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M7
A nameless young man on the run seeks employment at U-City’s renowned Library—the bastion of the Word, housing all forms of the written word since the beginning of the world.
In the Library, Messengers glide through the air, and Finders retrieve holdings for patrons, spending their entire lives in the vast Stacks learning the Collection as they walk, run, climb, or crawl through.
Psychedelic Light Clusters in the Living Complex provide solace via spectacular arrays of ever-changing, symmetrical patterns. Pods accelerate travel, extending deep into the Earth and to netherworlds beyond. And millions of small green vials dating back 150,000 years wait in a high-security storage facility.
When the Shadowheen, a secretive cult devoted to destroying the precious remnants of humankind, set their sights on the Library’s collection, and the Ten Commandments, the nameless young man, now called M7, is pulled into a transcendental mystery.
Cryptic and enigmatic, M7 resonates with humor, wit, mind-bending adventure and intrigue—sacred and profane—where punctuation can change everything.
"M7 is destined to become the premier librarian, futuristic, Steam-punkish, psychedelic 'I'm a little bored at work and I want to fantasize about working in a much cooler library that doesn't really exist yet but might if I squint, tilt my head and take the right drug.' book. No, it's bigger than that. Katzman has written an entertaining guide book that gives us a literary template for how to fantasize about how to futurize your job, any job (at least inside your head)."
— Bowen Craig, co-founder of Bilbo Books Publishing, author of A Look to the Future Through the Eyes of an Eighty- Year-Old Pirate, and co-author of Pass the Oxtail Before the World Ends with Kelly Codling
"Library attendants in velvet suits, baffling urgent memos, unnavigable corridors of glowing light, sexual innuendoes, inappropriate and innocent, hilarious and poignant. Katzman's M7 captures the essence of what delights us, puzzles us, and ultimately frustrates our best plans for order and meaning in life. Katzman expertly weaves sense into nonsense and dresses us in a big ridiculous coat of words as he nudges us toward the mirror where, stunned to recognize ourselves, we surrender to laughter. I was dizzy by the end of it."
— John Clay, editor, bhag.net
"M7 is wildly imaginative, irreverent, and funny. Katzman takes us on a joyride through a bizarre, Kafkaesque landscape where bureaucratic absurdities abound. The main character of this novel navigates a sprawling institution that defies logic, even the dimensions of time and space. Nothing escapes Katzman’s comic genius—not sex, religion, hierarchy, esoteric mysteries, or even language itself. I couldn’t read twenty pages without bursting into laughter."
— Walt McLaughlin, publisher of Wood Thrush Books, and author of Cultivating the Wildness Within, The Allure of Deep Woods, A Reluctant Pantheism, and twenty other nonfiction books.
"Mark Katzman’s M7 is a brilliantly biting, provocative, psychedelic, slyly (and wildly) hilarious (and naughty, yes, very naughty) satirical epic of bibliographic proportions that will make even the worst offender think twice about ever holding on to an overdue library book. More than that, with M7, Katzman unabashedly and seriously vivisects both the sacred and the profane, adroitly (and delightfully) illustrating how that flimsily fabricated papier-mâché wall dividing those two realms ca
In the Library, Messengers glide through the air, and Finders retrieve holdings for patrons, spending their entire lives in the vast Stacks learning the Collection as they walk, run, climb, or crawl through.
Psychedelic Light Clusters in the Living Complex provide solace via spectacular arrays of ever-changing, symmetrical patterns. Pods accelerate travel, extending deep into the Earth and to netherworlds beyond. And millions of small green vials dating back 150,000 years wait in a high-security storage facility.
When the Shadowheen, a secretive cult devoted to destroying the precious remnants of humankind, set their sights on the Library’s collection, and the Ten Commandments, the nameless young man, now called M7, is pulled into a transcendental mystery.
Cryptic and enigmatic, M7 resonates with humor, wit, mind-bending adventure and intrigue—sacred and profane—where punctuation can change everything.
"M7 is destined to become the premier librarian, futuristic, Steam-punkish, psychedelic 'I'm a little bored at work and I want to fantasize about working in a much cooler library that doesn't really exist yet but might if I squint, tilt my head and take the right drug.' book. No, it's bigger than that. Katzman has written an entertaining guide book that gives us a literary template for how to fantasize about how to futurize your job, any job (at least inside your head)."
