[REVIEW] Motherfucking Sharks, by Brian Allen Carr

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