Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Sip
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1979
WEBSITE: https://vampireconditions.com/
CITY:
STATE: IN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://sohopress.com/authors/brian-allen-carr/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Allen_Carr
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1979, in Austin, TX.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer; former high-school English teacher. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haut, IN, staff member.
AWARDS:Short Story Prize, Texas Observer, 2011, for “The First Henley”; Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel, 2013, for Motherfucking Sharks.
WRITINGS
Work has appeared in periodicals, including Annalemma, Boulevard, Fiction International, Hobart, Keyhole, and Texas Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Brian Allen Carr is a fiction writer and teacher whose work has been published in Annalemma, Boulevard, Fiction International, Texas Review, and other periodicals. In 2011, Larry McMurtry chose Carr as the recipient of the inaugural Texas Observer Short Story Prize. Carr has also received a Wonderland Book Award.
Short Fiction
Often compared to that of Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Denis Johnson, Carr’s work combines “noir, horror, and bizarro” in a kind of “spellbinding Southern Gothic,” according to Pank contributor Gabino Iglesias. Set mostly in the author’s native Texas and in Mexico, the stories in Carr’s first collection, Short Bus, focus on dysfunctional relationships and characters who have been beaten down by tough circumstances, bad decisions, and various kinds of heartbreak. In the title story, a special-needs teacher takes his students on a field trip to rob a bank. The money, he hopes, will keep the severely brain-damaged Marisol from being removed from the school. In “Whisper to Scar,” a father admits he hates his disabled young son and briefly contemplates drowning him on a fishing trip. The three main characters in “Over the Border” are driving into Mexico to buy prescription drugs when they casually kick a roadside beggar into the roadside brush; they joke and laugh all the way home. As Sal Pane commented in a Pank review, the author never flinches from confronting questions about violence and human imperfection in this collection, which presents its characters as “deeply relatable, funhouse mirror versions of ourselves.”
Vampire Conditions, described by Small Press Book Review contributor Mel Bosworth as a collection of “gritty and powerful stories that pop like pistols and leave the head filled with gray, swirling smoke,” contains six short stories and four pieces of flash fiction. Bosworth particularly admired the story “Lucy Standing Naked,” in which an Asian American teenager who dreams of becoming a country singer gains confidence with the help of the title character. The reviewer also praised “Corrido,” in which an intellectually challenged student tries to stab his teacher. In this collection, said Bosworth, Carr “strikes a perfect balance between pensive and humorous” and insists that his flawed and troubled characters are worthy of readers’ sympathy. Nervous Breakdown reviewer Richard Thomas expressed similar admiration for the collection, stating that these “cautionary tales [are] bound with bruised human flesh, taut and cracking from the tension.”
The Shape of Every Monster Yet to Come offers more of the author’s unsettling confrontations of dysfunctionality and violence. The collection opens with an extremely brief piece in which a child, sent to the yard to fetch a stick with which his mother plans to beat him, returns with a magnolia blossom. He hopes that this will make the beating impossible. But his mother simply says that she will use her fists instead. “Empty Handed Year” recounts the narrator’s first awkward sexual exploration and the continued embarrassment of its aftermath. Among the book’s most affecting stories, according to many commentators, is “We All Become Something,” a disturbing portrait of a violent man.
Novellas
Carr’s first novella, Motherfucking Sharks, received enthusiastic attention from commentators and won the author a Wonderland Book Award. It begins when a tattooed stranger wanders into a frontier town with a cartful of shark jaws and harpoons, warning the locals of imminent catastrophe. As he juggles a set of human skulls that he says are the remains of his family, he tells an outlandish tale: his family had lived nowhere near the sea, but rain had brought Motherfucking Sharks to the area, and they had killed and eaten his entire family. No one wants to believe this mad story—and yet the rains soon begin. And the sharks are hungry. As with his short stories, Carr infuses this novel with minutely described acts of violence. Writing in Heavy Feather Review, Brett Beach observed that Carr’s central concern in Motherfucking Sharks is not only the “grimy and uncertain morality that arises during times of crises” but also the ways in which the book’s readers become complicit in its violence.
Marlet, the protagonist of Edie & the Low-hung Hands, is a preacher’s son who lives in the postapocalyptic backwater of Victory. His freakishly long arms have isolated him from society and made him an object of scorn within his own family. Marlet’s only source of happiness is Edie, his brother’s wife, and in attempting to woo Edie, Marlet kills his brother and is forced to flee. He is pursued through a desolate landscape by the only other man with similarly low-hung hands: his own out-of-wedlock son. Observing that the book becomes “a sort of off-kilter mystery play,” Monitor reviewer David Bowles said that the “stark amorality of the protagonist . . . emerges so naturally from his physical and emotional deformities that I couldn’t help but sympathize with him and to despise . . . the eponymous object of his affections.”
The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World, set in borderland Texas, plays with the tropes of westerns and horror fiction. The citizens of the small town of Scrape are haunted by tales of “La Llorona,” a woman who allegedly killed her children rather than give them to her unfaithful husband. La Llarona now lives among them and leads a procession of zombified children to a watery death—only to be interrupted by a group of drunken and trigger-happy hunters. The survivors hide in an abandoned house, but they are soon plagued by disembodied hands. A way out can’t be found until the devil himself appears. Sam Moss, writing in the Small Press Book Review, enjoyed some of the book’s skewering of genres but found the result “piecemeal.”
Sip
Carr’s first novel, Sip, is set in a near future in which humanity has been devastated by a new addiction. People have begun to sip shadows, which give them a dark high more powerful than any other drug. Whole populations are quickly enslaved to these shadows, and society eventually collapses into violent tribalism and squalor. Sensing that the addiction has neared its endpoint, a trio of characters sets out across the Texas wasteland to find some way to right things. Mira is the daughter of a woman whose shadow has been stolen; Murk, an amputee, is a shadow addict; and Bale has grown up in a community living under a sealed dome that eliminates natural light so that addictive shadows cannot form. Together, they decide to find and destroy the man who took Mira’s mother’s shadow.
Along the way, the three encounter myriad other characters: an army of anti-shadow women; a Faulkneresque doctor; a comically insane military officer. Acknowledging the novel’s “promising premise and intriguing core characters,” a writer for Kirkus Reviews felt that Carr’s reliance on shock tactics and the “exploitative grotesque” undermines the book’s cohesion. Making a similar point, a Publishers Weekly reviewer appreciated Sip‘s interesting ideas but deemed the novel underdeveloped.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Sip.
Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2017, review of Sip, p. 76.
ONLINE
Brian Allen Carr Website, https://vampireconditions.com (January 31, 2018).
Clash, https://yesclash.com/ (January 31, 2018), Christoph Paul, review of Sip.
CCLaP, http://cclapcenter.com/ (January 31, 2018), Jason Pettus, review of Sip.
Entropy, https://entropymag.org/ (January 31, 2018), Gabino Iglesias, “The Weird Interview: Brian Allen Carr.”
Fangoria, http://www.fangoria.com/ (January 31, 2018), John Skipp, review of The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World.
Heavy Feather Review, https://heavyfeatherreview.com/ (January 31, 2018), Brett Beach, review of Motherfucking Sharks.
HTML Giant, http://htmlgiant.com/ (January 31, 2018), Benjamin Rybeck, review of The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World.
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (January 31, 2018), Loren Kleinman, interview with Carr.
Monitor, http://www.themonitor.com/ (January 31, 2018), David Bowles, review of Edie & the Low-hung Hands.
Nervous Breakdown, http://thenervousbreakdown.com/ (January 31, 2018), Richard Thomas, review of Short Bus; (January 31, 2018), Richard Thomas, review of Vampire Conditions.
Pank, https://pankmagazine.com/ (January 31, 2018), Sal Pane, review of Short Bus; (January 31, 2018), Gabino Iglesias, review of Motherfucking Sharks.
Small Press Book Review, http://thesmallpressbookreview.blogspot.com/ (January 31, 2018), review of Short Bus; (January 31, 2018), Mel Bosworth, review of Vampire Conditions; (January 31, 2018), Chris Vola, review of Edie & the Low-hung Hands; (January 31, 2018), Sam Moss, review of The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World.
Soho Press Website, https://sohopress.com/ (January 31, 2018), author profile.
Texas Observer Online, https://www.texasobserver.org/ (January 31, 2018), David Duhr, “David Allen Carr on Vampire Conditions and Being a Texas Boy.”
This Is Horror, http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/ (January 31, 2018), Thomas Joyce, review of Sip.
Tor.com, https://www.tor.com/ (January 31, 2018), Tobias Carroll, review of Sip.
Uncertain Tales, https://uncertaintales.wordpress.com/ (January 31, 2018), review of Motherfucking Sharks.
Brian Allen Carr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brian Allen Carr
Born 1979 (age 38–39)
Austin, Texas
Occupation Writer
Nationality American
Genre Literary fiction
Website
shortbusbook.com
Brian Allen Carr (born 1979 in Austin, Texas) is an American writer. He is the author of the short story collection Short Bus (2011) and was the winner of the inaugural Texas Observer Story Prize as judged by Larry McMurtry in 2011.[1] Carr was also a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for First Fiction, 2011.[2] His stories have appeared in Annalemma, Boulevard, Fiction International, Hobart, Keyhole and Texas Review, among others. He currently teaches English at Shelbyville High School in Shelbyville, Indiana, where he is known as the "English God". His book "Sip" has been greenlit for movie production for a future date.
Bibliography[edit]
Short Bus (2011, Texas Review Press)
Vampire Conditions (2012, Holler Presents)
Edie & the Low-Hung Hands (2013, Small Doggie Press)
Motherfucking Sharks (2013, Lazy Fascist Press)
The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World (2014, Lazy Fascist Press)
Sip (2017, Soho Press)
BRIAN ALLEN CARR
Brian Allen Carr is the author of several story collections and novellas and has been published in McSweeney’s, Hobart, and The Rumpus. He was the inaugural winner of the Texas Observer short story prize as judged by Larry McMurtry, and the recipient of a Wonderland Book Award. He splits his time between Texas and Indiana, where he writes about engineers and inventors at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. This is his first novel.
Brian Allen Carr lives in central Indiana.
His novel, Sip, is coming from SOHO Press.
He is represented by Bill Clegg at The Clegg Agency.
He can be reached at carr[dot]ba[at]gmail.com
Brian Allen Carr
Brian Allen Carr
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Brian Allen Carr lives in Indiana. His first novel, Sip, is coming from SOHO in 2017. He is the winner of a Wonderland Book Award and the Texas Observer Story Prize.
Take a ‘Sip’: Brian Allen Carr Talks about His Debut Novel
12/11/2017 03:48 pm ET
Brian Allen Carr’ short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Ninth Letter, Hobart and other publications. He is the recipient of a Wonderland Book Award and a Texas Observer Story Prize. SIP is his debut novel about addiction, friendship, and the struggle for survival.
SIP is now available through SOHO Press.
Loren Kleinman (LK): Can you talk about the inspiration behind SIP? Discuss the intro paragraphs to the collection and how it relates to the title.
Brian Allen Carr (BAC): The primary inspiration for Sip is addiction. Well, addiction and perception. The two things are pretty connected, depending on how you think about it.
Ostensibly, there are two types of addiction.
You have physical dependence—which to my mind is a kind of poisoning in reverse, where your body calibrates to a state of compromised existence and begins to feel toxic when the toxins purge—and psychological dependence where the senses have calibrated to an altered state and therefore non-altered states feel wonky to the senses.
Both are unpleasant.
Sip is a look at an epidemic of addiction.
In it, humankind has become capable of ingesting the sun-made shadows of sentient beings. This ingestion brings intoxication. This intoxication brings depravity. This depravity leads to a bleak future.
It is essentially a meditation on how humanity might behave if there were no buffers to intoxication.
The opening paragraphs quickly run through the woe of the world and position Sip as a fable. It is not a systemized universe I’ve set to create. I’m not a fan of books that info dump a false reality into existence. Sip says: this world can’t happen.
But, there again, it’s a meditation on addiction. If you’ve never been addicted, then you have no idea how bizarre a thing it is. To say to yourself: just don’t do this thing. To know how much, you hate it. And to do it anyway.