— Bowen Craig, co-founder of Bilbo Books Publishing, author of A Look to the Future Through the Eyes of an Eighty- Year-Old Pirate, and co-author of Pass the Oxtail Before the World Ends with Kelly Codling
"Library attendants in velvet suits, baffling urgent memos, unnavigable corridors of glowing light, sexual innuendoes, inappropriate and innocent, hilarious and poignant. Katzman's M7 captures the essence of what delights us, puzzles us, and ultimately frustrates our best plans for order and meaning in life. Katzman expertly weaves sense into nonsense and dresses us in a big ridiculous coat of words as he nudges us toward the mirror where, stunned to recognize ourselves, we surrender to laughter. I was dizzy by the end of it."
— John Clay, editor, bhag.net
"M7 is wildly imaginative, irreverent, and funny. Katzman takes us on a joyride through a bizarre, Kafkaesque landscape where bureaucratic absurdities abound. The main character of this novel navigates a sprawling institution that defies logic, even the dimensions of time and space. Nothing escapes Katzman’s comic genius—not sex, religion, hierarchy, esoteric mysteries, or even language itself. I couldn’t read twenty pages without bursting into laughter."
— Walt McLaughlin, publisher of Wood Thrush Books, and author of Cultivating the Wildness Within, The Allure of Deep Woods, A Reluctant Pantheism, and twenty other nonfiction books.
"Mark Katzman’s M7 is a brilliantly biting, provocative, psychedelic, slyly (and wildly) hilarious (and naughty, yes, very naughty) satirical epic of bibliographic proportions that will make even the worst offender think twice about ever holding on to an overdue library book. More than that, with M7, Katzman unabashedly and seriously vivisects both the sacred and the profane, adroitly (and delightfully) illustrating how that flimsily fabricated papier-mâché wall dividing those two realms ca
393 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 7, 2024
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About the author
Mark Katzman
7 books15 followersMark Katzman is an author, playwright, and musician. He lives in Athens, Georgia. He is a native of St. Louis and grew up in Kansas City.
He is the author of the novels Playdate (2015), I Russian Bride (2011), and the artist books, INoN (1990) and Along the Way (1990), which are held in museum and Special Collections, including MoMA. He hosts Hargrett Writer's Circle at the University of Georgia.
Katzman has published interviews with Timothy Leary (http://fusionanomaly.net/timothyleary...) Robyn Hitchcock, William Orbit, Stanley Kunitz, William Bronk, among others. He co-edits athensuncharted.com, an Athens, Georgia-centric art project.
Prairie Fields, an album of instrumental soundscapes, was released in May 2015. (basic-music.tumblr.com) ITunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/pra...
He is the author of the novels Playdate (2015), I Russian Bride (2011), and the artist books, INoN (1990) and Along the Way (1990), which are held in museum and Special Collections, including MoMA. He hosts Hargrett Writer's Circle at the University of Georgia.
Katzman has published interviews with Timothy Leary (http://fusionanomaly.net/timothyleary...) Robyn Hitchcock, William Orbit, Stanley Kunitz, William Bronk, among others. He co-edits athensuncharted.com, an Athens, Georgia-centric art project.
Prairie Fields, an album of instrumental soundscapes, was released in May 2015. (basic-music.tumblr.com) ITunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/pra...
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 4, 2024
To Read M7
Pioneering author Mark Katzman, with his outrageously audacious and challenging new novel M7, has succeeded in turning the fantasy and science fiction genres inside-out and plopped them squarely on their respective heads. Instead of taking the easy way out and penning a story that adheres to a calculated, accepted whimsy, Katzman has nimbly pushed that “approved” and crowd-pleasing fancifulness through a psychedelic meat grinder and has literally destroyed that contrived, flimsy wall between the sacred and the profane. What our culture holds up as beauty, M7 redefines as base; conversely, all that is “obscene” becomes “pure.” This alone will unnerve even “experienced” readers.
At the novel’s opening, the eponymous protagonist M7 (gently haunted throughout the novel by the recurring, unsettling spectre of his supposedly dead mother) finds himself thrown into a kaleidoscopic adventure that tests his skills and his wits: his first trial is to complete an application for employment at the world-renowned, prestigious “Library,” where all of the remnants of the “Word” are housed from the beginning of history (including the original Ten Commandments) – an application that he later discovers requires years of preparation.
He is hired because he is an outsider; he is NOT part of the hoi poloi of “U-City”; he is not a known or fawning player. The “Librarians” (in the elaborate guises of Bronk, Dickinson, and Shakespeare, to name a few, “adorned” in “colorful ribbons” heralding “what glories their namesakes had achieved”) have chosen M7 because he does NOT fit the pattern, is not part of the formula, is not part of the orthodoxy.
