Brian Allen Carr - Fetuses sport mustaches, testicles don tuxedos, a melted-faced track star keeps sweethearts by the dozens

Brian Allen Carr, Short Bus, Texas Review Press, 2011.

"Short Bus is a muscly and energetic collection of linked short fictions plagued with deformed characters who crunch through life in the southern haunts of Texas. Fetuses sport mustaches, testicles don tuxedos, a melted-faced track star keeps sweethearts by the dozens. Often tender and bitter against the same taste bud, this wicked debut collection breathes life into the American Southwest. There are hints here of McCarthy, Hannah, Burroughs and Garrett in the voice, but the structure sings of ...y no se lo tragó la tierra. The entire approach is refreshing. Carr's fiction is a new animal--untamed--and Short Bus will cut a welcomed wound across your heart."

"Brian Allen Carr’s brain must be a snarl of firing pistons, sizzling fuses, hoses leaking blood and tequila and hydraulic oil. How else can you explain the twisted machinery of his stories? Each of them a disturbing journey that will thrill and educate you in the sunlit haze of the Texas/Mexico border–and the sometimes subterranean darkness of the human heart." - Benjamin Percy

"These stories are everything hardworking–the characters, the scenery, the sentences–all form to build a machine crafted to break hearts along the border. A ridiculously strong first collection." - Shane Jones

"Short Bus balances the harshness of characters’ lives with beautiful and precise language, making parched land feel lush. Carr writes the best kind of stories-stories that only he could have written." - Mary Miller

"Brian Allen Carr spins brilliant border stories with a rhythm and beat all his own. Short Bus joins a short list of books that sound like now: I can think only of Matthew Mc Intosh’s Well and Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions that ring with the same 21st century authenticity. At a time when too many voices are touted as original, Carr’s voice truly is." - Larry Fondation"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." - Mel Bosworth

In his own words, here is Brian Allen Carr's Book Notes music playlist for his short fiction collection, Short Bus




Brian Allen Carr, Vampire Conditions, Holler Presents, 2012.

When given the choice, I mostly choose not to read literary realist fiction. I’ve been out of school for more than a year now, so I’m accustomed to having the choice. I read Brian Allen Carr’s collection Vampire Conditions anyway, and I loved it. I knew that I wanted to review the book, too, which meant that I would have to find a way to articulate why I loved it. There are two keys. First, Carr takes nothing for granted. Second, he never justifies his stories.
Carr’s refusal to take anything for granted makes him different from most writers of literary realist fiction because most of these other writers — the ones I now choose not to read — will resort to writing what they think “it’s really like” when they aren’t sure what to do next. That is to say that they often make boring events and characters (affairs and the middle-aged people who have them, unconsummated affairs and the middle-aged people who don’t have them, cancer deaths and the survivors who mourn them, suicides and the people who commit them, drugs and the people who use them) and congratulate themselves for writing the world the way it is. This takes the reader for granted because it assumes his or her interest will sustain itself without the writer’s help. This takes the world for granted because it suggests that the way we expect things to be is the way they are. Such writing fails as an imitation of reality; nothing in this life is ever much like what it’s “really like.”
I don’t believe that Brian Allen Carr decides writes his literary realist stories by asking himself what is likely or real. If he were doing it that way, he wouldn’t have made up Thick Bob, a grotesque who one day gave a bartender so much shit she actually tased him — and who, when he saw how much pleasure it brought the bar’s other patrons to see him tased and collapsed on the floor, proceeded not only to continue antagonizing the bartender, so that she would regularly repeat that performance, but to mount brief shows on a small stage inside the bar, wherein said bartender hits him with a bat, explodes fireworks in his clothes, throws darts at his person, and etc. If Brian Allen Carr wrote stories by asking himself what is likely, he wouldn’t have invented the protagonist of “Lucy Standing Naked,” a young boy of Asian descent, adopted by white Texans, who is named Nelson, and who is learning to play the guitar, and who sings country music better than most white boys, and who is in any case a novelty because there’s never been a famous country singer who looked like him. He wrote Nelson because Nelson was interesting. He wrote Nelson because Nelson makes a good yarn.
What I mean when I say that Carr never justifies his stories is that I do not believe they are designed to be fair to anyone involved. (Nor are they pointedly unfair.) No one gets what they deserve, because no one deserves anything, and thank God; I am so exhausted with reading all about deserving people. In a story that begins with a miscarriage, he writes of the un-child’s father, “Barrow didn’t know whether or not babies went to heaven, but he wished a minister was there to tell him they did.” The father has not lost his child because he is a bad person or because he had an affair or because his wife was a bad choice for him or because he once hurt a girl he doesn’t know anymore. He has lost his child because it gives us something to feel about, and because it gives him something to feel about also, which gives him a way to be a person on the page. What I am describing here is “narrative,” which isn’t necessarily moral or perverse, and which doesn’t require an intellectual agenda to justify it, because what happens in a story doesn’t need justifying. It (narrative) is the most satisfying thing in fiction. It is also the thing that most people can’t be bothered with.
So when Nelson’s father meets George Straight’s brother in his (the father’s) capacity as a butcher, and when Nelson’s father tells George Straight’s brother all about his talented performer of a son, and when Nelson’s father gives George Straight’s brother extra steaks in order to win his sympathy, and when George Straight’s brother agrees to see Nelson play, with the expectation being that a sufficiently good performance would lead to a record contract then stardom then wealth, I don’t feel as if any of this is happening because Nelson has suffered, because he is unpopular at school, because he is not especially bright, or because he was adopted. (“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.”) If there will be a record deal, then this is not a reward for the bad things Carr has put him through. If there will be no record deal, then this is not a punishment for what Nelson secretly thinks of his father. It will only be the next interesting thing to happen in a fascinating story. And this is all I need.
I am reminded, sometimes, in reading Carr, of the many twists and turns of Barry Hannah’s stories, and the surprising sentences he found along the way. The stories in Vampire Conditions are concise, condensed variations on those loose, wild structures. But in each story’s few pages, Carr also finds room for surprises, and wildness of his own. Here are three surprises: “She couldn’t let one of her fallen brother’s heroes stay that way. In a saloon in Corpus Christi watching his final finger float.” . . . “My friend had a little pier and beam house with a fence that was rotting, and he put me up in a back room, went off to work and dropped a barrel on his head and died.” . . . “White folks never dedicate their cars to loved ones.”
I didn’t have to read the stories in Vampire Conditions, and I read them anyway. If that’s not enough for you, then I will say this: they are generous but unsentimental, strange but never proud, thoughtful but not too thoughtful, with good sounds and sentences you won’t see coming, not because they are contrived but because they are not yours. They are better. - Mike Meginnis