LK: How does the theme of ‘death’ and ‘sickness’ trace through your book?
BAC: Well, death and sickness are the way of addiction, so I’d say they’re stamped on about every page.
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It’s a funny book, though.
I mean, addicts laugh a lot. They cry, too. Sometimes, they poop their pants.
But one of the side effects of this shadow-addict society is limb piracy. That is to say, people steal the arms and legs of men, women, and children in order to enhance their abilities to get high.
It sounds bizarre, but Americans are addicts of pleasure and vice of every ilk, and I can’t even imagine how many foreign-born people’s lives were burdened so that I could type this sentence into this computer and send it across the internet to you. How many Native Americans were murdered so I could sit in this heated house in Indiana on this cold November day.
Just so I could feel good, and shit.
LK: Which character do you relate to most: Mira or Drummond? Why or why not?
BAC: Drummond. But for obvious reasons.
Or, no, Mira. Because she feels like so much of an outsider that sometimes she wants to kill herself.
Or, no, Drummond. Because he feels so trapped that he gets high to escape.
Or, no, Mira. Because she’ll do anything to make her family happy.
Or, no, Drummond. Again, for obvious reasons.
LK: How do you use dialogue to show most of the story?
BAC: Dialogue is my favorite thing, because it is the most natural use of language. You can’t learn it from watching plays though. Or TV. Or from reading. You have to go out and talk to people.
It’s great.
Have you heard of them?
People?
They’re like these weird animals who pay rent and like to bitch about their jobs. They drink from plastic bottles and shit almost exclusively into water.
Once a year they have birthdays, and they can get diseases that only affect their genitals.
With Sip, I tried to have a book rich in dialogue, because I thought the most important part of this book was how the characters responded to each other. Sometimes, in books like these, book sets in the future, authors try to make the primary function of the book be an explanation of how the future is different than now. I don’t really get that. Who would be narrating that, exactly? What culture has ever collected their stories to send them back into the past?
LK: What’s after SIP? Can you share the first line of that next project with us?
BAC: I’m working on a book about shame and mental illness and gun control and magical lemons.
It will be the most important book about white people ever written.
THE WEIRD INTERVIEW: BRIAN ALLEN CARR
written by Gabino Iglesias February 13, 2015
Brian Allen Carr is one of the best writers working today. And yes, I’m willing to throw down if you care to disagree on that level. His work is fresh and unique and exciting in a really weird way. He also gave me goose bumps the last time I saw/heard him read. However, the best thing about Carr is his sense of humor. I’ve gotten drunk with many authors, and some of my best hazy memories come from getting drunk and talking nonsense/books/writing/frontera issues with this guy. In any case, he has a new collection out with Lazy Fascist Press, The Shape of Every Monster Yet to Come, so I decided to ask him a few things. Here’s what he had to say.
GI: So I pitched a review of Motherfucking Sharks to a venue. They said yes. I sent them the review. They couldn’t publish it because it had the word motherfucking in the title. Can you talk me through the process behind selecting that motherfucking title?
BAC: Man, I wish I could. Thing is, it’s not my title. The book’s not really my concept. It’s Cameron’s. He came up with the title, and I think he’d actually asked several people to write the book before he asked me. I was, maybe, the tenth person he asked. Cameron is perhaps the best young writer working, so why he didn’t write the thing himself is beyond me. But Jim Thompson is one of my favorite writers, and he didn’t come up with the title or concept for The Killer Inside Me, and Motherfucking Sharks gave me the opportunity to be like one of my idols, so I jumped at it.
GI: You teach people how to write. Why is grammar in this country in such a deplorable state?
BAC: See, you’re bilingual, which means, beyond most, you understand language. I don’t think anyone who speaks one language really understands how language functions. The same could be said of musicianship–you don’t know how music works just because you can play one song. Americans suck at English because we suck at every language. We’re faking it. It’s just the one song we know. Knowing two languages makes you question the functions, the rules.
But I’ll say this: language is made to change.
If there are flaws, consistently, it is because the language needs to be improved.
So: their, they’re, there. That needs to be fixed, in my opinion. Two and to, too.
GI: The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World was not your last book and a few authors have published horror novels since then. What were you trying to accomplish with the false advertisement?
BAC: Well, and it’s also a novella and not all that scary.
But that’s not my title either.
GI: You won the Wonderland Book Award at least year’s BizarroCon. How did that feel? Is it better than on of them Pulitzer things?
BAC: It felt great. I was super proud. Eraserhead is such a wonderful outfit, and Rose O’Keefe handing me that award made me go crazy. This was their fifteenth year, Eraserhead. I hope they’re around for a million years, and I hope they keep letting me come back to BizarroCon.
GI: I like you because you’re a fellow reader. Who are you reading right now? Any new voices we should all put on our radars?
BAC: Man, I’ve been reading Juan Pablo Villalobos!!!!!! HOLY SHIT THAT GUY IS AMAZING!!! You should check him out in Spanish and tell me if he’s as good in that language. He’s got two translated in English, both from FSG Originals, and I think he might do novella length as well as any living writer. He’s also pretty political, which, for a Mexican is insane–you know how many heads were cut off in Sinaloa since I started typing this sentence?
I don’t think enough people read Alain Mabanckou. Broken Glass is one of the best bar novels ever.
Anything Archipelago puts out is worth your time.
Rios de la Luz’s debut, The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert, is gonna make a ton of noise when it drops in March. So is Robert Paul Moreira’s Scores.
bac2
GI: Who’s the worst rapper alive?
BAC: I don’t know, but did you see Katy Perry try to dance at the Super Bowl?
White American pop stars are the least talented people in the entire universe.
GI: The Shape of Every Monster Yet to Come, your latest book, is a collection of tales that deserve to be called both funny and brutal. What gives you such insight into the darkest recesses of human nature? Why are you always showing us how we truly are? What’s your favorite taco?
BAC: Barbacoa with cilantro and onions and chile on corn. All day. Any day.
Man, I think the difference between me and most writers is I’ve read a lot of books and I’ve been arrested. It sounds like I’m being silly, but I’m serious as shit. It’s rare to find a writer who has spent the night in jail, and if they have they’re the kind of folks who think Jim Morrison was a great poet.
Why is that?
When did being a writer–a person who deeply examines life and questions everything–become being about following social rules?
Most writers are rich kids who’ve never done any real work or gotten into any real trouble. It’s all because the endeavor is so heavily subsidized by education and people who work in education have to be boring.
Just wait until you can teach rapping at a local college. Songs will get fucking meaningless.
GI: I see you on Twitter doing your thing, but you don’t show your face on Facebook any more. You should. We talk about you sometimes. Anyway, why did you abandon the bastion of common sense? How do you keep track of your readership’s Zeitgeist? How do you plug your work?
BAC: Um, I had to leave Facebook because it was making me insane, and because I am constantly battling alcoholism and Facebook just makes me want to drink and be an asshole. Twitter doesn’t seem to have the same negative effect on me. I’m not sure why.
Funny thing about me, my books sell better when I’m not doing social media stuff.
In terms of keeping up with the readership? I don’t know. I like Goodreads. I can usually get a sense of things there, like how people are reacting to the books.
I wish I was better about social media, but I’m just not.
GI: Como andan las cosas en la frontera?
BAC: It’s great. Next year they’re forecasting a weak peso which is supposed to have a pretty negative impact in the Rio Grande Valley, where I live. But we haven’t had a recession down here. The rest of America had woes and we just partied right through.
We’re ballerz like that.
PS: I woulda answered this in Spanish, but my Spanish is made of pharmaceutical-bottle plastic.
GI: TSOEMYTC. TLHNITHOTW. Can we agree that those sound like Chinatown versions of Lovecraftian monsters? Also, were you asked to blurb Harper Lee’s sophomore effort?
BAC: Haha. Well, when you put it like that.
Man, I would blurb the shit outta that.
“Harper Lee has written another book that freshmen will read while stoned and forget all over again.”
bac3
GI: We talked about how Austin claims to always shine a bright light on all cultural endeavors but they tend to leave local authors out of it. Why is that? Can we fix it? I’m sick of having to travel every time I want to read my stuff to a crowd.
BAC: I can’t talk about Austin because that city just makes me sad.
GI: You’re one smart dude. That’s not a question, but I wanted readers to know that. Dangerously smart.
BAC: Shit, you should see me try to do math. I had to take college algebra three times.
GI: All jokes aside, what’s up with ping pong in the 80’s?
BAC: Yeah, I don’t know. Someone told me I said that.
I should get a shirt made.
I was in a bar fight once that I don’t remember, but someone told me I won.
Ping Pong in the 80’s is a lot like that.
Brian Allen Carr On Vampire Conditions and Being a Texas Boy
by David Duhr
@write_by_night
Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 1:59 pm CST
Brian Allen Carr
Brian Allen Carr PHOTO COURTESY: ILEANA GARCIA SPITZ
Vampire Conditions, the new story collection from Brian Allen Carr, includes his 2011 Texas Observer Short Story Contest prize winner “The First Henley.”
Recently I caught up with Carr and asked him a few questions about “The First Henley,” how winning the story contest has impacted his career, and why so much of his writing deals with characters self-destructing along the Texas/Mexico border.
Texas Observer: Did you write “The First Henley” specifically for the contest?
Brian Carr: I had a draft before I knew about the contest, a short story I was trying to do in the tradition of [Guy de] Maupassant or O. Henry, maybe even [Faulkner’s] “A Rose for Emily” to a certain extent because I knew the ending before I started it. There were a few other little storylines in it that I pulled out to make it fit the word count, and I think doing so made it a stronger story.
TO: Did you always envision a Texas setting for it?
BC: Yeah, definitely. In a lot of the story the setting is unknown, but it ends in Corpus Christi, and all that stuff is historically accurate. The first Lone Star Fair did take place in Corpus [in 1852], and it was supposed to launch Corpus as a really big town: they sent out 20,000 circulars, trying to get all these people to come and party—but not as many people came as they wanted. And there actually was a woman named Sally Scull who killed someone at that fair. That aspect of it’s completely true, or as true as the historians say it is.
TO: Are you a fan of Larry McMurtry [the contest’s guest judge]?
BC: I like his stuff quite a bit. I like different writers for different reasons, and with him, he’s pretty damn good at plot-driven narrative, and I think growing up in Texas he’s somebody that you know for sure. He’s very important, probably the most important Texas writer ever. Well, depending on who you ask: some say Barthelme, McCarthy, if you consider him now Texan… but McMurtry is in the conversation.
TO: He once said he’s a critic of the “Cowboy Myth.”
BC: I hope that’s what he likes about the concept of “The First Henley,” because that story intends to poke fun at the cowboy myth as well, more in the revelation at the end. It’s supposed to be one of those things where it’s all myth, and it really is inflated in the retelling, and so that’s the point of the conclusion.
But it’s all uncertain and really silly when you think about it; I mean, I love the cowboy myth, and McCarthy is still working in the cowboy myth, he just sort of twists it differently. So the cowboy myth’s still there. No Country For Old Men, that’s a cowboy story, it just has a different ending. The hero doesn’t win, or there is no hero.
TO: What was your reaction to winning the contest?
BC: When you called me I just knew it was some number I didn’t know, so I let it ring through. As soon as you said who you were in the message, because I remembered your name from writing the cover letter, I was like “No, no, no fucking way.” I’ve never won anything.
When I got the news I geeked out. McMurtry’s a cool guy, and the idea that he would’ve picked one of my stories, that’s pretty awesome. For someone who’s born in Texas and who’s a writer, that’s one of the coolest things that could happen.
TO: Who’d you tell first?
BC: My wife. I called my wife, then I called Eric Miles Williamson, and then I called my mom and my little sister. Then other folks here and there.
TO: What has the contest done for your career?
BC: More than anything else, it gave me a ton of confidence. The coolest thing was that all my non-writer friends knew what it was; they knew who Larry McMurtry was, they knew Lonesome Dove, they knew Brokeback Mountain, which he had just done the screenplay for. My mom’s favorite movie is Terms of Endearment. So that made me feel good.
It was a big load of confidence, something I needed at the time.