What transpires from this point early in Chapter 2 is anything but buttoned-down; and the Library, this fantastic, hypnagogic Library (with its forever shifting and re-configuring passageways through its infinite Stacks, watched over by an enlightened, orphic seer) provides the mind-bending backdrop for Katzman’s M7, a meticulously (and joyfully), fully realized hallucinatory odyssey -- at times utterly inappropriate (filthy, if you will), but adroitly suffused with wickedly hilarious satire.
Does Katzman really get “down and dirty”?
You bet.
Is there a reason?
Yes...to break us free of conventions, of rote expectations.
Much too often, we as readers WANT the cookie-cut, preconceived notions of what a work of literature should embody because reading itself is a challenge; we readers want ease of navigation. Why struggle? Roadmaps help us get to that point of understanding, of “grokking.” Yet, as much as we protest, we need to be tested regularly; connections do not happen in aspic.
M7 alters this path and piques our collective attention span, creativity, and skill. Katzman wants us to become uncomfortable, wants us to squirm a bit, wants to rail against well-worn patterns in order to open up our horizons, to force us to become 3D, to interact...not just passively watch words float by.
Authors such as Samuel R. Delaney have done the same with such ground-breaking novellas as Phallos and his controversial novel The Mad Man. In 1974, the Pulitzer Advisory Board refused to award the Prize for Fiction because the board was unsubstaniatedly offended by Thomas Pynchon’s monumental masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow. As far back as 1893, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was lambasted by the New York Tribune as grotesque and lacking any “charm of style.” A long history of unconventional literature NOT being accepted by “the norm” exists to underpin the necessity for breaking rules and confronting readers and critics. J. D. Salinger experienced the same myopics; Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, to this day, is still reviled by many “authoritative” commentators; readers were (and still are) dumbstruck by Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. Henry Miller was excoriated.
M7 is an unapologetically unique and robust constituent of this library of revolutionary literature; and Mark Katzman more than comfortably fits in with all of the aforementioned great cutting-edge authors. M7’s voice, its “obscenity” is NOT gratuitous (any more than Farmer’s Image of the Beast is debased). With M7, Katzman believes that we HAVE (or can readily develop) the experience, acumen and skill to dive deeply into his compellingly surrealistic tale, his mesmerizingly other-worldy, psychedelic novel, which, at times, defies logic, even time and space. It may very well be the first pro-psychedelic novel of our times, a perfect complement to the rise of psychedelic psychotherapy and the general acceptance of psychedelics into mainstream culture, a process which has taken over fifty years to reach.
M7 took over ten years to complete; but during its completion, Katzman threw himself into transcribing all of Alexander Shulgin’s papers concerning psychopharmacology. M7 is an outpouring of this experience from a very intimate and poignant perspective. In other words, Katzman knows about what he writes; and he portrays what he knows brilliantly: this is fiction refracted through an “electric Kool-Aid acid” looking glass. The late Timothy Leary, whom Katzman had interviewed a number of years ago, would have embraced Katzman’s exuberantly outrageous epic as a primer.
M7 is this decade’s challenge to readers everywhere; and the punchline, folks, is the ending.
M7 shines.
To be truthful, many of us may not be prepared or steeled to tackle a novel like M7. In short, Mark Katzman’s provocative voice, his graphic, well-effected twists and turns may, in fact, befuddle or even vex those attempting to understand the gravity of what has been written.
Pointedly, M7 is a dark, cosmic comedy, reflecting the seemingly dire, upside down world in which we presently exist. While “K” never made direct contact with “The Castle,” in Franz Kafka's “unfinished” titular masterpiece, Katzman/M7 goes further, deeper and actually infiltrates “The Library,” giving us a glimpse into an enigmatic world none of us will soon forget.
It’s the 21st Century. Do we have what it takes to be experienced?
Pioneering author Mark Katzman, with his outrageously audacious and challenging new novel M7, has succeeded in turning the fantasy and science fiction genres inside-out and plopped them squarely on their respective heads. Instead of taking the easy way out and penning a story that adheres to a calculated, accepted whimsy, Katzman has nimbly pushed that “approved” and crowd-pleasing fancifulness through a psychedelic meat grinder and has literally destroyed that contrived, flimsy wall between the sacred and the profane. What our culture holds up as beauty, M7 redefines as base; conversely, all that is “obscene” becomes “pure.” This alone will unnerve even “experienced” readers.
