Indeed, as we make our way through this collection, we may feel as if we’re moving gradually through a dark chronology of America’s imminent social and political unraveling. If these details sound more at home in dystopian sci-fi than in a pair of otherwise naturalistic short stories set in present-day Cleveland and aboard a tacky cruise ship, they’re only the first of many such dissonant chords Marcus strikes. After this point, Marcus’s straightforward narrative sensibility begins tacking toward the mysterious Don DeLillo Islands, where paranoia reigns supreme and light humor goes to harden. But mid-story, a crew member begins barging in on sleeping passengers to check them against the ship’s manifest, without explaining why. Its setting is a creative-writing seminar offered to (hilariously untalented) cruise-ship passengers as an edifying onboard activity. “I Can Say Many Nice Things” begins as wry, spot-on satire. This destabilizing weirdness starts off subtly in the opening story, “What Have You Done?” So invested are we in tracking the shaky progress of an ill-tempered man who has reluctantly returned home for a family reunion that it almost slips right by us when he pauses to regard the newest architectural additions to the downtown Cleveland skyline: “They were tall and thin and black, hooked at their tops, and were either sheathed entirely in charcoal-tinted glass or simply windowless.”Įven those who don’t think to scribble a question mark in the margin after reading that sentence may wonder whether there’s some sort of connection between those hellish, hook-topped skyscrapers and the middle-of-the-night knock at the door that resonates throughout the next story.

But even when he’s overestimating his reader’s patience or fortitude, Marcus is nothing less than fully engaged in an artistic enterprise that the surrealists would have authorized: injecting into our recognizable world just enough weirdness to make readers second-guess their senses. These 15 tales are by turns tender, funny, heartbreaking, frightening and occasionally overweening.

They seem powered by the electrostatic charge that results whenever the texture of the familiar is abraded by some alien, highly resistant material. The best stories in Ben Marcus’s new collection of short fiction, “ Leaving the Sea,” are surreal in this original sense of the word. Their goal was rather to discomfit readers in the way that our most vivid dreams do, through the juxtaposition of realistic yet unrelated images: “two realities, more or less distant, brought together,” in the words of poet Pierre Reverdy. The adjective “surreal” has, over time, come to mean “unfathomable” or “not of this world” or just “really, really freaky.” But it’s worth noting that the early surrealist writers weren’t interested in summoning strangeness for strangeness’s sake.

Notable American Women by Ben Marcus