It’s probably a lot of the reason I was shortlisted for the TIL Award [the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2011 Steve Turner Award for First Fiction]; it definitely opened up doors for me.
TO: What did you do with the $1,000 prize money?
BC: I told my wife I was going to spend it on hookers and blow, but she told me I couldn’t.
TO: So you had to do it without her knowing.
BC: Yeah, I had to keep it on the down low.
TO: Would you call yourself a lifelong Texan?
BC: I lived in Vermont for a year, but other than that I’ve been only in TX. I was born in Austin, and have lived in Galveston, Houston, Dallas, Corpus, McAllen, Corpus, McAllen, Victoria, McAllen …
TO: Once a Texas boy always a Texas boy.
BC: There have definitely been times where I’ve been done with this place, but I just keep getting … I don’t know how to leave it, for a lot of different reasons. They must’ve done a good job beating that sadistic Texas pride into me in elementary and middle school, taking me to the Alamo and shit. When I was in Vermont it was during Kerry/Bush [in 2004], I’d be at parties and people would be talking shit about Texas because of Bush and it would piss me off; you get this sort of nationalism in being a Texan, if you grow up here.
Also, there’s not as much good Mexican food if you go north of here.
It just sucks when you’re in a place that doesn’t have any other kind of cultural influence. I get bored or nervous. My wife’s from Indiana, so we’ll go to Indiana … and I don’t hate Indiana, but it’s weird to me to be around all those white people, even though I’m one of them. I keep wanting to ask someone, “What the hell is wrong, where are you keeping all the other people?”
Additional cultures, whatever they might be, add a much-needed element to America, because otherwise America’s kind of bland.
But the majority of the people who make news from Texas are people I’d really rather be distanced from, like your Governor Perrys or your George W. Bushes.
TO: Did the TIL nomination give you a confidence boost like the contest did?
BC: Not even remotely close, for a couple of reasons. I didn’t really care if I won that; I didn’t enter myself in it. To me, what TIL does is they give away a prize each year to the book that did best in terms of recognition around the nation. Siobhan Fallon, who won the award, she lived on the base in Austin for a year and so she set her book there; but she’s on a big press.
TO: And she was just passing through.
BC: Exactly. She was just passing through. And the other finalist, Miroslav Penkov, teaches at UNT. But I knew that Siobhan’s book was going to win. I don’t care that I lost, but I wanted to lose to Miroslav, because he’s here, and it made sense to the mission statement of TIL.
To me, it feels like they’re just fools.
TO: Tell me about Vampire Conditions.
BC: It’s a small collection of six short stories, tied together in this sort of sense of self-destruction and the border. You can read it in an afternoon.
TO: Short Bus also centers on self-destruction and the border. What draws you to those?
BC: The border has made me see things very differently about the way people live their lives and the way people can do the same things so differently.
Like, we call it the Rio Grande River. If I drive 20 miles south, they call it the Rio Bravo; the connotation isn’t “brave river,” it’s “wild river.” They call it the Wild River because people die trying to cross it, we call it Rio Grande like it’s this big, grand thing. The reality is, it’s just a seedy river, and in most places you can easily swim across it. Life is so different based upon a river with two inaccurate names where in most spots it’s ten yards across.
For self-destruction, it’s just that people are the biggest pains in the ass to themselves. Most people know how to live healthy, manageable lives; but we don’t do it. We like to destroy ourselves. It’s our greatest hobby.
Brian Allen Carr lives with his wife and daughter in McAllen, Texas. His stories appear in Annalemma, Boulevard, Fiction International, Hobart, Keyhole, Kitty Snacks, Texas Review and other publications. He was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Texas Observer Story Prize by Larry McMurtry. He teaches at South Texas College.
Carr, Brian Allen: SIP
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Carr, Brian Allen SIP Soho (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 29 ISBN: 978-1-61695-827-5
A post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western, short story writer Carr's (The Shape of Every Monster Yet To Come,
2014, etc.) debut novel traces a brief and hobbled journey across the enduring landscape of the end of the
world.Around the year 2017, a terrible new addiction afflicted humanity. People discovered they could sip
shadows, ingesting a darkness more powerful than the strongest drug. Predictably, the other side of the high
is abuse, withdrawal, desperation, depravity. In short order, society crumbles; tribalism reigns; all becomes
violence and stark waste. A century and a half later, the addiction has come to its finale. In the precisely
realized landscape of southern Texas, Mira (the daughter of a shadow-stolen mother), Murk (an appealingly
foul, shadow-addict amputee), and Bale (a "domer" raised in a hermetically sealed settlement that
eliminates natural light) embark on a muddled quest across the Texas scrub to...do something. Ostensibly,
their mission is clear--they must find and kill Joe Clover, the addict who stole Mira's mother's shadow,
before Halley's comet returns--but, as with so much else in this exuberant book, their motive is
overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters and side plots. We meet the ferocious women of the
Shadowless Army; the Faulkner-ian Doc; the Dr. Strangelove-esque Capt. Flamsteed; Bale's doomed
brother, Drummond, and more and more and more besides. This, coupled with an uneven tone which
borrows just as heavily from Flannery O'Connor as it does from Chuck Palahniuk and an even more
unfortunate tendency toward the exploitative grotesque (amputees are an endless source of sight gags and
are sometimes beaten to death with their own peg legs; a saloon piano player is a waddling one-eyed midget
possessing a "voice, quasi-maniacal"), conspires to create a book whose allegiances tend toward the shock
and awe of its conceit and shy away from the coherent development of either its world or its main
characters. A promising premise and intriguing core characters but, ultimately, not enough cohesion
between the plots to stick them all together.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Carr, Brian Allen: SIP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495428032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=52ae1732.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495428032
1/27/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517090209007 2/2
Sip
Publishers Weekly.
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p76.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Sip
Brian Allen Carr. Soho, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-1-61695-827-5
Carr's jumbled and unsatisfying first novel depicts a dystopian future in which much of the dwindling U.S.
population is addicted to consuming the shadows cast by natural light. Mira, a young woman with poorly
defined supernatural powers, spends much of her time caring for her shadow-addicted mother. Years before,
those seeking to escape the addicts and the hardscrabble life outside gathered in artificially lit domes, but
recently, for nebulous reasons, the "domers" have been establishing outposts. Bale, a soldier banished from
one of these outposts, joins Mira and her addicted friend Murk as they cross the desolate landscape in hopes
of hunting down a particular shadow thief before the impending return of Halley's Comet, which will cast
particularly potent shadows. The parameters of the addiction and its variations are frustratingly opaque, and
the passages addressing the addiction's history and the way it shaped the world just raise further questions.
Numerous side characters and events add complexity without clarity. Interesting ideas form the core of the
novel, but their development leaves much to be desired. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sip." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 76. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099058/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8688c2d8.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494099058
Brian Allen Carr’s Sip and the (Literal) Future of the Acid Western
Tobias Carroll
Mon Aug 28, 2017 2:00pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]
Raise a glass to the acid western. It’s a subgenre that derives much of its power from alternately subverting tropes and undermining them altogether. If you’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, then you know the drill: a familiar setting—sparse population, lawlessness, a potential for violence—with more than a little concern for altered states and the grotesque. The recent resurgence of interest in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s work suggests the acid Western is gaining ground; novels like Colin Winnette’s hallucinatory Haints Stay and Rudy Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge of Yonder tap into a similar sense of mood and imagery. The acid Western aesthetic can be spotted further afield as well: in Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher and its television series adaption, and in Ben Wheatley’s film A Field in England.
There’s a whole lot of acid Western in the DNA of Brian Allen Carr’s novel Sip. Admittedly, this isn’t the first of his book about which that could be said: 2013’s Motherfucking Sharks was set in a landscape that could be read as a surreal version of the Old West—or a postapocalyptic landscape in which something has gone horribly wrong with the world. (And by that, I mean: sharks can appear out of nowhere on land, with feeding on their mind.) But Sip pushes against several categories at once: it makes use of a stunning speculative concept, it creates a surreal futuristic landscape, and it heads for the metaphorical and metaphysical in abundance. But at its core is something Western, and something Weird. It’s a high-concept story that never loses sight of the grit.
At the core of Sip is a haunting concept: what if people developed the ability to drink their own shadows? And what if, once they’d exhausted their own, they decided to try their hand at quaffing the shadows of other people? The ensuing obsession, violence, and horror leads to a radically reimagined version of society, in which the bulk of humanity lives within massive domes, in which light can be carefully controlled so as not to prompt an epidemic of infectious shadow addiction, and the desperation and bloodshed that generally follows.
While the domed cities that populate Sip’s landscape make for a powerful image, Carr largely confines the action to the raw landscape outside of them. Dramatically speaking, it’s a curious choice—it makes sense that the outlands would be where the dangerous people go and the real action’s happening, but at the same time, having such a striking location in this fictional world and not spending more time there seems strange.
Carr’s language takes on a deliberately archaic quality in describing the novel’s action. After a short introduction to the shadow-drinking concept, which posits it as something that might be mystical or scientific or entirely without a rational explanation, the novel properly opens. “The sun was up, so the dark could start,” Carr writes. “All about the ground, all in the same direction, shadows sprawled.” It’s a stark use of language, very much in the post-Cormac McCarthy school of ominous minimalism. But it’s also a reminder that, while this is a novel set in the future, its concerns are much more ageless—the fears of the past surfacing hundreds of years later, in new and ominous forms.
The novel’s plot is a kind of quest narrative, bringing together a trio of main characters as they explore the landscape. Two of them hail from the land outside of the cities: Mira, who spends her days stealing shadows from animals and bringing them to her ailing mother, who needs their sustenance; and her friend Murk, who’s missing a leg, craves the taste of shadows, and has a fondness for an ancient Doors album. They’re joined by a man named Bale, who is exiled from the dome for an act of compassion.
That absent leg points to the visceral paradox at the center of this novel: for all that it deals with the ephemeral qualities of shadow and light, there’s a whole lot of blood shed over the course of the narrative. One of the creepiest details of the world of Sip is that one of the properties of shadow addiction relates to, well, severed limbs. In one passage, Carr describes a machine from which arms and legs hang; they’re deprived of blood briefly, then jolted back to life, which renews their shadows. The description of it is surreal, suggesting something out of a David Cronenberg remake of Near Dark.
“Mostly, the thing housed legs, which dangled from a crossbar that they were fixed to with hooks, tied into the circuitry of the system with hoses that seemed red, but were in actuality see through, filled with blood. These appendages drooped from their housings, live nerves fidgeting meekly.”
Sip’s three leads certainly fall into the realm of bold types: Mira is the caring daughter; Murk is the unpredictable addict; and Bale is the newcomer in a world that’s alien to him. As with many an acid Western, this novel feels more about tone and location—and its unsettling central concept—than it does as far as an intricately arranged plot is concerned.
In the end, that’s more than enough. Carr’s novel exists in a consciously discomfiting overlap of genres: the location is science fictional; the concept is fantastical; and the grit of the setting reads more like a Western than anything else. Its weird energy and penchant for hitting certain visceral notes carries it to a host of unsettling places. Cue up an Earth record when you’re reading this one, and keep an eye on your shadow. Much like this book, they’re unpredictable things.
Book Review: Sip by Brian Allen Carr
August 14, 2017
“Carr does an excellent job of threading the separate narratives together to create a compelling and exciting story with a cast of wonderfully entertaining characters.”
He won the inaugural Texas Observer Story Prize (judged by Larry McMurtry) in 2011 with his short story, “The First Henley”, and also the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel for his book Motherfucking Sharks (Lazy Fascist Press, 2013). These two awards alone should tell you all you need to know about the range of work of Brian Allen Carr. Between December 2012 and November 2014, he published at least three collections and two novellas–an impressive rate of work by anyone’s standards–and Sip is his first published novel. It has been described as a “post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western” but the themes explored–addiction, friendship and survival–delivered in Carr’s own unique style, means that one short description does it little justice.
