Ben Marcus, _Notes from the Fog_

NUMBER THREE IN my campaign to read more short story collections, but I certainly would have read this one in any case--Marcus has been among my very favorite writers since his first book, Age of Wire and String.

I tend to think of him as having an "earlier manner"--that of Age of Wire and String and of Notable American Women--and a "later manner," that of The Flame Alphabet and of his previous book, Leaving the Sea, also a story collection. The earlier manner, in my head, is stranger, wilder, scarier, more original; the narration often seemed too be coming from someone with only a nodding acquaintance with humanity, baffling and exhilarating at once. The later manner is more that ofd Marcus's New Yorker stories, a bit more domesticated, a bit more within familiar lit-fic boundaries.

(That sounds like the classic lament of the old fan, I realize. My favorite REM album remains Murmur.)

Almost all of the previously-published stories in Notes from the Fog (that is, ten of the thirteen) were published since Leaving the Sea came out in early 2014, but one dates all the way back to 2008. "A Suicide of Trees," which appeared as "A Failure of Concern" in Harpers, is a mainline shot of everything about Marcus's writing that I fell in love with: the missing father, the mysterious agents Rogerson and Mattingly, the sentences like "My father's living body on the property was a caution to me: like a crystal ball smeared with the blood of a neighbor's pet."

Not that Marcus's later manner lacks its own eddies of disquiet. As in Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea, we have inexplicable forced evacuations, family estrangements, and Thompson himself louring on the horizon, performing unthinkable experiments. "Cold Little Bird"does a neat reversal on a classic Marcus motif in giving us a son who becomes chillingly remote from his father, the son's aloofness seeming to strike everyone except our narrator, the mystified father, as perfectly normal.

What most struck me, though, was that the three stories that had not previously appeared anywhere--"Precious Precious," "The Boys," and "Notes from the Fog"--seem to be leaning into a whole new strange. Do they date back to the aughts, or do they signal a new manner with some dollops of starter culture from the earlier manner, the weirdly detached, ostranenie-flavored language of the earlier manner blended with adult pain? In "Precious Precious" we have an aging parent in an institution with startlingly frosty nurses and a pill that will not stay swallowed. "The Boys" is a bit Hawthorne-like, with a woman drifting into her sister's abandoned identity. "Notes from the Fog" particularly recalls the old Marcus discombobulation ("I had a made-up language, with words that mostly sounded like breath gone wrong, the last breaths of an old man, and I could recite that for someone if they paid me"), but at the same time it revolves around all too familiar domestic disasters: being fired, a spouse with cancer.

The last of our money was spent on the hole we put her in. A coffins and some flowers and some food for the few people that came by. [...] That was what a family was now, just this one body that had a lot of parts, and several heads, and it had children's voices and a man's voice, and it was a force to be reckoned with. So until we learned how to do that, until we could glide  through the world as fast as a cat, them hanging from me and me carrying them along, we'd have to be apart. Just for a little while.