Marcus...returns with another work of his unique and unnerving brand of fiction. Each story in this darkly prescient new collection immerses readers in distorted but startlingly recognizable realities ... Marcus is a master of injecting bleak apocalyptic premises with absurd humor and light moments ... Marcus instills his fiction with a deep sense of unease, one that is both strikingly strange yet uncomfortably familiar.
Notes from the Fog, Ben Marcus’s new story collection, shows a persistent awareness of the violence involved in interpretation—of the difficulty of fully understanding something without in the process destroying it ... Notes from the Fog adopts a grimly low-tech vision of the future that mostly ignores machines and systems to work directly on bodies ... the wilder and more Swiftian the plots get, the more intimately the stories seem to evoke a lived reality ... Given the considerable range of these stories in tone and scope, it’s striking how neatly their concerns and techniques are prefigured by Marcus’s deceptively simple opening salvo ... This subject matter is a gift, a giant joke on the geopolitical import one’s home life can be felt to have, though perhaps it’s inevitable that not all...personal anecdotes can quite bear the weight this places on them.
...the author manages to instill both humor and heart in the bleakness he creates ... Above all, Marcus weaponizes language for maximum assault ... Throughout these stories, Marcus creates linguistic mash-ups that are dissonant, estranged and heartbreaking ... Marcus walks a fine line, at times, between the mainstream and the surreal ... Notes from the Fog is an intense, vividly written book, filled with nightmarish scenarios and leavened by wit. Few writers possess Marcus’s agility with language or his controlled flights of imagination.
He’s an engrossing, poetically surreal writer. He’s often woundingly funny. Still, the pages turn more heavily here than they did in his last two books ... Notes From the Fog has moments of humanity and grace, but the darkness weighs on you more and more as you read. It’s as if each story, however inventive, is a stone that Marcus is asking you to carry ... is sentences deserve to be lingered over, and his unsettling vision requires recovery time.
I wish I could give Notes from the Fog an unqualified rave, and why I’m sad to write a thoroughly mixed review ... Marcus is a fine writer; readers who underline especially good sentences ought stock up on ink before beginning this collection ... while a few stories seem rote, others impress and perturb in equal measures ... And while the insufficiency of words may strike some readers as being too dry a theme, there’s a surprising emotional warmth to several of these Notes, particularly those dealing with parenting, its ambiguities, and its ambivalences. I suspect Marcus, had he wished, could have been a very good writer of conventional realism ... On balance, I enjoyed Notes from the Fog, for all its unevenness, this collection proves Marcus a compelling and original voice ... for a few daring readers, an entry into this mist will be amply rewarded.
It is in his short stories for mainstream magazines that his fiction becomes most vital, as the form forces him to accommodate his originality of expression with the need to be intelligible. Notes from the Fog is his second collection of stories, after Leaving the Sea (2014), and both contain stories that are his best work ... People’s refusal to engage with the emotion of those closest to them is a recurrent them ... But the repetition of certain stylistic tactics aimed at avoiding cliché ultimately creates new clichés, particularly in the way he describes the human with mechanical terms ... At these moments his style greys itself with repetitive invention, and does not estrange the world in a way that lets us see it anew ... Readers will find some of the most thrilling and disturbing literary fiction of the year in this collection, though it is less successful as a whole than its best stories. Its unevenness makes one hope that Marcus might subject his own conventions to the same scrutiny to which he subjects those of realism.
... spectacular ... In some of these stories, Marcus’s habit of rigging up an eye-catching scenario only to leave it hanging might feel unsatisfying, were it not for the sheer line-by-line joy of his phrase-making, caught between strung-out melancholy and tart misanthropy, electric with thrilling change-up ... One or two of the more self-conscious pieces, such as Critique, styled as an architectural review, fall flat, but it’s exhilaratingly bleak stuff overall...
Marcus’s prose is deceptively straightforward, precise but chatty, and often a lot of fun – which is helpful, albeit in a confusing way, when the subject is the physical or psychological collapse of a person, or even of society as a whole. In stylistic terms he has come a long way from the disturbing, almost alien syntax of his earlier books... and his characters now feel less like malfunctioning allegories and more like flesh and bone ... Is this a bleak book? Absolutely. But there’s beauty in it, too.
The stories in his new collection Notes from the Fog are filled with individuals thinking about what they should be doing, what emotions they should be having, or how the structures in which they live, literal or otherwise, should be functioning ... Marcus’s writing is by turns extremely funny, affecting, and then disquieting, and as he moves seamlessly between these tones, his work accrues a strange mood like so much smoke. Something hangs over the collection in the form of a shapeless threat ... Marcus produces narratives of authenticity, not to feed in to discourse of the examples I listed earlier, but to suggest it as an impossible ideal in a self-conscious society ... This writing does anything but soothe.
Fog, hardly; confounded though his characters might be, Marcus...delivers slightly tilted, sometimes futurist worlds in beautifully, icily precise language. Often his characters are crushed by corporate excess ... In a particularly effective story, a couple whose marriage is freezing over must continue with their business—building memorials after terrorist attacks ... Excellent for smart readers.
Diehard fans of the dystopian futurist series Black Mirror will undoubtedly love the stories in Ben Marcus’s collection Notes from the Fog ... However, when one sits and thinks about Marcus’s prose for a moment, the realization soon sets in that these stories are about insufferable people doing insufferable things, oblivious to their banality ... readers get chatty, easy-to-digest, precocious prose. It feels as though every story in Notes from the Fog has an unearned pride in its existence. It’s difficult to take this seriously or even chuckle about it.
Domestic dysfunction gets some techno-dystopian twists in Marcus’ third story collection ... Compared to his previous works, these are more conventional narratives, though he still admires abstracted metafiction ... But his storytelling is easier to coolly respect than fall for given how storm-clouded it is ... Richly imagined stories though this fog is a particularly dark one.
Marcus’s refined and uncompromising third story collection...dissects the American experience through language that is always precise, unexpected, and alive ... Throughout, each story features moments of considered, lacerating prose ... threaded together by sentences that, like a marionette’s strings, bring the world to full, expansive life. This is a bracing, forceful collection.
