An irreverent, blood-soaked morsel of Western horror with a metafictional twist (and flying sharks)
Both the title and premise of Brian Allen Carr’s Motherfucking Sharks promise a romp akin to Sharknado and other gleefully kitschy creature features: man-eating sharks that follow storms, spawning in leftover puddles and chewing their way through entire communities as they swim through the air.
The book opens with a stranger, Crick, arriving in an unnamed town in a vaguely Dark Tower-flavored Old West. Weathered and mysterious, Crick has come to warn the townsfolk of these sharks, which may or may not have devoured his entire family. The townsfolk, headed by a man named Kinky Pete and a woman simply referred to as “Mom,” deem him insane and lock him up. The town is therefore caught unprepared when the rains come, and the bloodbath that ensues is as gory and over-the-top as the campy setup would lead one to expect.
However, the book’s self-awareness is not the jovial, indulgent self-awareness of camp. Its metafictional touches—which include asides on the narrator’s porn-watching habits, a page left blank for the reader’s thoughts on rain, and a lengthy passage that makes the reader a coconspirator in “killing” a toddler—are calculated to disturb, both emotionally and aesthetically. This is likewise evident in the prose, which is dominated by a feverish, quasi-biblical style that skirts the line between poetic and florid, if not grotesque.
In this sense, it is tempting to read the book as a commentary on the nature of writing, reading, and (more broadly) the violence of human imagination and desire. Yes, the sharks are allegorical: A chapter that ends with a boy, afraid of dying a virgin, talking his twin sister into sex opens with the reflection, “If a human is a molar, the shark is a fang, but both creatures are just instruments the mouth of the world uses to chew its prey.” Incest is just the beginning of the brutalities humans visit on one another and themselves in the run-up to the sharks’ arrival.
However, the sharks are also literal—as is the addiction, child abandonment, cannibalism, etc.—and therein lies the book’s tricky balancing act. Motherfucking Sharks wants readers to enjoy the ride. For all its curiosity about the nature of that enjoyment, it is downright scornful of the alternative. When a character questions why the sharks can only be killed by harpoons, Crick replies, “Because they are magical flying sharks and that’s how they die.” In other words, don’t look too deep for logic or meaning in the realm of fiction, where things happen simply because the author says that they do, and maybe also because they are cool or fun.
For the most part, the book successfully fuses its more philosophical concerns with its contention that there is nothing wrong with entertainment. The toddler scene is a good example—two pages of cajoling the reader into imagining the gruesome demise of a child, all to prove that “These motherfucking sharks are crazy.” The dark humor only makes the episode more distressing. Elsewhere, however, the balance tips toward shock value, as in the killing of Mom by a tiger shark that “traps her pussy in its jaws.” The scene invests the book’s title with an absurd literalism that passes as a wink, so one may question whether it matters that Mom—a figure characterized by her disappointment in weak men who inevitably finds herself enjoying this pseudo-rape at the teeth of a macho shark—is not particularly believable as a woman. However, amid the book’s other sexualized female characters, any satire on the horror genre’s exploitation of women loses its punch.
Still, the book deserves praise for sheer audacity, which pushes beyond the mere breaking of taboos to include real narrative experimentation. At just 118 pages (many blank, or nearly so), Motherfucking Sharks has the concentrated force of a parable but little interest in providing a parable’s answers. What to make, for instance, of the narrator, who implies kinship with the book’s characters but also has the authorial power to kill them off? The narrator who is both inside and outside the story is not unusual in metafiction, but the tension here is unusually understated and more destabilizing for it. The incongruences accumulate in the background, generating subliminal unease—possibly like sharks quietly materializing in puddles, but then again, possibly not. Ultimately, whether one reads it to be entertained or to be challenged, Motherfucking Sharks is a book with lingering bite.
The post Motherfucking Sharks by Brian Allen Carr appeared first on Independent Book Review.