At the novel’s opening, the eponymous protagonist M7 (gently haunted throughout the novel by the recurring, unsettling spectre of his supposedly dead mother) finds himself thrown into a kaleidoscopic adventure that tests his skills and his wits: his first trial is to complete an application for employment at the world-renowned, prestigious “Library,” where all of the remnants of the “Word” are housed from the beginning of history (including the original Ten Commandments) – an application that he later discovers requires years of preparation.
He is hired because he is an outsider; he is NOT part of the hoi poloi of “U-City”; he is not a known or fawning player. The “Librarians” (in the elaborate guises of Bronk, Dickinson, and Shakespeare, to name a few, “adorned” in “colorful ribbons” heralding “what glories their namesakes had achieved”) have chosen M7 because he does NOT fit the pattern, is not part of the formula, is not part of the orthodoxy.
What transpires from this point early in Chapter 2 is anything but buttoned-down; and the Library, this fantastic, hypnagogic Library (with its forever shifting and re-configuring passageways through its infinite Stacks, watched over by an enlightened, orphic seer) provides the mind-bending backdrop for Katzman’s M7, a meticulously (and joyfully), fully realized hallucinatory odyssey -- at times utterly inappropriate (filthy, if you will), but adroitly suffused with wickedly hilarious satire.
Does Katzman really get “down and dirty”?
You bet.
Is there a reason?
Yes...to break us free of conventions, of rote expectations.
Much too often, we as readers WANT the cookie-cut, preconceived notions of what a work of literature should embody because reading itself is a challenge; we readers want ease of navigation. Why struggle? Roadmaps help us get to that point of understanding, of “grokking.” Yet, as much as we protest, we need to be tested regularly; connections do not happen in aspic.
M7 alters this path and piques our collective attention span, creativity, and skill. Katzman wants us to become uncomfortable, wants us to squirm a bit, wants to rail against well-worn patterns in order to open up our horizons, to force us to become 3D, to interact...not just passively watch words float by.
Authors such as Samuel R. Delaney have done the same with such ground-breaking novellas as Phallos and his controversial novel The Mad Man. In 1974, the Pulitzer Advisory Board refused to award the Prize for Fiction because the board was unsubstaniatedly offended by Thomas Pynchon’s monumental masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow. As far back as 1893, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was lambasted by the New York Tribune as grotesque and lacking any “charm of style.” A long history of unconventional literature NOT being accepted by “the norm” exists to underpin the necessity for breaking rules and confronting readers and critics. J. D. Salinger experienced the same myopics; Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, to this day, is still reviled by many “authoritative” commentators; readers were (and still are) dumbstruck by Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. Henry Miller was excoriated.
M7 is an unapologetically unique and robust constituent of this library of revolutionary literature; and Mark Katzman more than comfortably fits in with all of the aforementioned great cutting-edge authors. M7’s voice, its “obscenity” is NOT gratuitous (any more than Farmer’s Image of the Beast is debased). With M7, Katzman believes that we HAVE (or can readily develop) the experience, acumen and skill to dive deeply into his compellingly surrealistic tale, his mesmerizingly other-worldy, psychedelic novel, which, at times, defies logic, even time and space. It may very well be the first pro-psychedelic novel of our times, a perfect complement to the rise of psychedelic psychotherapy and the general acceptance of psychedelics into mainstream culture, a process which has taken over fifty years to reach.
M7 took over ten years to complete; but during its completion, Katzman threw himself into transcribing all of Alexander Shulgin’s papers concerning psychopharmacology. M7 is an outpouring of this experience from a very intimate and poignant perspective. In other words, Katzman knows about what he writes; and he portrays what he knows brilliantly: this is fiction refracted through an “electric Kool-Aid acid” looking glass. The late Timothy Leary, whom Katzman had interviewed a number of years ago, would have embraced Katzman’s exuberantly outrageous epic as a primer.
M7 is this decade’s challenge to readers everywhere; and the punchline, folks, is the ending.
M7 shines.
To be truthful, many of us may not be prepared or steeled to tackle a novel like M7. In short, Mark Katzman’s provocative voice, his graphic, well-effected twists and turns may, in fact, befuddle or even vex those attempting to understand the gravity of what has been written.
Pointedly, M7 is a dark, cosmic comedy, reflecting the seemingly dire, upside down world in which we presently exist. While “K” never made direct contact with “The Castle,” in Franz Kafka's “unfinished” titular masterpiece, Katzman/M7 goes further, deeper and actually infiltrates “The Library,” giving us a glimpse into an enigmatic world none of us will soon forget.
It’s the 21st Century. Do we have what it takes to be experienced?
May 17, 2024
[dropped at 46%]
Where do I even start with this one? What a hot mess [derogatory].
