Adam Marek

Fascinating stories. After finishing each one I would go back and try to figure out why and how it worked. They are like crafty little mechanisms with innards you can see into but still can’t understand.

Marek is adept at using the surreal to probe the more elusive nooks of the real. In one story the narrator’s wife is pregnant with thirty-seven babies, and finds a doctor who will help her bring all of them to term. She swells out to a monstrous, repugnant size.

He writes a detached prose that presupposes an objective ‘scientific’ point of view. The dialogue often has that functional quality that you used to get in science fiction. His style reminds me of Philip K. Dick. In theme too, one of the stories, “Robot Wasps” could be from PKD.

Another story about what seems to be a large thorn caught in a boy’s big toe, evokes a more visceral reaction than hardcore splatterpunk.

His prose doesn’t come flagged with indicators “now I am trying to entertain you” “now I am trying to be poetic”. It’s an instrument manipulated in accordance with a logic you cannot divine, but which is never arbitrary. There’s a weird precision to his phrasing.