 
 

Brian Allen Carr, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands, Small Doggies Press, 2013.

“In turns naturalistic and fantastic, Brian Allen Carr has crafted a truly original tale. This Texas landscape is a mix of country and blues. Larry McMurtry sings Robert Johnson. And then there’s the sword.”– Percival Everrett

“This book is beautiful. You’re going to hell if you don’t buy it. I mean that. Carr is a man with magic inside his heat. Read this book and meet a man who will love you forever. Live. Live. Read Carr. You will be alive. Finally.”– Scott McClanahan

“Carr’s alternate world is reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro–dreamlike, haunting in its dystopian aura, and fully imagined. The humanity of his characters is never lost, despite the violence and strangeness of their existence.”– Paula Bomer

Brian Carr’s Edie & the Low-Hung Hands is funny, odd, poetic, and beautifully written. Read it, and ride toward Victory.– Nick Antosca 


Excerpts:

I held Edie's hand at Welder's funeral and wondered how long I should wait. I've never seen a mirror I liked much, and just then the sturdiest branches on the cemetery's broadest tree became a fixture I could string my neck from. I saw myself limp, blue and hung, swaying in the breeze, deceased, but I thought how oddly my hands would dangle as I choked out there. It seemed four months would be long enough, but of course I didn't make it. Six days later I stood in the damp field behind their home swatting at chigger bites and slashing Johnsongrass with my blade. The sunset grayed, and mocking birds sang their noise, and Edie sat in the breathy glow of a low-watt bulb on the porch, pouring something from a green-glass pitcher that hummed colorful in the light. She knew it was I standing out there and waved hello with the back of her hand. I motioned her to come off the porch, but she shook her head no. I held my arms out like Jesus, my sword aloft.

"I could hold you so good," I said, but she stood and went in off the porch. "Then why'd I do it?" I hollered as the screen door rattled closed against its frame.

After that, I went slashing my way through the field.

Father served as minister of our church, and he was assassinated in the pulpit. Unlike I, he wasn't cursed with low hung hands.

In the wake of his death, mother sipped Sweet Janes in the holey shade of the pecan limbs, her black dress moist against her body, her brow blotted and damp, her speech flaccid in the freeness of liquor, and she'd look me over, at my arms, "I know you come from me," she'd say, "but how are you mine?"

She said once she'd traced her lineage back to the root, and there was nothing like me in it, and that, "Father, God rest him, hadn't hereditary oddities in any direction. His line was pristine back to Adam. He was the most glorious of men."

Agreed, he was radiant in life, and I loved him, but after his throat was slit he got cast as saintly, and that wasn't so.

Welder, my brother, was also configured right. He was shrewd in stance as my father was. Indeed there was only one other low-hung handed man alive in Victory and he was much my junior and I knew how he came to be. I remembered the sour smell of his mother when I hoisted her heaving body upon mine.

I denied everything, but the obvious signs were truly telling, and I heard people whispering when I walked by.

I supposed him then twenty, and I'd caught him glancing me often. He was my image in so many of his features, and I knew someday he'd come for me.

Mother didn't live long after my father passed. She died in a helicopter crash beyond the town's edge. I was eleven then.

I used to pretend to be the chopper that took her. I'd hold my hands like blades at my sides and spin until my faculties were robbed by dizziness and the world slunk about me, a drape of color and sound, and I wouldn't let up, my arms cutting the humid air, filling with blood from the force and tingling with weight until my frame became unwieldy and I crumbled to the ground, scuffing my skin against the earth. If I bled, pride filled me. I hated the bad-candy smell of mother's Sweet-Jane breath, and I wished I hadn't come from within her. Welder, of course, mourned her loss. He was my brother, and he got what he deserved.

How low are they hung? I can scratch my knees while standing fully erect. I've not measured, but I'd say my arms are half a foot longer than most men's. But that's not what people think when they see me. They think my hands hang low. They look down at my knuckles as though they're pornography. It's a condition that births inconveniences. I only drove an automobile once, back before we bombed the roads, and my shoulders cramped from holding my elbows up like buzzard wings, and I was only ten and the arms have since grown. Books pose a similar ache to me, and it's near impossible to drink beer from a bottle. I strain my neck. I cock my elbows. It takes an effort to swat the gnats from my nose. But the looks folks give are the worst. They can't look at my eyes. The low-hung hands just own their attention.

Father was the architect of bombing out the roads and he was a great swordsman and feared by many. He wanted me to learn the verses too. He'd say them as he drew his sword.

Those he fell knew verses of their own. From the same book, just said in different ways. Before my father, there were a hundred churches throughout the town. The average there being one church per sixty citizens. He consolidated them, as did others of his line, by dueling for congregations. The ministers would meet in DeLeon Park, and, standing in the shadow cast by a statue of a rifle-wielding confederate, would draw their sabers, whisper scriptures, make each other dead.

This was always on Saturday, the day before worship, and the entirety of each church's congregation would amass to watch the duel, in part supporting their pastors and in part coming to find out which church they would attend service at in the morning.

My father became too powerful with a sword. He became thirsty for a larger flock. He was stopped by a Presbyterian who snuck from behind him and slit his throat open with a razor as my father prayed silently at the head of his congregation, the gurgle of his blood filling the pulpit—the only sound before terror hit those with their heads not bowed—and then the choir started screaming. 

When Welder died there were twenty churches left in Victory. There were four hundred residents. Many folks fled before the roads out were destroyed. Some, like my mother, left later—in helicopters built from scraps found in barnyards or in hot air balloons made from quilts. They could have just walked away, but I suppose that route lacked drama. Mother craved attention.

You couldn't hate them for leaving. Those who didn't stayed out of fear. People elsewhere held bad stories of us. How would we survive among them? I couldn't understand.

I never committed verses to memory, but I did use the sword. There was less order to it. It became rare to duel in DeLeon Park, but it wasn't rare to duel. Most people in Victory thought me evil. They knew how many men I'd killed, and they knew about the boy. I thought that, in time, they'd become suspicious of Welder's death as well. The only reason the town didn't swallow me was because of my father. They knew I was his seed, and they'd adopted his vision in his absence, and they couldn't bring harm to me on account of his honor. But many of those who remembered him fondly had found their way to the grave. I felt my days were numbered and I wished Edie would let me spend my remaining life with her.

Edie had no children with Welder. I wasn't sure if the fault rested with her or him. I saw her before he did. She attended the ceremony where they announced the plan to follow my father's vision—the plan to bomb the roads. She was glorious. A brilliant figurine amongst the other girls. That was thirty years ago now.

Seeing a girl does not mean you automatically lay claim, and when Welder brought her home later, I had no right to be bitter, though I was. It was my own fault. I had seen her so often in the Victory streets growing broken and gray, grass taking over through cracks in the asphalt. I saw her and did nothing.

Things faded. Sun bleached the billboards white. Streetlights bent in the summertime heat. Power lines sagged, faltered and were stripped for copper once they hit the road. The zoo animals were inbred until every flaw in their genes emerged, the tigers going first white then blind. The tortoises dried up and rested decrepit in their shells. Years passed.

The coast lay thirty miles east. With a good breeze you could smell it. Salt water lived only in my imagination. To subsist we grew potatoes and corn, raised rabbits and chickens. In the spring there were tomatoes. In the fall, squash. I couldn't remember the taste of black pepper. I killed a man once over salt.

I've killed many folks, all with the same sword my father presented to me on my ninth birthday. A one and a half foot saber with an ebony handle, a little ball of pewter at the handle's base. It's a true blade, though to those I slew with it, it must have looked silly in my low-hung hand.

Many of those men were not from our town. Often exhibitionists rode to the thicket of windmills we maintained to keep Victory powered. They knew of our customs or fancied themselves competent with blades. In the past, when I couldn't get Edie from my mind, when I thought of her naked body wrapped in my brother's arms, I'd hike out beneath the spinning turbines and wait for men from neighboring towns to find me. Sometimes they'd come in clusters. I once fell six men in a single skirmish with my saber. It's a good weapon for slitting throats with.

The oddest of these duals was with a blank-skinned man who'd brought a woman along with him, and the woman held an umbrella over his head. He was the finest swordsman I'd ever met, though this might have been because he was so hard to look at. I'd seen an albino once in a book, but this was not what he was. I couldn't say for certain that his skin was thin, because when I finally cut him it felt like cutting any other man, but you could see the blood in him. You could see the bones. Not clearly. His skin wasn't clears as glass. Perhaps it was the color of wax paper. Or maybe the whisked whites of eggs.

For a moment I feared he'd best me. We tarried through the turbines, and the woman strained to keep up with us. Then, on accident, I slashed the umbrella, and it fell broken. With the umbrella broke the bright light robbed his ability and I gutted him.