The plot seems fun and interesting at first. A mysterious nameless protagonist gets hired at this huge library that holds all the information and mysteries of the world. I think it was going for a magical workplace type of story. Unfortunately it fell so flat on its face it broke its own nose.
Let’s do things I liked about it first:
-somewhat intriguing worldbuilding and occasionally fun library references
Moving on to things I hated:
-nothing happened??? granted i didn’t finish the book but if the plot doesn’t move a single inch by 46% then it’s already a lost cause
-the main character was the most generic annoying piece of sh*t i’ve ever read
-all the other characters were also generic and interchangeable
-what the hell was going on with all the random gratuitous pornographic bits?
-the “witty” tone was just extremely obnoxious
-“quirky” details just for the sake of being quirky
-things just happen to the protagonist, like getting hired and getting promotions and girls throwing themselves at him, without him ever doing a single thing to warrant it
In general this simply felt like some weird fantasy the author has and he just happened to put it on paper and somehow miraculously got it published. Personally I feel like his agent should get fired and Mark should keep his writing locked up on his computer to never see light of day.
[thanks to the publisher and netgalley for an advance copy of this book]
Where do I even start with this one? What a hot mess [derogatory].
The plot seems fun and interesting at first. A mysterious nameless protagonist gets hired at this huge library that holds all the information and mysteries of the world. I think it was going for a magical workplace type of story. Unfortunately it fell so flat on its face it broke its own nose.
Let’s do things I liked about it first:
-somewhat intriguing worldbuilding and occasionally fun library references
Moving on to things I hated:
-nothing happened??? granted i didn’t finish the book but if the plot doesn’t move a single inch by 46% then it’s already a lost cause
-the main character was the most generic annoying piece of sh*t i’ve ever read
-all the other characters were also generic and interchangeable
-what the hell was going on with all the random gratuitous pornographic bits?
-the “witty” tone was just extremely obnoxious
-“quirky” details just for the sake of being quirky
-things just happen to the protagonist, like getting hired and getting promotions and girls throwing themselves at him, without him ever doing a single thing to warrant it
In general this simply felt like some weird fantasy the author has and he just happened to put it on paper and somehow miraculously got it published. Personally I feel like his agent should get fired and Mark should keep his writing locked up on his computer to never see light of day.
[thanks to the publisher and netgalley for an advance copy of this book]
February 26, 2025
Any reasonably well-read person is going yo go "this is just a smorgasbord of Kafka, Borges, Vonnegut, PKD, Ursula LeGuin, and Douglas Adams." But ya know what? I love those folks. Turn off your inner critic and just tune in and enjoy the ride. Special props for living in Athens and digging E6. We've probably run into each other.
June 1, 2025
Mark Katzman writes about the simple efforts of human beings to fulfill their basic needs in an unfathomable world. The characters and settings change from novel to novel as if to tell us "See? No matter where you are, you can't escape it. This is the life we live." In the novel M7, the protagonist (for whom the story is named) is a library worker, and the unfathomable world is a library like no other. In fact, this library seems to be a world of its own.
The administration building is guarded by identical twin men who know nothing of what is inside the building they protect. The library associate from whom M7 picks up his library key invites him to hand-search her blouse for it. But this absurd world in which employees are charged, like the guards, with a task but granted no information to understand it and in which sexual encounters occur when least expected and probably inspire unease more than pleasure, is strangely familiar too. Katzman captures the essence of what delights us, puzzles us, and ultimately frustrates our best plans for order and meaning in real life. His language innocently and industriously weaves sense and nonsense through the reader's mind, inexorably dresses us in a big ridiculous coat of words as it deftly nudges us toward the mirror. We furrow our brow, shake our head, and finally begin to laugh. I look forward to the next variations on the absurd still to come from Katzman's rich mind.
The administration building is guarded by identical twin men who know nothing of what is inside the building they protect. The library associate from whom M7 picks up his library key invites him to hand-search her blouse for it. But this absurd world in which employees are charged, like the guards, with a task but granted no information to understand it and in which sexual encounters occur when least expected and probably inspire unease more than pleasure, is strangely familiar too. Katzman captures the essence of what delights us, puzzles us, and ultimately frustrates our best plans for order and meaning in real life. His language innocently and industriously weaves sense and nonsense through the reader's mind, inexorably dresses us in a big ridiculous coat of words as it deftly nudges us toward the mirror. We furrow our brow, shake our head, and finally begin to laugh. I look forward to the next variations on the absurd still to come from Katzman's rich mind.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews