{"id":7318,"date":"2026-09-18T15:01:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T15:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7318"},"modified":"2026-09-18T15:01:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T15:01:12","slug":"motherfucking-sharks-by-brian-allen-carr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7318","title":{"rendered":"Motherfucking Sharks by Brian Allen Carr"},"content":{"rendered":"

An irreverent, blood-soaked morsel of Western horror with a metafictional twist (and flying sharks)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Both the title and premise of Brian Allen Carr\u2019s Motherfucking Sharks<\/em> promise a romp akin to Sharknado<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n

The book opens with a stranger, Crick, arriving in an unnamed town in a vaguely Dark Tower-<\/em>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 \u201cMom,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

However, the book\u2019s self-awareness is not the jovial, indulgent self-awareness of camp. Its metafictional touches\u2014which include asides on the narrator\u2019s porn-watching habits, a page left blank for the reader\u2019s thoughts on rain, and a lengthy passage that makes the reader a coconspirator in \u201ckilling\u201d a toddler\u2014are 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

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, \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> Incest is just the beginning of the brutalities humans visit on one another and themselves in the run-up to the sharks\u2019 arrival.<\/p>\n

However, the sharks are also literal\u2014as is the addiction, child abandonment, cannibalism, etc.\u2014and therein lies the book\u2019s tricky balancing act. Motherfucking Sharks<\/em> 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, \u201cBecause they are magical flying sharks and that\u2019s how they die.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> In other words, don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014two pages of cajoling the reader into imagining the gruesome demise of a child, all to prove that \u201cThese motherfucking sharks are crazy.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> 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 \u201ctraps her pussy in its jaws.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> The scene invests the book\u2019s title with an absurd literalism that passes as a wink, so one may question whether it matters that Mom\u2014a figure characterized by her disappointment in weak men who inevitably finds herself enjoying this pseudo-rape at the teeth of a macho shark\u2014is not particularly believable as a woman. However, amid the book\u2019s other sexualized female characters, any satire on the horror genre\u2019s exploitation of women loses its punch.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> has the concentrated force of a parable but little interest in providing a parable\u2019s answers. What to make, for instance, of the narrator, who implies kinship with the book\u2019s 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\u2014possibly 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<\/em> is a book with lingering bite.<\/p>\n

The post Motherfucking Sharks by Brian Allen Carr<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An irreverent, blood-soaked morsel of Western horror with a metafictional twist (and flying sharks) Both the title and premise of Brian Allen Carr\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7318"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}