30+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185587/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 1 July 2018. "The Sea Beast Takes a Lover." Publishers Weekly, 11 Dec. 2017, p. 145. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521875912/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 1 July 2018.

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