The story is set on an Earth gone bad. The demise of the world began with a child exhibiting behaviour similar to someone suffering from rabies. But when the scientists and doctors witnessed him sipping from his shadow, the world changed. As it is with human nature, curiosity got the better of some folk and soon, divisions and factions began to appear between those that succumbed to their shadow addiction and those that abstained. The former became slaves to the taste of their own shadow, getting high on it, some even going as far as to steal the shadows of others, while the latter built massive domes to house their cities and adopted a militaristic and moralistic lifestyle, without natural light. What Carr has created is essentially a post-apocalyptic world without the cataclysmic event. Instead the world has steadily fallen into ruin as half of the world became junkies and the other half became scared.
One group of “Domers” have begun to venture out into the world, protecting themselves with a train that continuously encircles their encampments while they seek to make contact with the other domes. Life within the domes is shown to be regimented and uniform, where everyone has the same haircut and they are all given jobs and rations. But one soldier on the train, Bale, dares to defy his orders and the natural order when he witnesses the intriguing Mira and her mysterious shadow. Mira is a young lady who lives in a small farmhouse and has to care for her mother since the deranged criminal Joe Clover stole her shadow, forcing Mira to “borrow” shade from animals so that her mother can sleep. The premise is original, and delivered with a wonderful style. The way Carr depicts Mira and the burden she feels when having to steal from the animals, and the way she communicates with each species and the difference in the dreams depending on the animal, is nothing short of tremendous. His sentences read like poetry, sometimes dark and often extremely emotive, but always with a rhythm and fluidity that makes the words flow from the page to the reader’s mind.
The story is anything but straightforward. While Bale and Mira find their fates intertwined as they embark on their own adventure, events at the train take a turn for the worse when outsiders known as The Shadowless Army, a faction made up of only women, target the train and lay waste to everyone, leaving only Bale’s brother, Drummond, alive yet imprisoned. Carr gives Drummond his own storyline, allowing for breaks in the main narrative which further highlight the author’s exquisite craftmanship (Drummond’s own quest is at times harrowing and bleak), but also introduces us to the Town of Lost Souls and its terrible inhabitants. This is the setting for the exciting finale as Bale and Mira, along with her childhood friend, the comical shadow-addict Murk, hatch a plan to murder Joe Clover, imprisoned in the town jail by town leader Doc, before the impeding passage of Halley’s Comet. But three members of the Shadowless Army will have their say before the towns fate is sealed.
Carr does an excellent job of threading the separate narratives together to create a compelling and exciting story with a cast of wonderfully entertaining characters. Bale is anything but a mindless drone, exhibiting behaviour that puts him at odds with his superiors and sets him on this path. Mira is enigmatic, seemingly simple yet wise beyond her years and with supernatural gifts that are only hinted at. Murk may come across as comic relief, but his character is deeper than that. The way he delivers the back story (in italicised passages at the beginning of each section) to provide the reader with just enough information to keep them hooked is brilliant. Carr knows he doesn’t need to spell every little detail out to provide a wonderful story. As in life, not everything can be explained and not every series of events comes to a nice, tidy conclusion. But the poetic prose he employs to deliver the story is vibrant and mesmerising. The premise of humans becoming addicted to shadow not only mirrors the horror of a blood-sucking vampire, but also the everyday horror of drug or alcohol addiction, and the degenerative effect on society, taking it to its extreme. Overall, Carr has delivered an exceptionally written and entertaining story with great characters and wonderful language.
THOMAS JOYCE
Publisher: Soho Press
Hardcover: 304pp
Release Date: 29 August 2017
If you enjoyed our review and want to read Sip by Brian Allen Carr, please consider clicking through to our links. If you do, you’ll help keep the This Is Horror ship afloat with some very welcome remuneration.
Buy Sip by Brian Allen Carr
Book Review: Sip, by Brian Allen Carr
Sip, by Brian Allen Carr
Sip
By Brian Allen Carr
Soho Press
Reviewed by Jason Pettus
Of all the kinds of bizarro novels that one can write, Brian Allen Carr’s Sip is an example of my favorite kind, because it has an actual three-act plot that goes from a recognizable beginning to middle to end, unlike so many other bizarro books that are essentially written-out versions of cartoons, just one random outlandish vision strung after another with no narrative thread holding them together. That said, though, I still found myself with a short tolerance for Carr’s manuscript, one of those kinds of books that’s much more interested in being poetic than in telling a truly great story.
The central premise is that one day the human race wakes up to discover that they can now not only “drink shadows,” but that it produces a better high than any other drug yet invented; the narcotic mania swiftly becomes a global panic and then apocalypse, destroying civilized society as out-of-control addicts knock out power grids and enslave entire populations in order to chase the purest high possible, the shadows of humans as given off by the light of the moon. Our story, then, takes place 150 years later, in an America that’s now been transformed into a kind of post-apocalyptic “working wasteland;” as we follow the misadventures of the teenage Mira (who now has a psychic connection to forest animals from all the shadow-bits she’s stolen from them), her addict friend Murk, and a man named Bale who has recently been exiled from the safe but harshly regimented domed cities that dot the landscape, where diffuse lights from all directions produce no shadows at all.
#BrianAllenCarr's #Sip is not a bad bizarro novel at all, although it'll still grate some CLICK TO TWEET
It’s certainly not bad as far as all this stuff goes, with prose that resembles Cormac McCarthy in its rough-edged poetry; but with a storyline that floats this much out in the ether of beautifully strange unbelievability, it’s hard to stay attached to any of the characters or care much about what happens to them, knowing as we do with these kinds of stories that there’s always a random chance of a magic fairy floating in and making everything right again. A book more to be experienced than read in a traditional sense, your enjoyment of Sip will depend directly on how much you can align your mindset with Carr’s when he was writing it, destined to be a wonderfully delicate surprise for some and a head-scratching disappointment for others.
Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for fans of extra-literary bizarro fiction
Review of SIP by Brian Allen Carr
SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 BY CHRISTOPH PAUL
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I never thought a book would make me look at shadows with suspicion. Brian Allen Carr is a bad man. Dude is the Aaron Rodgers of indie writers.
He’s literary AF but his books move and pace as well as any pro genre fiction out there. His last two novellas have been unique, entertaining, artful, and probably some of the best books labeled Bizarro in this decade. He’s killed it in the small press & novella scene but I always wondered can he bring the same magic to the novel?
That was some pointless pondering because SIP is easily his best book. It has one of the best hooks I’ve heard in awhile: people can get high by sipping on their shadows. Sold.
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But…the only problem with many high concept books is the writers don’t pull them off and the characters are plot beats instead of human beings. BAR doesn’t fall into that trap and I enjoyed spending time with Mira, shadow junkie Murk, and Bale as they look for a way to survive living in the shadows.
I am seeing more and more great books come out that blur in the lines between genre and literary that are as weird as they are artful. I love it and I want more books like his! Writers like Carr, Victor LaValle’s & Alissa Nutting’s latest, and the upcoming Marlon James series are taking the best of genre fiction and adding a literary level that has me excited about this new direction in fiction. Carr’s novel takes genre fiction out of the shadows and shows why stories are the only way we can see the light.
JUNE 16, 2014 BY GUEST POSTS
The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World by Brian Allen Carr
21800749The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World
by Brian Allen Carr
Lazy Fascist Press, May 2014
128 pages / $9.95 Buy from Amazon
Brian Allen Carr’s The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World is a bewildering book—a work of low-key madness. It’s a novel that moves across literary modes—from horror, to gritty realism, to psychological study—without ever quite embodying any one. In his introduction to the novel, Tom Williams compares the novel’s genre-confounding qualities to the border between Mexico and Texas, where Carr lives: “the border that exists between the fiction deemed as literary and that deemed as genre is far better policed and regulated than the border between Mexico and Texas.” You, like me, might be skeptical of such a claim—if anything, the Jonathan Lethems and Gillian Flynns of the world seem to suggest that the border between literary fiction and genre fiction has worked out a pretty decent immigration system—but Williams’ point still resonates: Carr’s novel is difficult to categorize. If anything, the idea of just one border is too reductive here: The Last Horror Novel feels, perhaps, like a dispatch from the four corners of the American Southwest, with Carr standing upon the intersection, dipping his foot into each of the states for only a second at a time.
Carr’s novel takes place in the evocatively named Scrape, Texas. Seriously, you know exactly what this town is like without me—or Carr, for that matter—describing an inch of it. Scrape is a “blink of crummy buildings, wooden households—the harsh-hearted look of them, like a thing that’s born old.” In this town, young and old alike seem stranded. The denizens drink beers, sleep with one another, and antagonize other races. A young woman like Mindy was lucky enough to get north to Austin for college to engage in artistic revelry, attending screenings at the cinema and falling in love with art films, but life blew her back like dust to Scrape. She and a handful of other characters—including racist Burt; his buddy, Manny; Tyler, the victim of Burt’s racism; jerk-off Tim Bittles, with his dick pics and “cell phone titties;” Teddy and Scarlett, who spend the novel either pre- or post-fucking; Blue Parson and Rob Cooder, who just want to drink beer all day; and convenience store clerk Tessa—wander through the town, working, killing time, and making secret their bouts of herpes.
A great boom—massive, shattering—changes this, and “newscasts show static.” Burt says, “Something’s off,” and he isn’t kidding: for reasons Carr never attempts to explain, horrors have been unleashed upon the town of Scrape. First, there is La Llorona, “the Weeping Woman,” a ghost that gathers replacements for the children she drowned. Then, there is the “fuzzy hand, the Devil’s hand, the black hand, the hand of Horta,” which brings violence and death to the world of the living. In short, the town of Scrape—full of small town American decadence—is assaulted by the myths of Mexican culture. And the residents of Scrape, in true American fashion, respond by fetching their guns and shooting without thinking.
This is a “genre novel,” yes, but not in the way most mainstream readers would expect. Instead, it’s a “genre novel” in a way that most literary/Alt-Lit readers (and readers of HTMLGIANT, certainly) will be comfortable with. By that I mean, it fucks shit up enough to be interesting, but doesn’t delve deeply enough into genre to be deemed boring. Early in The Last Horror Novel, Carr signals his generic divide while describing Scrape as being positioned between “two legitimate cities”: Corpus Christi and Houston. Carr’s novel, therefore, occupies an illegitimate space—not too different, really, from the so-called “illegitimate” space that genre fiction occupies. For instance, Carr flirts with one of the great tropes of the Victorian gothic: the notion of the “gentlemen’s club,” i.e., men of science, sitting around, discussing things that science cannot explain. Gothic tales tend to rely upon the unutterable: how, after all, to describe the uncanny happenings of the world? In this sense, Carr’s novel feels like old-fashioned horror: his characters huddle, attempting to explain the unexplainable. A rickety tree house becomes Carr’s version of the “gentlemen’s club.”
This is a short novel, and Carr’s style is elliptical and spare. A recent work of fiction like Katherine Faw Morris’ Young God comes to mind, though Carr is far more playful. Maybe the stripped down prose of Brautigan is the more apt analogue, and Carr’s cultural commentary seems to operate a bit like Brautigan’s: he embodies a milieu so fully that he winds up satirizing it without expending a single extra breath. Many of his chapters are just a few paragraphs, and the book’s already trim 121 pages contain a lot of white space. Within this small frame, Carr moves through literary modes that go beyond genre, from the dirty realism of Scrape, to a section labeled “Thoughts” that becomes psychologically probing and revealing in a way that nothing else in the book is. Then, in this novel of jagged edges, there’s an additional piece: a first-person voice that floats through the text—something between Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, though lacking either novel’s coherence.
Does all of this add up? No. Is it supposed to, or does it need to? On those points, I’m less certain. The end of The Last Horror Novel sort of dissolves, crumbling in the reader’s hand—but then, when unspeakable horror is unleashed onto the world, what other possible ending is there aside from gradual dissolution? This fatalism makes Carr’s novel feel emotionally muted but brief enough for this not to matter; it is, after all, closer to a long short story or novella than anything else, and as a result, Carr works out one idea and produces interesting results. It may not seek emotional complexity, but it’s effective in its portrait of characters that think themselves at a dead end. Ultimately, Carr is ingenious in externalizing this existential angst by deploying the conventions of a genre. There’s an apocalypse coming to Scrape, Texas, and Carr seems to be saying, “You think your life’s at a dead end? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
***
Benjamin Rybeck is events coordinator at Brazos Bookstore in Houston. He writes for Kirkus Reviews, and his work also appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature’s The Outlet, Ninth Letter, PANK, The Rumpus, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has received honorable mention in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and he is currently seeking an agent and/or publisher for a novel and a short story collection.
“THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD” (Book Review)
in: Book and Comic Reviews,Books/Art/Culture,News | August 15, 2014 - 9:32 am | by: John Skipp | Comments Off on “THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD” (Book Review)
I recommend a lot of odd books here on Fango. I consider that the heart of my job. Not just pointing out the big commercial strikes bowled straight down Target Audience Alley, but spotlighting the weird, improbable shots that – when pulled off – make the whole fucking game worthwhile.
To that end, the contemptuous rivalry between literary fiction and genre fiction is BIG LEBOWSKI-worthy in its absurdity: two strident scenes, driven by self-importance, self-loathing, and tribal hate, keeping score by entirely different sets of rules, yet crammed into the same arena together. The arena we call words, lumped together on pages called “books” that both sides worship like gods. Gods in need of salvation.
It is into this fracas that the demurely-titled THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, by Brian Allen Carr, inserts itself. And right there, the joke is spun. It’s both epically grandstanding and patently untrue. (At least a dozen horror novels were self-published in the time it took to write this paragraph,)
You could simply dismiss this as lit’ry “Look at me!” hubris, and miss out on all the fun. Or you could get in on the joke, and marvel at how Carr plays both sides against each other. (Guess which choice I picked!)
The setup is this: we’re in a tiny-ass town named Scrape, Texas, right on the Mexican border. It makes Joe Lansdale’s Nacogdoches look like a metropolitan area. Just a handful of regular people, ripe characters all (old white racist, his black and Mexican stoner buddies, a pair of young lovers, more drunks, strumpets, and layabouts), killing time till something else comes along.
Something else comes along in the form of a devastating cosmic rift that knocks everyone in Scrape down on their asses, then unleashes a swarm of Mexican nightmare folklore iconography upon them. Including La Llorona (the weeping ghost, and her endless trail of drowned ghost children) and a swarm of deadly, disembodied black hands worthy of Clive Barker’s “The Body Politic”, only hairy as tarantulas. And then shit gets just a little bit weirder, before ending badly for pretty much everyone involved.
But here’s the thing. Carr doesn’t write it like a horror novel. He writes it, flat out, like the late Richard Brautigan: a 60s-70s cult author and hippie fave (who did not, himself, much care for hippies), specializing in ultra-stripped-down impressionistic prose, not so much telling the story as dropping sparsely vivid notes about it. Making you fill in the rest.
Kind of a bastard, if you ask me.
But here’s the other thing: I really love Richard Brautigan. And have come to really love THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. All three times I’ve re-read it. For me, it’s that kind of book.
Because it’s so ridiculously stripped-down – many of the chapters are barely a page long, if that – genre readers cornfed on silo-sized Stephen King flotillas may think “This is the laziest writer I’ve ever seen.” Even a guy like me, who ceaselessly campaigns for books to trim their fat down to the bone, found himself thinking, “Jeez. This guy just set up something really juicy, and then went, ‘Nah, fuck it. Next!’” On first read, it made me a little bit crazy.
That said, I can imagine MFA-bred aficionados of The New Yorker‘s “literary still-life” school wincing in mid-disdainful snoof at the reek of actual brains blowing out of human heads, as Carr’s wicked gonzo shenanigans unspool. This is no flaccid, inert, contemplative assessment of the live unlived. This is the life unlived exploding. Unlived even as it ends. Flashes of batshit. And done.
Sooooo… if everybody’s expectations are gonna be deliberately disappointed and thwarted, by this thing or that, what’s left to like?
We’re left with the actual book itself. Carr’s writing, so dry and smart and lean. Saying tons with a phrase, a flicker of insight, a neurosurgeon’s scalpel flick. An understanding so deep of his people and place that he barely needs to say a thing. A use of white space so vast and empty it echoes and equals the desert it’s set in.
It’s also laugh-out-loud funny and relentlessly, shockingly grim, in the no-bullshit Texas modality guys like Lansdale have taught us to love. There’s something bracing about how little he says, how much he expects from us, and how little he cares about holding our dicks while we pee.
I don’t wanna read too much into this – provide the kind of wanky a-hole analysis that would hopefully send Carr cackling straight into his whiskey flask – so let’s just say that I love what a sly little experiment this is. Characteristic of Cameron Pierce’s Lazy Fascist Press, which is experimenting madly with ways to blow down the afore-mentioned literary/genre lines. And every other line they encounter, along the way.
By throwing off everybody’s expectations, and just doing what it does in a way I’ve never quite seen done before, THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD achieves – in bowling terms – a 7-10 split. It ain’t a strike. But it’s an amazing spare. The kind of shot that, viewed in instant replay, reveals just how deft and spinny and meticulous and lucky and hilariously game-changing a couple of moments can be.
Even in the middle of nowhere, it’s still the end of the fucking world.
More than any other book I’ve ever reviewed, I can’t wait to hear what you people make of this.
Review of Brian Allen Carr’s THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Brian Allen Carr. Lazy Fascist Press, $9.95 paperback (128p) ISBN: 978-1621051466
The line between genre works and literary works is one that is invoked and argued over above and beyond its importance. Some of the most successful and most interesting writers of the twentieth century have created great works that straddle, blur, or evaporate this line and have done so without dwelling too much on their breaches. It seems that many of the writers that consciously adhere to the restrictions of genre or ‘literature’ do so mostly out of laziness or lack of imagination, though just as often these classifiers are placed (unwillingly even) on talented authors by others out of laziness or lack of imagination.
The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World, Brian Allen Carr’s latest novella, is prefaced by a rather hyperbolic, though not totally off base, introduction by Tom Williams which sets out to address Carr’s meshing of genre and literary styles. The preface establishes a strange tone for the work, one that hazards drawing the reader’s focus unduly toward the line between the two schools while distracting from the work itself. While it is true that The Last Horror Novel includes aspects classically considered found in either Literary and Genre works, this is not nearly as groundbreaking, nor are the elements as integrated as the preface would have the reader believe. Regardless, The Last Horror Novel is a generally enjoyable, if a little uneven, work.
The novella follows a handful of natives of (hopefully fictional) Scrape, Texas—a desperate, drunken, poverty stricken border town where activities for the natives include drinkin’, fuckin’, shootin’ and little else—as they encounter a series of horrific, apocalyptic events. It should be noted that there is a considerable amount of blatantly illogical racism here, well used for depicting the characters and the reality of the area.
In the first section, Carr captures Scrape vividly in a series of vignettes, touching all the points you would associate with a dusty border town, evoking a place we have all heard of without unduly essentializing or sinking to stereotype. Carr’s language pops wonderfully in this section. In only a few lines he is able, through the description of one character, to paint a whole section of the town,
‘Mindy keeps her herpes secret. Crawls in and out of apartments that smell of new carpet and microwaved soup.
She knows the boys of high school intimate.
They are sharkskin smooth and firecracker quick.
They whip in and out of her like snake tongues tasting air.
She examines their tightness, the curls in their hair.
Gives them more than they want of her.
Make them say her name.’
And regularly includes gems like, ‘The black magic of bad living only looks hideous to honest eyes.’ He builds up the stifling heat, boredom and malaise effortlessly into an unquestionably lush world. This was the strongest section in the novella.
Just as we get to understand the world of Scrape, it flips upside down. Scrape is apparently cut off from the rest of the world and an intense, bone piercing, bottle smashing screaming infiltrates the lives of the characters. Carr switches gears and tells us an old border ghost tale regarding ‘La Llorona,’ a tragic character who, rather than giving her children to an unfaithful husband, chooses to drown them. While the change between stories seems abrupt and the prose tones down a bit, the tale of ‘La Llorona’ dovetails nicely into the crushing sadness and despair of Scrape.
The next section is a semi-comic depiction of the residents of Scrape as they come to terms with ‘La Llorona’ and the horde of zombified children she leads into a nearby body of water. Here, the work takes on its more standard horror genre aspects, and I have to admit I lost a bit of interest. A scene where a drunken group of hunters nonchalantly blows apart the oblivious children is mildly funny, but trivializes the despairing vision of Scrape that Carr had so painstakingly, and thoroughly, built. The previously separate groups of characters come into contact with each other in different ways.
As ‘La Llarona’ and the plague of children pass, the survivors engage in the classic horror trope and hole up in an abandoned house. Here they witness another wave, this time a plague of autonomous black hands which crawl along the ground. Facing their imminent demise, the survivors begin to make the tough decisions like who should live and who should sacrifice themselves while taking out as many of the hands as possible. Keeping with the border theme, this involves, rather than picking straws, picking cheap beers out of a cooler. This part does involve some thoughtful implications regarding a long sober character’s struggle with drinking in the face of death.
The book ends on a thoroughly absurd note, the Devil is involved, and one which seems to have been written in with too much haste.
Overall, The Last Horror Novel is a quick and enjoyable read. I am tempted to say it lacks depth, though this is not totally true. Rather, Carr builds a significant amount of depth, then seems to grow bored with it, or at least moves to favor the standard horror aspects instead. He revisits them here and there but does not develop them to their full extent, which I found disappointing. While The Last Horror Novel does engage in both genre and literary styles, these are (unfortunately) put together piecemeal rather than used together. (May 2014)
Purchase The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World HERE.
Reviewer bio: Sam Moss is from Cascadia. He has had his work in theNewerYork, Signed Magazine and The Eunoia Review. His fiction chapbook Rural Information was published in January 2014 by the Rockwell Press Collective. He writes at perfidiousscript.blogspot.com and nadadadamagazine.blogspot.com
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[REVIEW] Motherfucking Sharks, by Brian Allen Carr
POSTED ON OCTOBER 14, 2014
shark
Lazy Fascist Press
124 pages, $9.95
Review by Gabino Iglesias
Whenever I read Brian Allen Carr’s work, I picture an old, barefoot, bearded prophet with smart eyes breathing in dust on the side of the road in a small town somewhere in East Texas as he yells passionately about the end of the world. Carr’s economy of language is second to none and he has a knack for selecting words that have a natural tendency to flow well together. His prose possesses a distinctive cadence that brings together noir, horror, and bizarro and this combination allows him to construct something new and unique, and the glue he uses for that is a spellbinding Southern Gothic tone that has the uncanny power of forcing readers to keep turning pages no matter how weird the narrative gets.
Motherfucking Sharks kicks off with a stranger, Crick, arriving in an unnamed town with his mule, Murm. The mysterious man travels around warning anyone who will listen about the toothy death that comes from the sky, sharks that “fall as rain, as spores in the drops, to land on the land, and emerge from the wetness… These dastardly creatures are made to kill and fit with some magic that enables their swimming through the same air, the same air we now breathe.” Unlike other prophets of doom, Crick knows the horror he speaks of firsthand because he witnessed the bloody death of his wife, parents, and young son, all of whom were shredded in the jaws of flying chondrichthyes. Crick carries his family’s skulls in a bag wherever he goes, and pulls them out to drive his point home. Sadly, it doesn’t work and instead of heeding his words the residents of the town treat him as just another madman and he ends up in jail. With Crick is locked up, brothers Scraw and Bark steal Murm and plan on cooking the animal in a stew, but Scraw develops a bizarre relationship with the beast and his brother pays the consequences. The tale of the murder reaches Crick in jail, where he sits waiting for the tragedy he knows will soon befall the town.
There is much more to the plot of Motherfucking Sharks, but revealing all its secrets would undoubtedly lessen the pleasure readers will derive from discovering them as they read. While an engaging and bizarre plot, sharp dialogue, and outlandish characters all make this story entertaining, what makes this weird novel an outstanding read is Carr’s writing. Walking the line between unexpectedly philosophical and unabashedly outré, the storytelling here is akin to a Socratic text wrapped in SyFy movie aesthetics.
“You’ve never known horror until you’ve watched your son’s arm bitten from his body by a creature you felt certain could only exist in imagination, and felt the warmth of his red blood spray your skin as you rattled inside a cage incapable of coming to his aid.”