The woman cried miserably for the blank-skinned man as he bled and died. She told me she was his mother, and I dragged him with her as far from the town as I'd ever gone, to where I could see in the distance where the roads to other towns picked up. I told the mother that her son was a strong swordsman, but it brought her no comfort. She said she felt empty inside. She told me her son's name. When I went home, I scratched it onto the turbine tower beside where I killed him.

My low-handed boy led a group of his peers. They walked the streets in a cinched-up pack. I'd seen them watching me. They'd hold mock duels. My boy was skilled. He used a traditional blade. He'd not called me out yet, but I'd noticed him with his sword in his hand, his lip a bit trembling as though he wanted to raise the tip of his sword in my direction and scream out my name. Then, I thought, if I had to kill him, I wouldn't drag him anywhere. I didn't know his name, and I wouldn't scratch it down. I imagine he felt the same about me.

Edie. It was a simple trick she played on me. It didn't take much. She found me on the roof of my home, trying to make out the coast with a telescope, but it was such a chore to get the thing in front of my eyes.

"Why haven't you left?" she asked me, and I didn't have an answer for her. She had an excuse to come by. It was near Welder's fiftieth birthday. He was several years older than us both, and she invited me to a party in his honor. "What do you miss most about out there?" she asked as I looked toward the distance. I had a list of things but didn't share them.

"Once," she said, "when I was seven, we traveled to Houston and we went to the top of a tower and you could see in every direction until your eyes went stupid against the distance, and everything became a single unnamable color, the whole world condensed to a blur at the edge of your vision, though you knew, in that space, beneath the blue of sky and before the empty of eternity, there were millions of years of life being lived, frozen, even just then, into that little sliver of moment, that I, even as a young girl, could grasp with my eyes and hold onto in my mind for forever." She looked at me, her face silly with wonder. A sad gripped her. "You can't find anything like that here." Then she climbed silently off my roof, and I watched her walk the town.

Weeks later, at the party for Welder, she pulled me beneath the pecan tree, the same my mother used to sweat in the shade of, and she whispered to me, that if Welder were gone, she would take me to that tower, and from there, I'd be able to see anything.

The next night I followed Welder into the field behind his house, crept behind him, ran my saber across his throat. He never knew what got him. Just a sting, then a silence. Once he fell, I drew his sword and placed it in his hand. I disappeared into the shadows.

Some of Welder's friends came for me in the night. They took me to his body, and I hid my face with my forearms.

No one asked questions. We fidgeted in the field a few hours. Someone passed around corn whiskey. When the night sky grayed with morning, we each left in the direction of home.

Two months after Welder's death, Edie showed ripe with pregnancy. I watched her in DeLeon Park resting in the grass, and a man with hands comfortably in his pockets sat with her. I asked one of the women about it, and she told me the baby was Welder's, and she told me that Edie lucked into finding a man to help her raise it. She told me these things and my mind opened in a broken way, and I saw, on a loop, and heard, in the same loop, the motion of the sword that swiped Welder's life from him.

I had hoped my boy would be better with a sword, but I'm puzzled I didn't kill him. I left the woman who'd told me the news and found him fencing with his friends and told him I was sick of the waiting game. He buckled with anger. I'd been that angry: so mad you would cry.

Tears filled his eyes as he approached me, his saber slashing. We clashed, blade to blade, and after three or four contacts, I disarmed him. It took so little. Perhaps he'd never killed a man. Or maybe he was too filled with emotion. Either way, the embarrassment of losing his blade caused him to drop to his knees and hide his face against the asphalt, and he slumped in the broken road, his lengthy arms clutched around him like a child who fears the dark, and I couldn't bring myself to slay him.

I eyed his friends who knew that their encroachment would lead to their demise. The world seemed out of breath. I decided I needed something new. I walked out toward the windmills. I felt light in the leaving.  I knew the blank-skinned man's name. I thought I'd look for his mother.

 After murdering his elder brother, Marlet must flee the broken town of Victory. With his sword, our low-hung handed hero maneuvers his way through a decrepit southern desert murdering blank-skinned men, being pursued by his illegitimate son, and deceiving those he encounters. All the while, Marlet holds on to his precious memories of Edie, the widowed wife of his brother.

