Instruction Manual for Swallowing by Adam Marek

First published in Great Britain in 2007; published by ECW Press on April 1, 2012

Adam Marek's best stories explore the oddness of life, or perhaps the odd ways that people live their lives. Many of the stories might be characterized as science fiction or fantasy or horror or alternate reality, but in the end, they defy conventional categorization. The stories are sui generis.

Some of the stories in Instruction Manual for Swallowing reminded me of Monty Python sketches. "The Forty-Litre Monkey" is about a pet shop owner who competes to raise the world's largest monkey (as measured by volume). A man's attempt to have an affair is disrupted by an adverse reaction to sushi (or guilt) in "Sushi Plate Epiphany." In the strange future imagined in "Robot Wasps," terrorists hack advertising zeppelins to make them display anti-government messages while a man does battle with the robot wasps that have taken over his garden. In "The Thorn," a child's grandparents struggle to pull a stubborn thorn from a boy's foot, only to discover that it isn't a thorn at all. The narrator in "Instruction Manual for Swallowing" gets in touch with his inner-self: the guy who runs his autonomic nervous system, who happens to look just like Busta Rhymes, is none too happy with the narrator's self-abuse.

In the absence of any better way to categorize the remaining stories, I'll lump them together according to my impressions of them:

Grotesque: Told from the father's point of view, "Belly Full of Rain" is the story of a woman who, pregnant with 37 fetuses, enlists the help of an "expert" to help her achieve the medically impossible by giving birth to all of them. A carnivorous centipede saves a man from a bear trap in "The Centipede's Wife," but haunting guilt about its past prevents the centipede from devouring the man.

Morbid: In "Jumping Jennifer," college girls are unsympathetic to the student they've nicknamed "Barbie" after she falls (or is pushed) from her dorm room window. A cat alerts two young people to an older man's unbecoming fate in "Ipods for Cats."

Bizarre: "Testicular Cancer vs. the Behemoth" asks which is worse: learning that you have an advanced case of testicular cancer or discovering that your family and friends are preoccupied with the Godzilla-type monster that is tearing up the city. "Boiling the Toad" is about a man who comes to fear the painful sex games his girlfriend wants to play. An art exhibit comes alive (with deadly intent) in "A Gilbert and George Talibanimation." Zombies with voracious appetites need a credit card to eat at the restaurant staffed by "Meaty's Boys"-- but what exactly are they eating?

Mysterious: A man meets a teenage girl he images to be the incarnation of his infant daughter in "Cuckoo."

Marek writes in a deceptively simple style that enhances the reader's ability to accept his wild imaginings as if they are ordinary events faithfully reported by a reliable narrator. In other words, Marek makes the extraordinary seem ordinary, perhaps because his characters are ordinary people who view zombies (for instance) in the same way we might view bad drivers:  irritating but commonplace.  I didn't like all of these stories equally, but I liked them all. 

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