Carr plays with syntax the way M.C. Escher played with perspective. Motherfucking Sharks is constantly shifting, seamlessly going from being a bizarro Southern Gothic that resembles what a collaboration between Joe Lansdale and William Gibson would be like to Carr’s smart, unique brand of soulful writing. The mix makes the narrative move forward at a quick pace, but when Carr touches on emotional subjects, something he repeatedly and inconspicuously does, the writing demands a stop and, more often than not, a reread. This paragraph on the nature of fatherhood is a superb example:
“Diotima told Socrates, in his quest to understand love, that “the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of old,” and so if you’re ever called daddy, you become a kind of god, because attribution of the word to your being is testament to the notion that some shadow of your existence cast by the light of time will stretch into the future and echo toward eternity.”
Pop culture has turned sharks into a running joke, but with a lot of humor, a healthy dose of gore, outstanding prose, and an invitation to murder a child, Motherfucking Sharks has taken them into the realm of exciting literature. Surprisingly, more than Carr’s magnum opus, this book feels like the next logical step in the career of a writer than gets weirder and better with each outing.
***
Gabino Iglesias is a journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. Gutmouth, his first novel, was published by Eraserhead Press. His reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Verbicide, Atticus Review, Word Riot, Entropy, Spinetingler Magazine, HorrorTalk, and other venues. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias
Motherfucking Sharks, by Brian Allen Carr
Heavy FeatherMarch 24, 2014book reviews, fiction
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Motherfucking Sharks, by Brian Allen Carr. Lazy Fascist Press. 124 pages. $9.95, paper.
A stranger comes to town. We know this story, don’t we? He warns of approaching danger, which the townspeople ignore. And because we are familiar with this story, we know the tale will not have a happy ending for most. The stranger—crazy or haunted, ill and raving—is right.
Brian Allen Carr’s Motherfucking Sharks is a willfully horrific and lyrical exploration of the tropes normally associated with westerns. The problem with worn out plots, of course, is that they remain tired until a writer like Carr—energetic and inventive—comes along to smash every preconceived notion. No character exists in one dimension; no description is expected. Take, for example, this moment following a rainstorm: “The sun plows the clouds to nothing. The blue of sky like a sheet of life the fiery coin of the sun just clings to. It is there, casting rays that warm the puddles which sit stagnant and bored in their sockets.”
The book begins with a stranger, Crick, who arrives in unnamed town with his mule, Murm. Crick travels endlessly to warn of sharks that “fall as rain, as spores in the drops, to land on the land, and emerge from the wetness … These dastardly creatures are made to kill and fit with some magic that enables their swimming through the same air, the same air we now breathe.”
With the town listening, Crick explains that he witnessed the death of his wife, his parents, and his young son long before—they are the skulls he carries around in his carriage, along with “harpoons and nets … the naked jaws of sharks, their multitudes of teeth chipping and chirping.”
Unfortunately, Crick is seen as a lunatic by the townspeople, and sent to the jail. Brothers Scraw and Bark take control of Murm, leading the mule to be slaughtered for stew. But when Scraw is tasked with the killing, he finds himself unable, and instead murders his brother.
The novella, broken into nine sections, contains many scenes in which madness enables people to behave as they would not otherwise. Carr includes the story of Tim, a young horse thief from the neighboring town, who has been imprisoned and sentenced to death for his crime. Moments before he is hung, a shark attack begins, which allows Tim to escape. He hides with his sister, Tilly, in a barn. Knowing that death is approaching, Tim confesses his one regret: that he is a virgin. Tilly, aware that outside “shivers of sharks swim rampant through the trees and streets gone red with the spilled human blood,” obliges her brother’s advances. In the uncomfortably intense and descriptively rich scene that follows, the brother and sister have sex while outside, “the sharks are chomping a bad-murder music.”
At the jail, awaiting the inevitable rainstorm and carnage, Crick encounters Kinky Pete. The man is so called for “the gnarled backbone that swerved and twisted down away from his skull.” He discovers that Scraw has murdered Bark after eating a particular batch of “mule stew” that contains plenty of meat, but no mule. “I dropped bowls of Bark … to the poor families,” Scraw explains, “but I don’t know if that means they’re part of Bark or if Bark’s part of them.” Kinky Pete soon dispenses of Scraw.
Outside, the rain begins: “Armies of drops fall, swelling the streets with impromptu rivers. The roofs cast sheets of rain from their lips like waterfalls. The thunder booms. The lightning strobes. The music of the falling rain hisses.”
The sharks are coming. To give away the rest of the plot would ruin the experience of reading Carr’s novella. It is at times thrilling and beautiful, and other times so gruesome and violent as to be unpleasant. Readers may be drawn to the audacious title or the bright, graphic cover; they may even see the masterful skill in Carr’s writing about violence. Days after finishing the book, I remain troubled by the story and my own enjoyment. I have more questions than answers.
Yet this seems to speak to Carr’s central concern: the grimy and uncertain morality that arises during times of crises. No one is a hero in this tale, not even Crick, who ostensibly wants to save people’s lives. His story is more complicated: his search for his dead son is driving him mad; the skulls he carts around do not, in fact, belong to his deceased family members.
But what do we make, afterward, of these sentences that twist and churn into syntactical masterpieces, or shock us with their directness? Take the character of Mum, for example, facing the assault of sharks: “She thinks: I bet it is a man, this shark. She thinks: I’ll spread my legs at him. With legs heaved open, Mum lays her head back, and a wild, electric lust spreads over her.” Likewise, how can a reader reconcile his or her enjoyment with the image of a baby attempting to suck its thumb, when its thumb has already been eaten by a shark?
Who are we, ultimately, to be reading a book called Motherfucking Sharks? What does it say that I miss the book already—the hypnotic rhythm of the sentences and unforgettable characters that kill and fight and fuck without reservation?
“Picture for me, if you will, the child you love the most,” Carr demands during the book’s longest stretch of violence. “Hold it in your head. Dress it with the form you’d least like to see killed. In this way, we have always been a team. I tell you a thing, but you spin it real in your head.
… We’re a team, okay? We’re going to kill this little kid together.
Kill this kid with me.
Put it in your mind and let’s kill it.
Just you and me.”
… I want this all to occur inside of you.”
Motherfucking Sharks at Amazon.com.
Motherfucking Sharks at Lazy Fascist Press.
***
Brett Beach studies and teaches at Ohio State University, in Columbus. His fiction is forthcoming in The Normal School, The Hopkins Review, and Mount Hope. He is currently at work on a novel.
BOOK REVIEW: MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS – BRIAN ALLEN CARR
Motherfucking Sharks – Brian Allen Carr
Great whites and makos and tigers and bonnets and lemons and nurses and threshers and blacknose and blacktips and spinners and bull sharks and duskys and finetooths and smalltails and silkies and dogfish and hammerheads, sharpnose, and browns. All circling, circling, circling their death-patterned courses, pushing the mass of horror-stricken humans deeper into their clump of false-security safety-in-numbers, huddling together with their backs to the murderous fish that had somehow stripped away order from the universe and learned to navigate against the laws of the physical world.
Have you ever seen a thing the first time and known its name?
These were the motherfucking sharks.
This book is…
Insane?
Crazy?
Motherfucking nuts?
… really quite unusual.
Oh. I probably should’ve put a language warning on this somewhere…
MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS: 4 OUT OF 5 STARS
Earlier this week I was reading another blogger’s book review (CouchToMoon’s review of Kiln People*) and noted the following comment:
But ultimately, 600 pages is too long to entertain such an absurd premise.
Motherfucking Sharks has an absurd premise. Possibly the absurdest premise you can imagine. But bugger me it works. I suspect this is because the book is super punchy, super short, even for a novelette. It’s 116 pages of ugly, inbred, desert communities being slaughtered by magical sharks. Magical Motherfucking sharks.
SYNOPSIS
This book has Motherfucking Sharks in it.
You want more? Fine.
A tattooed stranger walks into a wilderness town with a mule and cart, carrying harpoons, carrying shark jaws and carrying a warning. A warning of a coming storm and a coming terror. He tells his tale as juggles skulls, the skulls of his family. His family who were eaten by the Motherfucking Sharks, despite being on land and nowhere near the ocean. The rains came, and with the rains came the puddles, and with the puddles came the Motherfucking Sharks.
Understandably the townsfolk treat this story with a degree of skepticism, but it’s not long before it starts to rain…
REVIEW
Scroll back to the top of this page and look at that cover. Go now. Look at it! Look at the blood spatter. Look at the cactus and the hazy mountains, and look at those crazy flying Motherfucking Sharks.
Savage. Bizarre. Bizarrely savage.
The cover does not disappoint and it does not lie. This story is weird, frightening, and funny all at once.
Brian Allen Carr can clearly write – his characters are written briefly but beautifully ugly, those that you meet are all broken and bent, twisted and tortured. His horror is graphic and gory but still surprising and entertaining. Great stuff.
I could bullet point the plot in about eight lines, so there is not a lot of complexity in the story itself. However Carr spends his very few pages on showing us the people, displaying them like exhibitions at a freakshow, building a reader’s sympathies and/or antipathy. In the end, whether you like the characters or not doesn’t really matter, because the rain falls and the Motherfucking Sharks come.
The book is quite experimental – I’ve seen one negative review that likens it to ‘a bloated creative writing exercise’, and to some extent I can see where this comes from. A simple five sentence ‘man walks into a bar’ joke is spread across five pages, one sentence a page. There is a segment where it’s raining, and there are super short chapters headed ‘Rain According to Character One’, then ‘Rain According to Character Two’ etc, before a single page headed “Rain According to You’ – which is blank apart from some ruled lines for the reader to add their thoughts. In another section the author breaches the forth wall in an aggressive and disturbing manner as he asks you (the reader) to help him (the author) kill someone with sharks.
From a critical point of view, I felt that it was a bit too short – I bought the the book and (perhaps unrealistically) I’d have hoped that for the regular price of a book it would have lasted a little longer. There is also little in the way of character development – the story is simple, elegantly written but a little shallow (like a puddle…?).
Regardless, I chewed through this book with a vengeance and and savored every bite. I will also keep an eye out for more of Carr’s work.
Review of Brian Allen Carr's EDIE & THE LOW-HUNG HANDS
Edie & The Low-Hung Hands
Brian Allen Carr. Small Doggies Press, $12.95 paperback (132 p) ISBN: 978-0-9848744-0-8
Rarely a book emerges that is possessed of – at the same instant – slicing insight through verisimilitude and the unique throb of the surreal, with enough grip to strangle and enough bizarre magic to make it curiously unforgettable. Brian Allen Carr’s novella, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands, is such a book. A frightening and exhilarating ride with a heart that darkens as it expands.
Marlet is the second son born to a joyless preacher and a sweet-breathed booze addict in the vaguely post-apocalyptic backwater of Victory, where clergy fight death-duels to increase their congregations, and where Marlet’s freakishly long arms and hideously big hands are the source of constant (and often sadistic) scorn and disappointment for his otherwise respectable family. A loveless childhood leaves him with a propensity for swordsmanship that leads to an even greater propensity for killing. When a botched attempt to win over Edie – his life’s obsession – leads to the secret murder of his elder brother, Marlet’s decades of complacent angst boil over with him deciding to leave the only town he’s known in order to find whatever talisman might lead to his love’s reciprocation. Let the body count commence.
Marlet’s trancelike odyssey amidst bombed-over streets and roaming bands of malformed cretins with questionable eating habits and major skin deficiencies might initially conjure images of The Road (there is a salient father/son component that ends predictably badly), but that would do Carr’s novella an unworthy disservice. Edie’s lofted-but-never-flowery prose – “Every terror that rolled those blank-skinned men’s imaginations needed to be a lackluster candle light to my supernova of solicitude”; “speech flaccid in the freeness of liquor” – endows the book with an almost mythological weight, projecting a welcome exuberance onto a decimated landscape that never feels bleak. And like all good myths, there is a timelessness to Marlet’s particular breed of dysfunction, a devastating compilation of unsavory truths – deformity is never just skin-deep; love is almost always idealized and self-serving; spinelessness, especially as it pertains to the possibility of death, is a much more convincing motivator than the desire to act “noble” – that most people would rather try to ignore or fail to acknowledge in themselves, but which the characters in Edie face head-on with little or no qualms: “That fear is what has kept me alive through so many altercations. Not strength. Not skill. Not experience. No favor from some higher power. I am a coward and so I have outlived.”