♦◊♦

I don’t know how far I’d walked when I heard his first call.
“Man,” he screamed. “Man.” He was a parched-skinned fellow with burlap throws over his shoulders and he held a rifle in both hands across his chest. I drew my saber and he aimed the rifle at me.
“Don’t shoot,” I said. “It’d be too depressing to die today.”
The man nodded. “Can’t imagine a dying day that wasn’t,” he said. “But I can’t even if I wanted to.” He lowered his gun. “Out’a bullets. Thought maybe you’d have some to sell. I got these pecan trees, but the ever-blessed squirrels make murder on the crop. Used to, with this here instrument, I’d do a good bit of battling them back. It was a two-fold good. I’d lessen their pecan consumption, and I’d get to feast on felled squirrel.” He scattered his vision through the clustered branches of pecan trees that stood gimply on the hill aside him. “Ever ate squirrel?” he asked, and I had. Often. A miserable meat. You get sick at yourself for eating the stuff. I told the man I wasn’t fond of it.
“You must not be cooking it right,” he said. We walked to a nearby tree that glistened with glue, and a trapped squirrel caught in the goop battled to free his tiny paws. The man seemed excited he’d caught the thing. He danced a dab to imaginary music, and he sang a line from something I’d never heard. He smiled at me, his teeth wilted in their sockets, and he saw that his teeth were hideous to me, and then his mental music faded. “You ain’t pretty either,” he said. He stepped back to look at me. “What’s wrong with your hands?” he asked.
I shrugged. “They hang low,” I told him.
“They hang stupid,” he said, and I nodded and he seemed pleased, and then he said, “Cut the head off.” I looked down at the squirrel’s furious attempts for freedom.
It fidgeted as though electrified. Its giant black eyes leapt about frantic. I drew my sword, capped the thing’s head in my left hand, and slid the blade back so the skull came away in my grip. It was a quick cut, silent. I looked at its head. Rolled it in my hand. I looked back at the body. I dropped the head and sheathed my sword. “What’s the glue?” I asked. It was deep brown, tacky. I’d never seen it.
“Make it from mesquite sap,” the man told me. “Other secret stuff goes in. There’s sap from some trees tastes like candy. Mesquite sap taste like a thirsty man’s piss. Does good for glue. A woman taught it to me.” The man yanked the squirrel from the branch, a quick shirk, and the feet stayed smudged in the glue. Blood drained the legs where the feet had been. The man shrugged, “Can’t eat the hands anyhow.” Then, as he held the squirrel body in his left hand, he offered me his right hand to shake. “Name’s Crodge,” he told me.
“Marlet,” I told him.
Then he held the headless critter at me, “This one don’t have a name,” and Crodge seemed proud of his joke.

♦◊♦

Crodge dwelt in a crude shed made from tethered post oak. He’d salvaged barbed wire from felled fences and stringed limbs into a tumble that reminded me of beavers’ homes I’d seen in books, and this clot of house was entered through a trench he’d dug, the dirt worn smooth by his tracks so that it almost shined as stone does, and there were two stools at the center of the hut and a little hole he’d dug for cooking fires, and he had me sit while he dressed the squirrel. Once done, Crodge grabbed a narrow branch from out of the structure of the home, snapped it on his knee and used the smallest bit of stick that came away to stir the coals in the fire pit. There were some embers slunk in the ash, and he worked up a little pile of them, laid some twigs and leaves upon them for kindling, proceeded to break up the branch, and in a bit he’d built up a good cooking fire.
I looked around. “You mentioned a woman,” I said. “A what?” asked Crodge. He had powders and salts, things he kept in little jars strewn haphazardly, that he grabbed while barely glancing, sniffing to decipher their contents, and he sprinkled these on the cleaned squirrel, a nude little thing of reds and yellows.
He pierced the squirrel with a skinny branch, and, with the other end, propped the squirrel in the dirt so it stood splayed above the fire. “Yeah,” said Crodge. “The glue,” he said. “She was a healer, now dead. Used to live here with me. You’re sitting in her chair.” I looked down at the chair and felt I’d some way intruded on her memory, but Crodge shook his head. “Years ago,” he said. “She wouldn’t mind none.”
As the squirrel cooked I asked Crodge how he’d come to this place.
He smiled his grayness at me. “The land,” he said, “I inherited it.”

♦◊♦

In history Crodge’s family did well with oil. Crodge owned as much land as you could see in any direction, though he was aware that his ownership existed merely in theory as passersby seemed free to roam it.
“Look at me,” he said and motioned to himself, his fire, the squirrel that roasted above the coals, “who could I keep away?”
He’d hunkered down to this tiny patch of trees, to this little cove of branches he’d lashed together and called home. All of his line died. He couldn’t have children. He’d tried with the healer woman, but that didn’t work, and he was happy it hadn’t. He said he imagined another mouth, a younger mouth, would be a burden he couldn’t take, but he’d been lonely since the woman died, and he said often he’d wake in the middle of the night with a terrible sad about him, and he’d walk through the fields of grass hoping to be snake bit, but that, luckily, in those times of ill thoughts, he’d never come across a serpent, had never been struck by its poisonous bite, and that he’d usually feel angry at himself the next day for chancing something so stupid.
Crodge said travelers were seldom, but when someone chanced by, as I had now, it filled him with hope. I asked him what he thought he’d do in the future, but he didn’t have much in mind. He knew of my town, but thought it to be crazy, and he knew of a few other towns northeast, but he’d only been to one, and it appeared empty when he entered it.
“Odd,” he told me. “There were buildings with lights on, and music came from somewhere, but the town was vacant. I walked around the daytime streets calling out howdies, but nothing. A small place. Twelve houses and a little stocked store, but the doors were locked on everything, and I was afraid to trespass. It felt like a trap.”
He said the squirrel was ready, and he pulled it from the fire.
There wasn’t much between the two of us, and while it was the best squirrel I’d ever eaten, I still wouldn’t call it good, though when he asked me what I thought of it, I just smiled and nodded and said, “Must be I wasn’t cooking it right.”

