by Adam Marek

I really loved Marek’s first collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing and wrote a few notes on it here.

This second collection is full of finely-cut memorable stories. Tamagotchi is one of my favourites. The title story The Stone Thrower hits with hallucinogenic clarity, but resists easy interpretation from the reader.

General the mind at work behind the stories seems to step back, leaving only the structured work. The stories themselves may be vivid, but it is as if the constructor as wiped away all traces of the engineering that went into them and the motivations behind them. Burying Chiyoko Sasaki is like that. Earthquakes is written in the style of a begging letter from a mother with a boy suffering from a very rare and very strange disease. The prose is cloying and annoying. There may be a small suspicion in the reader’s mind that this is a spam fradulent letter, but as the details and pathos mount it becomes clear that’s not the way things are heading.
In fact things don’t head anywhere much, except deeper into pathos and maybe an uncomfortable insight that suffering isn’t always heroic and ennobling, but real all the same.

I wish he’d included the story that was in The Stinging Fly of 2010, but for some reason it’s not there.