It is to Carr’s credit that he renders one of the most unredeemable scumbags to inhabit the page (“I didn’t want to kill a woman. I hit her until she silenced.”) a surprisingly likeable fellow, an anti-hero whose violence-strewn quixotic wanderings are as provocative as they are addicting. Perhaps “likeable” is wrong. Marlet’s familiarly flawed humanity and unrepentant honesty serve to engross the reader, but it is ultimately what his journey signifies that resonates best: “You are uncertain about what lays beyond. You are so used to your veins filled with blood, your lungs with air, your eyes with visions, and your mind with thoughts. You’re fighting to keep yourself comfortable. When a sword is drawn on you, you know. There are two options.” A fight against absence, but also the motivation to deaden a pain that is more important than survival.
Carr’s alternative world might very well be more potent, more glaring than our own. (January 2013)
Purchase Edie & The Low-Hung Hands HERE.
Reviewer bio: Chris Vola is the author of Monkeytown, a novel. His book reviews appear in The Rumpus, The Collagist, PopMatters, Rain Taxi, PANK, and elsewhere. He is currently looking for a good recipe for kale chips that won’t melt his oven this time.
TOP SHELF: Edie and the Low-Hung Hands
David Bowles Mar 28, 2013 (0)
Edie
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Brian Allen Carr is rapidly becoming a literary force of note in south Texas. His first two short story collections are unflinching gazes into the darkness of the human heart that nonetheless find a fire guttering in that existential black (not to mention some real humor). With Edie & the Low-Hung Hands, Carr’s first novel, the author manages to explore the human condition with a Faulknerian bleakness and almost Biblical weight lightly seasoned with cosmic absurdity along the lines of Calvino or Beckett. Frankly, the dense little book reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (number two on my list of great American literature, right after Moby Dick).
Edie & the Low-Hung Hands takes place in a post-apocalyptic, nearly mythical Texas. In the town of Victory, an oddly long-armed man has lived a life on the margins of society, mistreated by even his own family. After killing his brother (with whose wife, Edie, he is desperately and futilely in love), Martel wanders through a sparsely populated, desolated landscape, pursued by the only other man with low-hung hands: his illegitimate son. Through encounters with vicious, “blank-skinned” figures, kidnapper shrimp boats, and impossibly old men astride buffaloes, Martel holds true to only two absolutes: his cowardly and violent need to survive (which, together with his unusual arms, has made him a formidable swordsmen) and his unrequited and impossible love for Edie. Despite finally understanding the absurdity and emptiness of his existence, the long-armed man cannot ultimately find it within him to make real memories of an actually lived existence: he seems doomed to spin out fantasy after fantasy and to lash out blindly at a world that won’t fit the lie.
Stylistically, the book was compelling. Carr’s style, with its Hemingwayesque rhythms and quasi-Elizabethan exchanges of dialogue, is a perfect match for the timeless quality of the setting and themes. Deftly, the author guides his audience through one bizarre set piece after another with such a straight face that the novella becomes a sort of off-kilter mystery play with Marlet as its Everyman. The stark amorality of the protagonist (whose father was a pastor who consolidated congregations by killing other religious leaders and bombing the roads leading out of town) is carefully constructed and emerges so naturally from his physical and emotional deformities that I couldn’t help but sympathize with him and to despise, for no reason I can explain, the eponymous object of his affections.
David Bowles is a writer, educator and editor. You can contact him at www.davidbowles.us
Review of Vampire Conditions by Brian Allen Carr
By Richard Thomas
December 20, 2012
Fiction Reviews
In order for a collection of short stories to work, the reader must be pulled into the narratives and settings as quickly and thoroughly as possible. In Vampire Conditions, a slim volume of grotesque stories by Brian Allen Carr, the immersion and compassion is palpable from each opening sentence. We are past the tipping point, along for the ride, and the destinations are always unexpected. These are cautionary tales bound with bruised human flesh, taut and cracking from the tension.
Carr’s stories are mostly rural, and he takes full advantage both of wide expanses of land and of emotion to show us how things unfold when nobody is looking. Take these opening lines from the first story, “The Paint From Her Hands”:
“When the baby came dead they held her for a few hours on the kitchen floor with their legs tangled in the purged amniotic fluid, and Tabitha cried with her head thrown back against the refrigerator door, but Barrow didn’t say a thing. He even breathed quiet, drawing the burnt-almond scented air through his nose, his thoughts as puzzled as dust floating in light. They had been to the flea market the week before and had seen a woman with a stand where she made dolls in the likeness of real babies for mementos, and they had smiled and laughed with her and had said they’d see her in a few weeks, and the doll maker held her hand against Tabitha’s belly…”
What a horrible moment, this tragedy, vividly unfolding in front of us. We get a sense of their unique world in his name—Barrow (not much of a stretch from barren, I think, or sorrow). And with the ominous doll maker, we feel a bit of the supernatural, the promise of seeing them again—and soon. It’s that twist, the dolls, that takes us in an unexpected direction. The reaction of parents (who are no longer parents) is filled with anger, desperation, and loss.
This hint of the unknown, this danger, is always there, right from the start, pulling us down the rabbit hole as we root for (or against) characters that struggle to find their way in the world. Again, a strong hook in “Lucy Standing Naked,” as we start the second story with a kiss:
“Lucy Colon kissed at strangers in the hall. She’d hold her face cold and still as winter concrete for the most part, but when she neared the strangers, got a step away, she’d turn her face toward them, pucker up, and suck a kiss through her lips. Most strangers wouldn’t even notice. Some would turn their heads unsure. Others might flinch at the sound, brushing their ears with their fingertips as though shooing away a fly. I only knew because she told me.”
We are let in on a secret, some kind of witchcraft perhaps, or maybe just the games kids play. Who knows? We have to read on to find out. But in that vulnerability, that risk taking, we ask her to do it again, to see what will happen, unsure whether the reaction will be positive or negative, but wanting to see something develop nonetheless.
Immersion. Compassion. And running through it all, dysfunction. Because we want to see things go wrong, we want to peer deep into the darkness, to witness the base desires of humanity, to gape at deviants as they try to fill the voids left behind by abuse, neglect and manipulation. Take this example from “A Brief OK”:
“The only real friend I had was this lady I paid for hand jobs at the library. She was hideous. Her skin was near the same color as the clump of dead baby that fell from my wife’s hiney, and I’m not sure how old she was, but I think she was going bald. I’d give her a twenty and she’d spank me off in the poetry section, we’d both be sitting on one of those weird canister things that you can stand on in the library to reach the top shelves, and I’d tell her about everything that was bothering me as she diddled me off—that funny flickering sound that hand jobs make. She didn’t ever really talk much, and when she did it sort of sounded like she was under water or afraid that if she opened her mouth too much her bottom teeth would fall out. She was always checking out books about “horseys,” and she always wanted to show me some of the pictures while she smiled. Yeah, come to think of it, she may have been a bit retarded.”
Where do you go from there? That’s all kinds of wrong, and yet, a part of us wants to laugh, while at the same time stone the man to death. But we also want to leave the poor slobs to their distorted salvation. Whatever the reaction, it’s hard to look away.
It is likewise in “Corrido,” a story about a teacher merely trying to do his best to save a few lost souls. When our protagonist opens the story by wiping the dirty butt of a handicapped boy, the shocking moment is disorienting, and the reader, unsure of what is happening, falls into the story of stunted emotions and mental limitations, worked over by Carr and left diminished, a bit of us dying inside.
It’s not a stretch to see glimpses of Denis Johnson, Ron Rash, and Daniel Woodrell in the writing of Brian Allen Carr. His settings are lush and yet bleak, his characters damaged but not beyond repair, his conclusions sad, but not without a ray of glimmering hope. In Vampire Conditions we are drained, and yet made eternal—forever altered, but still intact.
Review of Brian Allen Carr's VAMPIRE CONDITIONS
*ARC review by Mel Bosworth
Vampire Conditions
Brian Allen Carr. Holler Presents, $9.99 paperback (115p) ISBN 9780983258902
Vampire Conditions finds author Brian Allen Carr (Short Bus) busting his ass and giving the reader gritty and powerful stories that pop like pistols and leave the head filled with gray, swirling smoke. Six short stories fill out this deceptively slender collection that’s spotted with four flash pieces, and each story—and each flash, for that matter—is rich and heady, offering up characters and worlds that are often dark, full, and intriguing. In Lucy Standing Naked, a young Texan boy befriends the title character—a precocious and daring woman who provides encouragement and protection—as he struggles with identity issues and his potential as an Asian-American country singer. “I didn’t get mad at my mom when she told me I was adopted on my twelfth birthday. Mainly because she had already told me on my eleventh birthday. And on my tenth birthday. And on my ninth. On my eighth birthday, though, that time was different. That time I cried and cried.” The story is incessantly surprising, and in the end it’s about a boy learning how to garner confidence. In Everything Will Fall Its Way, a man brutally murders a possum that startles him only to find that the possum is pregnant. So begins another wonderfully full story, this time about a man in search of someone/something to care for. In large part, Carr’s characters are affected by some kind of loss or separation and so they’re looking for something—assurance, a friend or companion, a god. They’ve made their adjustments on the fly—like we all do—and they carry themselves in an off-balance, uneasy, very human way. They’re flawed—sometimes through no fault of their own—yet highly motivated which makes them compelling. The mentally challenged character in Corrido, for example, is hell-bent on stabbing his teacher. “He dug his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small pair of scissors. ‘I can see that you’re angry,’ I said. ‘What do you want to do?’ The horny one stepped toward us swinging the scissors as he neared.” Carr exhibits extraordinary craft and patience in his writing which allows his characters to be relatable and worthy of our sympathy. Throughout, Vampire Conditions strikes a perfect balance between pensive and humorous, and it shows a writer hard at work and well on his way to the next great thing. (August, 2012)
Review of Short Bus, by
Brian Allen Carr
By Richard Thomas
September 05, 2011
Fiction Reviews
212-6619-Product_LargeToMediumImageWhen you wander around the desert looking for trouble, searching for an escape, sometimes you find it. In Brian Allen Carr’s powerful collection of short fiction, Short Bus, characters drift through small towns in Texas and Mexico, engulfing these border stories as if huffing paint: Lost, disoriented, with questionable motivations and histories. Carr is able to weave into these adventures the heartbreak, the buried love and intimacy that is sought in the shadows, and then to leave us laughing, shaking our head, and wincing at the pain and suffering we have witnessed, wishing somehow that we could undo it. A boy loses his hand and his father contemplates drowning him. A younger brother considers setting his face on fire in order to gain the sympathy and attention that his older brother gets. A husband questions his pregnant wife’s faithfulness, drawing tiny moustaches on the x-rays of the fetus. It all unfolds under the stifling sun, shadows cast in every direction.
Carr creates vivid landscapes that are dotted with sharp details, every rotten board and rusty nail a sign of something more, something larger—the loss and exhaustion of a people that have given up rippling on the surface. From “Over the Border”:
“Whores. Oh, the whores. Their bodies beaten, drained like used batteries, so their forms held, but something in the eyes, a vacuous swallow of light rather than a twinkle, and a looseness of skin, so their bones seemed far away even as you stood beside them and eyes their smiles. They leaned in doorways to rooms that opened to the street, on either side, and the sun dipped toward an orange colored west, and a graying east, so the rooms, their pale light spilling, like twin strands of dirty Christmas lights pulled tight across a bed of dust.”
Carr’s characters are not whole and they are not framed here on their best days. No, they are spinning out of control, addicted and fractured, skittering about looking for a safe place to land, to nod off and rest. In “Whisper to Scar” we get a sense of the kind of mothers you’ll find in this collection:
“His mother didn’t find him for hours. She was probably out with her boyfriend. Huffing paint. Snorting meth. Videotaping sex in some basement. She’s like that. A small town fiend. Shoulders that scrape up through her flesh. Gums receding. Pimples. Tattoos. Stringy unwashed hair and cigarette breath. This was back when things were good for her. This was back when she saw still a waitress at Waffle House.”