♦◊♦

I slept the night at Crodge’s on a small patch of dirt. He hummed as he slumbered, and the humming woke me. I didn’t mind. I had fidgety dreams.
I dreamt of the town that Crodge told me of. I dreamt it like memory. Spare streets and shuttered windows and locked doors and emptiness all around. I dreamt of the store. I dreamt of what it housed. Salt. Candy. Things wrapped in plastic I hadn’t tasted since childhood. When I woke the next morning I wanted badly to go there, so I asked Crodge to point the way.
“One more thing,” I said just before I left. “You ever seen a blank-skinned man? A man you could kinda see the blood in?” Crodge scratched his head. “He’s dead,” I told him. “Had a mother. Kinda pretty.”
He shook his head no and apologized for not knowing, so I thanked him for is hospitality and walked toward the vacant town with the memory of Crodge’s hummed tune filling my mind. I had been a great fan of music as a child, and I’d often sit in my room alone learning lyrics to songs I liked, but as I aged music became just a thing that filled the emptiness out of a room or got stuck in your head as you walked, and I wondered what it was that made it so. There were foods I loved as a child that I grew weary of, and there were things that, as a child, I hated and grew to appreciate. I would never appreciate squirrel, that I was certain of. And I would never forget the sight of Edie the first day I saw her. And, if I couldn’t find the blank-skinned man’s mother, or if she didn’t want part of me, or if I didn’t want part of her, I decided I’d go back to Victory, slay Edie’s suitor, and take her by force if I had to.

♦◊♦

I walked for hours in the heat. My clothes soaked through quickly. I rested beneath a sprawled mesquite. A breeze swept across me in the shade, and my clothes dried, and a ring of salt stained my chest. When I stood to walk again I felt dizzy, and for a moment I thought I’d go crazy walking that way in the sun, but after a few hours I saw in the distance a bit of road, and I could just make out a tiny town in the distance.
A large-skulled boy sat in a wooden chair in the middle of the road on the outskirts of the town Crodge told me was deserted. At first I guessed he didn’t know language. Each of his hands clenched the back legs of his chair. His knuckles glared white and shook under the strain. He stared toward where the road would lead, if it went on forever, and he nodded steadily, his eyes wide and dark. He didn’t move as I neared him. I tried to discern what held his attention. The earth ahead of us showed ashy beneath the sun, maroon with the mixture of dead grass and bare-limbed trees. I waved my hand in front of the boy’s eyes and he laughed a hideous empty laughter, a lunging breathy expression, as though all his air escaped with some sense of satisfaction.
“What are you doing, boy?” I asked, and he gasped his laugh again.
“Watching,” he said, his voice toneless, just a fluttery sound against his teeth, “the road,” he said and continued to nod, “for strangers.”
It seemed a joke, his being there. I looked in every direction. “Well,” I said, “I’m a stranger. You’ve seen me. Now what?”
He had a second laughter that he now displayed, a cackling, wobbling heckle that seemed made by some awkward organ that most folks don’t have, and it came from him in some queer flapping way, and he blinked big as he chuckled. “Hard to say,” he told me.
He wore a white shirt with black suspenders, black khakis and black boots. There seemed an order to him.
“Is there a town up the road?” I asked.
“There is,” he told me.
“Does it have a name?” I asked.
“I don’t know it,” he said.
“You from there?”
“Indeed.”
“Is it nice?”
“Is anything?”
He did not make eye contact with me as he spoke. His eyes stayed in the distance.
“I’m looking for someone,” I told him.
“As am I,” he said. “Strangers,” he said again. “On the road.” He launched into some third laugh that seemed less laugh than scream, a piercing wailing bending obnoxious thing pouring from his chest and throat, and his face went red in the noise of it, and it hurt my ears so much I drew my saber.
“Esau Cotton,” I told him. “Heard of him?”
He cackled on. He leaned forward in his chair. “Which one?” he screamed. “There are dozens.”
It then occurred to me that the boy lacked some key components, so I decided to leave him and head toward the town, but he laughed so loudly I grew angry, walked behind him, and ran him through several times with my sword so blood came pouring from the back of his neck, staining his shirt and silencing his laughter.
For some reason I couldn’t stab him enough. Maybe I was stabbing lots of things. I was stabbing my mother and Welder and Edie’s fetus and my son. And then I started hacking at his neck while pulling at his hair, until the boy’s cumbersome skull came away in my grip, and I kicked it into the bushes where it tumbled facing back at me, an ugly smile on its ugly face, so I ran into the bushes and booted it again. I turned back and the boy’s hands still clutched the chair legs, and that furthered my rage, so I drove my saber a few dozen times into the heart of his corpse, and I only stopped stabbing when I realized that there was nothing I could do to kill the boy enough, so I left him bloody, headless, and pierced where he sat.

Sometimes in my dreams I am blessed with the true-length arms of a man, and I am proud of my arms, and sun shines upon them. I’m also usually younger. My face is taut, my teeth well lined, my hair is black as ever it was, and there is fidget in my step, because I am youth with potential. There is no ache in my hips. No murders replay in imagination.
When I’m awake I catch a smell, and there’s a throat slit in mental vision. A gut split. My blade through a spine. The first kill was in self-defense. A young friend of Welder’s taunted me toward duel. He gaped at my arms. Hollered guttural things. Kicked dirt in my face. Drew his sword.
“You’re hideous,” he said “And now I’ll disappear you.”
I might have had my sword two years then. I had taken it into a thicket of mesquite in the park near the river, and I had practiced chipping at branches, slashing low limbs free from the trees, but I had never had anything come at me in turn. My father used to work with Welder on how a sword should be held, on how an enemy should be approached. They had names for the moves they made. One thing was called an appel. It wasn’t a move with a sword. They’d mash a foot on the ground to distract their opponents. In theory the opponents would hear the noise and their attention would draw away from the next move, and then they might lunge, holding their swords out and level with their shoulders, just shy of arm fully extended, and take a wide stride at their opponent, essentially stepping into a stab.
So much of how they fought was with their legs, but I didn’t care for their style. You have to stay loose on your feet, in my opinion. Less postured. Ready to move in all directions. There was so much rigidity in their methods. Or, maybe I’m lazy. I didn’t want to take the time to learn. I think, for a while, I just assumed that only the proud cared to get good at it. I was so angry at my arms and the world, my father, brother, and mother, that I sort of hoped to be bad. Perhaps someone would take offense at me and make me nothing—a sack of skin with bones and blood in it, less blood than needed, and no air in its lungs. But, somehow, I thrived. And when Welder’s friend drew his sword and stood stern postured with his blade at me and his face smart with rage, I heard his foot mash the floor, drew my short sword, stepped back, brushed his blade aside as he lunged, and drove my sword twice into his face. It split open in both spots, and blood covered his white skin in gushes, blood near black, and his eyes widened as he dropped to his knees, grabbed his face and began flailing. I hadn’t thought of them while it happened, but he had friends with him. I can’t remember how many, but they looked scared of me when they saw I’d bested their friend, and they didn’t know if they could go to him, to hold him as he bled out, but when I sheathed my sword, he fell face down, and one of them picked him up, turned him over, and laid him on his lap, telling him lies as he died. I think the boy was seventeen. He’s probably my favorite kill.
But in my dreams those moments often cease to be. There is music gently somewhere. Perhaps there is a party. It’s for me, and there is cake. Light, soft as lullabies, bleeds in from a window. Balloons hover. Candles are lit. People sing my name. I hold my arms above me. There is a ceiling, but my hands are far from it. There’s my mother, but her breath is just plain sweet, not Sweet- Jane sweet, and she holds me to her. Maybe she says, “You make your mother and father proud,” and maybe my father says, “You’re my favorite son,” and Welder says, “I wish I looked as much like Dad as you do,” and then perhaps Edie, the young Edie, the Edie of the first time ever I saw her, dances toward me shyly with her hands held behind her. “I brought you a present,” she tells me, “I picked it out special.” And she produces a small box, wrapped in paper with a bow, “I’ll open it later,” I tell her, “Right now we should dance.” And then the rest of them will disappear, the way dreamt things often do, and we’d be in a small space all our own, nobody in sight of us, and we’d hold each other and move with a music that would speak to our souls, and in unison, and with grace. We’d be together.

 
Brian Allen Carr, Motherfucking Sharks, Lazy Fascist Press, 2013.

 "Motherfucking Sharks reads like it was carved into the floor of a sun-baked desert by an old testament prophet with a thirsty knife." - BEN LOORY, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

Where I come from, the children sing a song:

Oh the motherfucking sharks
Oh they're gonna come to town
Oh they're gonna kill the babies
Oh they're gonna make you drowned in your blood

Oh the motherfucking sharks
Oh they're gonna mince the flesh
They're gonna swim up and surround you
Don't you know you'll never pass the test it's over

Oh the motherfucking sharks
Oh they don't care about the gods
And they don't care about the families
And they don't care about the cries or tears they're killers.
Motherfucking sharks
Motherfucking sharks
Motherfucking sharks
Motherfucking sharks



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.”

 
 
Brian Allen Carr, The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World, Lazy Fascist Press, 2014.
 
Welcome to Scrape, Texas, a nowhere town near the Mexican border. Few people ever visit Scrape, and the unlucky ones who live there never seem to escape. They fill their days with fish fries, cheap beer, tobacco, firearms, and sex. But Scrape is about to be invaded by a plague of monsters unlike anything ever seen in the history of the world. First there's La Llorona -- the screaming woman in white -- and her horde of ghost children. Then come the black, hairy hands. Thousands, millions, scurrying on fingers like spiders or crabs. But the hands are nothing to El Abuelo, a wicked creature with a magical bullwhip, and even El Abuelo don't mean shit when the devil comes to town