When working at the Waffle House is the pinnacle of your career, things are probably not going that well.
Rooted in lives that spin out of control, that have gone off the tracks never to get back on again, is the suspicion that things didn’t have to be like this, that life wasn’t always so difficult. There were good times, once, and maybe they can be found again. There is a memory of civility, of meals eaten while sitting around the table, conversations that didn’t end with a fork embedded in somebody’s forearm. Life used to be normal and happy. But it didn’t stay that way. From “Hot Mess”:
“My father used to ask at the dinner table if we needed water.
‘Water?’ he’d say and pass the rolls. ‘Ice water?’ Then send the greens. ‘Cold water?’ And the butter would go clockwise. ‘Need water?’ Bread across the table.
My father set my brother’s face on fire.”
And this:
“My mother smoked three packs a day until the day of her diagnosis. In every old picture of her there’s a cigarette between her lips, or she’s reaching for an ashtray. She smoked so much that the walls in the house turned from yellow to green. So much my elementary teachers asked me if I smoked, because the stench followed me on my clothes wherever I’d go. In all my memories smoke pours from her smile. I used to think my mother made the clouds.”
There is a sweetness buried in here, a nostalgia. Carr’s characters are not all damaged beyond repair, without any redeeming value or flickering hope for better days. In fact, in the title story, “Short Bus”, we follow a teacher with a questionable history who is lured into the life of the handicapped children he teaches. He is softened by Marisol—an essentially catatonic girl—who spends her days in a wheelchair, eyes darting about, drool dribbling down her chin. But people are drawn to her—they whisper their secrets in her ear, and in a moment of great charity, the protagonist hires a cellist to play for Marisol, and the musician is honored by her simple beauty, the way the music seems to be meant for only her.
And this collection is not without humor either. When the aforementioned teacher takes his ragtag classroom of special needs students on a mission to rob a bank in order to keep Marisol from being kicked out of their school, , things get out of hand quickly. Tthe dialog and breakdown of the mission is a slow build-up to the inevitable failure, the break-dancing Pappi pointing his fingers like guns as he gets his groove on, the muscled assistant, Rocky, slowly morphing into The Rock, . It is a pair of scissors ultimately that ultimately dooming dooms the noble crime in progress, forcing our hero to regroup and reconsider.
What Brian Allen Carr has done with this collection of short stories is create a world where betrayal and lies are only the beginning of relationships, distorting expectations but not erasing all hope. In Short Bus we are treated to a number of tragedies and dysfunctional relationships, the sun beating down on us as we search for water and relief, as we laugh at moments with our hands over our mouths and hope for outcomes that are nearly impossible. Somewhere in the lush, hypnotic prose and campfire tales of urban legends there is a heart beating, urging us on, the solutions to all our problems waiting for us just over the distant horizon.
Short Bus By Brian Allen Carr (A Review By Sal Pane)
POSTED ON JULY 14, 2011
Texas A&M University Press
$22.95
My first encounter with Brian Allen Carr was over the internet.  HTMLGIANT had just linked to this long diatribe I’d written about a semi-obscure video game from the 1990’s. I checked the comments section hourly, and eventually a poster came on under the handle BAC saying how badly he wanted to punch me, or anyone else who wrote about video games for that matter. We started e-mailing back and forth, and long story short, things culminated in a bar with Brian hugging me like a long lost friend. That stormy juxtaposition—the easy camaraderie of men and the threat of violence just beneath the surface of everyday life—is a huge part of Short Bus, Carr’s debut short story collection from Texas Review Press. His characters are wonderfully volatile, and Carr, in the tradition of Barry Hannah or Flannery O’Connor, never balks at allowing them to punctuate a story with a terrifying act of violence.
Short Bus focuses on the Texas/Mexico border, and many of its characters—hardscrabble men and women who wear their hearts on their sleeves—reappear throughout the collection. The strongest stories are ones where Carr surprises the reader with unexpected moments of violence, not for violence’s sake, but as a new lens to explore characters we think we have a handle on. Take, for example, this section of “Over the Borderâ€, a moody story about three men who drive into Mexico for prescription pills:
“[The bum] smiled and bowed again. Then he turned to make his way into the nest of needles. Moving slowly, he raised a foot, his balance swayed and he held out his hands. That’s when Holt kicked. He reared back like a punter and struck the bum’s ass hard with the toe of his shoe, sending the grimy man face first into the spiky paddles, and the bum hollered as he thumped through the plant and toward the ground. His shirt tore on the way down, and he screamed when his body thumped the dirt.â€
This completely unexplained and mostly out-of-character act of violence begins “Over the Border†before darting back in time to before the boys made their pilgrimage south. It serves most importantly as an intriguing prologue, but it also adds a well-deserved sense of menace to the entire story. In the pages that follow, as the boys joke and holler on their car trip, the level of tension never dissipates because that image of the bum kicked into the brush never fades. Who are these men? What does Holt’s violence say about them? What does violence say about us? These are the questions Carr mulls over again and again throughout the collection.
There are standout stories throughout. “Whisper to Scar†is a particularly moving piece about an unhappy father who, even if only for a moment, considers letting his handicapped son drown on a fishing trip he never wanted to take in the first place. The story is cringe worthy, but in a good way. Where so many writers often look away from the metaphorical car crashes they set into motion, Carr never flinches. Another highlight is the titular “Short Busâ€, a bizarrely funny story about a special education teacher who leads his students on a bank heist after forcing them to listen to gangster rap. What makes “Short Bus†work is that the admittedly ridiculous concept is coupled with real emotion and insight reminiscent of the final pages of Douglas Coupland’s slacker classic Generation X. On his first day of classes, the protagonist confronts a silent student while the others play outside:
“Marisol’s body lay crooked. Her limbs shaped like a crab and pulled tight toward her… That was the first time I talked. Maybe it was the smell. Maybe it was the music. I whispered how I never wanted to be a teacher and all about the probation and my DWI and… every stick of gum I’d ever stolen and every drink of liquor that I’d ever let steal my brains. All of the girls I’d slept with. Every fight I’d been in. I spread out as I spoke, my fibers seemed loosened. And when the bell rang and the nurse came back and my conference was over, the steps seemed serene moving back toward my room.â€
Like the violence, Carr knows when to seed in scenes of truly unexpected tenderness, and it’s the tension between these two impulses, peppered with dashes of hilarity and earnestness, that fuel his work. The standouts highlight this tension. “Hot Mess†focuses on a teenage boy jealous of his brother’s easy way with women despite having terrible burn scars inflicted on him by their father. “My Second Throatâ€, one of the many pieces of flash fiction included, might be the strongest overall story. Joyously sincere and prose-poem lyrical, it follows a soldier returned from war unable to face his old lover. “Water-Filled Jugs†follows the familiar route of an unhappy husband and wife, but here they are strangely fixated on ice cream as a metaphor for their marriage and an actual human skeleton they draw on with crayons.
Not every story is as memorable as those above. Much of the flash fiction is tough to get a handle on sandwiched between the longer sections. “Fake Pregnant†flickers around without ever giving its attention to any one story thread. “Face So Mild†ends with a man looking up videos of high school fist fights but doesn’t give us quite enough character to care very strongly. “Pale Milk†darts unannounced from one POV to another again and again, but there’s not much going on at the center of the story. However, these are small nitpicks more than anything, and even the stories that are less fleshed out than the best pieces in Short Bus still have the power to astound you with a single, well-placed line that lands like a punch to the sternum.
Brian Allen Carr’s Short Bus is a strong, often poetic debut collection of short stories that will be of particular interest to fans of Barry Hannah or Flannery O’Connor or even Chuck Kinder. There’s an innate southern sensibility humming just beneath these pages, and like the aforementioned authors, Carr is at his best when exploring the oddly murky line dividing love from hate, tenderness from violence. His characters are deeply flawed and almost always make the worst possible decision when presented with any and all conflicts. In so many ways, they are deeply relatable, funhouse mirror versions of ourselves.
~Salvatore Pane has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web, and his fiction has appeared in PANK, Annalemma, Quick Fiction, Hobart, and others. He blogs for The Rumpus, BOMB, PANK, and Dark Sky and teaches fiction at the University of Pittsburgh and Chatham University. His graphic novel, The Black List, will be published later this year, and he can be found online at www.salvatore-pane.com.~
Review of Brian Allen Carr's SHORT BUS
SHORT BUS
Brian Allen Carr. Texas Review Press, $22.95 paperback (176p) ISBN: 978-1-933896-54-0
Short story collections are like tackle boxes, and as readers we’re like big, literate fish. But we’re fish who’ve grown arms and legs and we live on land now. However, unlike our aquatic friends, we want to be caught, and that’s what we’re looking for when we’re slapping around in the tackle box—we want a sharp, exciting ride.
A good tackle box will have all sorts of lures: simple hooks, jiggly, fake worms, maybe some fancy flies, or even a bit of Strike King™ Pro-Model stuff. And as we’re rocking in our chairs, our eyes wide and our jaws slack, we’re hoping for that sharp surprise to tear through our cheeks and reel us flopping across the carpet.
Luckily for us, the tackle box that is Brian Allen Carr’s debut collection Short Bus is loaded with material that’ll snag hard on our throats, cheeks, foreheads—hell, even our fingers. Sometimes all it takes is a simple graze and we’re tight on the wire.
In the opening story Running the Drain, Carr wastes no time in snapping his pole back, setting a dark, pounding, addictive tone deep into our jowls.
pg. 1: “I’ll check the police report in the morning from Mexico. I’ll slip across the border at Reynosa. I’ll buy a cheap, rusted car and a pistol and drive south. I’ll get a room in the mountains. I’ll walk through the pines and kick the fallen needles. I’ll be free.”
Carr writes with a clarity that is both elegant and brutal. When you employ short, declarative sentences, there isn’t any room for shadowplay; everything is honest, bared. His characters live by these same rules, flexing their weaknesses, confiding their often dark desires.
Whisper to Scar, pg. 38:
“I thought how easy it would be. Like an accident. Him falling into the water, then splashing around in circles as his left hand pulled across the surface and his nub pierced through clean.
I reeled up the slack in my line. I set my pole in a holster.
“Hey, Timmy,” I said.
“Yes, Daddy.”
“That life jacket don’t look too comfortable on you,” I said. “Why don’t you hand it here.””
By and large the characters in this collection are broken by time and circumstance, some by birth, and they slink and limp along the Texas/Mexico border in search of simple moments in which they can seize at least a sense of the control they’ve relinquished somewhere along the way. They are recognizable strangers, each and every one of them.
While the doses of darkness and damage come fast and often in this collection, there are stories that succeed in lightening the mood, so to speak. And after having my face smashed into the surf behind a speeding boat for several pages—but delightfully so, mind you—I’m always happy to hear the gears downshift and feel the fun bubbles rush over my body. The story that best embodies this shift is the titular Short Bus, a first person account of the adventures that come with teaching a special education class. It’s funny, honest, sad, and, in my opinion, it’s the best balanced piece in the collection. It’s also one of the longer stories, and it’s the one whose end saddened me the most because I didn’t want it to stop. You hear me, Carr? You’ve got a novel waiting for you in that story. Or at least a healthy novella.
pg. 41: “Pappi likes to pop-lock, which is funny to watch because he’s retarded and he’s got no neck. He likes to dance, and he likes rap music. That morning he held his fingers out as though barrels of guns. He wagged his thumbs like crashing hammers. He did this in time with the beats blasting from the speakers. He wiggled his body and it looked like an off center gumdrop ready to fall. Everybody loves him.”
The strengths of Carr’s writing are many, notably his attention to detail, his wonderfully crafted characters and settings (you can taste blood and dust in many of these stories), and my personal favorite—his ability to surprise, regardless of a story’s content. Whether following friends on a trip to Mexico, looking over the shoulders of two hit men, or feeling the pressure of a young boy growing up beneath a sick mother and a hardened older brother, we never know what’s coming around the corner, or what that shiny thing is that’s twirling through the water.
Carr’s Short Bus will leave you punctured, dripping, and smiling. I highly recommend this collection. (2011)