How does one write a zombie novel without falling into the trap of being pigeonholed as the guy who wrote the zombie novel? It’s no easy task, and yet The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World sets itself apart from others in its genre right from the start, with a title provocative enough to announce the imminent end of its own universe, a kind of reminder that you’d better read now, while you can, because once what’s inside takes hold you’ll be just another blood bag.
The most appealing thing about Carr’s horror is the number of forms it takes, and the subsequent mutations the story’s landscape carries out along the way. The youth of Scrape, Texas, are gas-station kids. When fucked-up creatures begin to appear in their town, they barely slow their parade of drinking, fucking, and joking. More than anything, they treat the new developments—a woman in white who hoards dead kids in the water, black hairy hands that crawl across the ground grasping for anything they can get a handle on, etc.—as just something to do. Carr can stack quite a nasty string of messed-up imagery, and yet the life inside the book continues on, flipping back from lines of death into more beer, more sense that everyone was just as fucked before the monsters rolled out as they are now.
Throughout it all, Carr’s magic shows in how he handles territory most would strand as genre. He fills the pages with magnetic, mostly sparse language, not far from how Robert Coover’s recreations bring new threads to a corpse. His new mythology, set right in the middle of nowhere that many would consider the heartland of our country, is new and old at once, sick and rhapsodic, alive and not afraid to die. “The black magic of bad living,” the book reminds us, “only looks hideous to honest eyes.” - Blake Butler



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

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.- Sam Moss

 The end of the world is upon us and I can think of no one more capable of raining down some strange ass shit on the last of the human race than Brian Allen Carr. This novella is a strange and perfect mix of old school  Mexican (and mostly made up) myths and legends - the wispy lost souls of the dead walking the earth, a plague of rouge severed hands that are aching to tear you to shreds, and El Abuelo, who comes to ask you a question you better be damn sure you're able to answer.
The backwoods people of Scrape, Texas are so typically human it hurts, and they uphold the usual rompy B horror flick requirements - the old, ignorant hillbilly with a closet full of guns; the token black guy; the young couple who fuck their way through the end of the world, mostly oblivious to the racket all around them; the local drunk; and two cute town chicks just to make it interesting.
Carr spends a little time setting up the history of this trashy little town, sharing the stories of its local yokels in the usual barstool-gossip sort of way. Within minutes of cracking it's cover, you're well acquainted with the secrets and skeletons carried by every one of Scrape's citizens.
And right when you're getting comfortable and about ready to chug back that first can of sweaty cheap beer, right as you're leaning back in that creaky ole porch swing, Carr pulls the mother fucking rug right out from under you.
In a matter of seconds, the entire town collapses all around your ears, and you gawk and gape as he unleashes the most god-awful end-times can of whoopass you can imagine.
The Last Horror Novel...is a quick, addicting read that runs you through the rinse cycle - soaking you to the bone one moment, mercilessly wringing you out the next, and whipping you around at break neck speeds - with some well placed breathers where time seems to slow down a bit - as our survivors take stock again and again of their ever-worsening situation.
The only criticism I have is with the ending. To me, it felt rushed and disconnected, very much the equivalent of Franco and Rogan's This is the End, which had some real kick-ass potential until that friggen devil-monster came out of nowhere and raped poor Jonas. The rest of the movie just devolved from there. Similarly, reading those last pages in Carr's novella, I got the sense that he might've shot his load a little too early and was left looking for a tissue with which to clean it all up. As if there was no where left to turn but to the devil, which, to me, even though we are taking end-times here, took a fairly disappointing turn.
All in all, a wonderfully wicked example of what the tamer side of bizarro fiction can be, especially for all you newbies out there who are still too afraid to give the genre a try.-  TNBBC Super Mod 

 Brian Allen Carr's The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World features the author's sparse but very literary style in a short novel of about 120 pages, yet managed to fill each page with jarring descriptions and fantastical imagery enough for 10 books. He seems to enjoy flash fiction styled chapters that teases the mind and delight the eyes evidenced in the first paragraph (and chapter) of the novel... 
"Scrape, Texas - far from fame or infamy - appeared on maps, was passed through by travelers. A blink of crummy buildings, wooden households - the harsh-hearted look of them, like a thing that's born old."
And on to the next chapter.
Scrape, Texas is indeed a desolate blink of the eye. Its residents might be called losers but they never appeared to have been anyplace but Scrape and never had the choice of either winning or losing. When Carr's bizarre apocalypse arrives, you can almost hear the sigh of "What now?" coming from the town's inhabitants. The author evokes a number of Latin American mythologies in his very literary end of the world, appropriately so since the fictional town of Scrape exists close to the West Texas-Mexico border. Many sections are fittingly disturbing and horrific. But I am not sure this should be called a horror novel. From the first few pages, Carr have created an eerily accurate description of small town desert life with its drunks, gun aficionados, directionless teens, and a endless sense of resignation. It takes Mexican apparitions like La Llorona, disembodied hands and the whip-ladened El Abuelo to truly pull Scrape's inhabitants out of their present indifference.
The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World is best read as a painting in prose; a look at taken-for-granted ennui placed on its head and shaken. It is a beautifully odd and quirky vision. There may be some hidden meaning to life in this work but if there is, Carr is going to make you work for that meaning. Yet it is unarguable that this thoughtful work reads quickly and effortlessly in a way that keeps the reader both entertained and pleasantly, if disturbingly, disoriented. The only minor issue is with the ending that comes abruptly, leaving the reader thinking, "And then what?". But it fits. There is nothing ordinary about this novel. If you are looking for something different in literary fiction, you found it. - Marvin Vernon

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.- John Skipp


Brian Allen Carr on Beverly Cleary, Magic, Fatherhood and the Last Horror Novel in the History of the World