28 Far Cries

by Marc Nash

28 flash fiction tales by master literary craftsman Marc Nash. The stories range from the violence of Happy Hour to armoured pole-dancers, from dying superheroes to synesthesia, and from toxic relationships to warlords to the mythic ponderings of incubi and succubi.

81 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2014

About the author

1) WORDS – voice
2) WORDS – communing
3) WORDS – emotional intelligence
4) WORDS – identity
5) WORDS – metaphor
6) WORDS – origins
7) WORDS – Origins
viii) WORDS – ideas
9) WORDS – alchemy
10)WORDS – trove
11)WORDS – meaning
12)WORDS – ambiguity
13)WORDS – stricture
14)WORDS – porousness
15)WORDS – vapour trails
16)WORDS – lyricism
17)WORDS – Being
18)WORDS – metastasis
19)WORDS – play
20)WORDS – inoculation against mortality

20 years in the counterculture working at Rough Trade Record Shop, now working in freedom of expression NGO world. I hope my books are more than just the sum of the above. I used to be a playwright, but then started writing more for dancers and physical theatre performers. I like a challenge and I like to move out of my comfort zone. Now I’m a novelist and am writing more ‘voice’ than I ever did as a playwright. Go figure!

My Booktube review site: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmpw...

Reviews

[Gregor Xane · Rating 4 out of 5]

The flash pieces in this book are like ZIP files that need to be unpacked.

No. That's close but not quite right.

This book is like a display case filled with 28 finely crafted, exquisitely detailed miniature sculptures. You have to pick each one up in turn, examine it on its own while lying on a hammock for a while, before returning to the case to pick up another. After reading one or two of these pieces, I decided to take my sweet time with this collection, and I'm glad I did. You could read this in an afternoon, I suppose, but I wouldn't recommend it. These flash fiction pieces have drag. (And somehow I mean drag as in the longitudinal retarding force exerted by air or other fluid surrounding a moving object.) There are little gnarly bits sticking out of these stories that you should allow to snag your attention. You should take some pleasure in examining the embedded hooks. You can tell the author has worked and reworked these pieces, grabbing different disparate bits over time and mashing them into place, working them in, rubbing and rearranging until they work.

Nash is playing with language here. That seems to be his main focus. He likes obscure and archaic words, and especially words or phrases with double or triple meanings. It was fun to see how he'd mash ideas together, reconcile juxtapositions, flog a pun to death, turn concepts inside out, and meditate on a peculiar concept until it nearly breaks under his scrutiny. In addition to inspecting the meaning of words, Nash is also obviously obsessively concerned with the sounds we make when we speak them. There is a rough rhythm to these pieces, a lot of hard consonant sounds that pop and crack and jolt and jar as you go.

This collection isn't for everyone. Many of the pieces aren't proper stories. Many are more like inspections of objects and concepts at a microscopic level. Yes, you will find stories in this thing, but there are plenty of chunks of writing therein that could just as easily be labeled anti-story. If you think you might like that sort of thing, give this a go. I had fun reading it. But, admittedly, it was less the pleasure one usually associates with reading and more the kind of fun one has while solving puzzles.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 5 out of 5]

This feels impossible to talk about without spoilers because absolutely everything that interests me pretty much unravels the respective story. You have been warned! This has changed my mind about flash fiction. I have not consumed something that fit the form well previously and was put off of it in other cases—until now.

This collection rightly and smartly begins with The Road to Nowhere, apparently emerging from a confluence of listening to the Talking Heads and Nash’s grey matter. What I love about this, especially as an opening to a collection, is that it signals so many things to the reader.

For one, Nash has an interest in the perception of constructs, interrogating the most mundane object: the road. What actual purpose does it or did it have. What is its importance? But also, many people have the same or similar thoughts when they go hiking, do they not? There is always an offshoot that seems like it goes nowhere productive and yet is so tramped down it’s almost frustrating because what are these people doing? It’s those tourists who go to Banff and pose with bears or cougars in the background. Roads have been around much longer than for the mere conveyance of cars or wagons. They are the detritus of the smart and imbecilic alike, delineating safety from danger and the expectation of reaching a place you presumably know of, as it’s probably a guide posted in some way.

For me, it begged the question: Are we within the expectations a reader would have? Speaking of genre or a theme that might bundle these all together. Or are we off the beaten path here and in for something else?

What follows is something like jazz, I think, so a bit of both.

Yet, there is usually a fluency regarding perception, especially. Aliens, rather than thinking cars are the primary life forms, examine juicy couture. A warlord, crippled with an emotion I don’t even think he’s properly able to understand what’s happening and so regurgitates a war truism while his men do not have the tools to interact with a man not performing his gender in the way he taught them. Ostensible agency embodied in a man who wakes up able to speak in the language of Ur, but no discernible lever in society can be deployed to make any use whatever of such a discovery. It is commodified and co-opted so foolishly it may remove the primary means of agency of everyone everywhere.

Tonally and thematically and subject matter wise, Nash reminds me of Douglas Adams, actually. Though Nash seems less interested in-jokes, when he wishes to be playful or funny, it’s in an erudite way. Other times he pens horror just as well. But Adams doesn’t command as many chewy words from what I recall. Nash knows how to make language work for him economically, but also in telegraphing character, motion, and tone.

“…While his wife’s face alternated between puce rage and puffy cerise when the tears absconded and burnished the skin channels they ploughed.”

Loved this collection and will certainly pick up another Nash book. Immensely enjoyable.

[Adriano Bulla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still reading it, and don't rate books before reading them, and should have finished if life had not thrown things my way. I shall change the rating in the unlikely case that the last stories are not as good as those I've read so far.

I will write a proper review after reading the whole book, still, take this as my thoughts on the book so far.

Mark Nash's fiction is both intriguing and often funny, but within it, there are also deep and thoughtful meditations on the Human Race, I believe that being able to combine the two, and within very short stories, is an outstanding achievement. They focus on areas of our Fulture that we often leave in footnotes, which adds to the worthiness of this book: it's easy to run away with topics everybody knows about, Nd even more commercial, let us say, it is for me more courageous and something someone must keep doing, while others focus on the rest, to preserve and reflect on smaller incidents and aspects of our development as a race.

The story that has made me realise this is 'Ur, Um': beautiful pun in the title, it is about a man who suddenly starts, with a Kafkian change of Fate, speaking the Ur-Language. This made me think, how many people know of the Ur-Language? Is it only Linguists, Philologists and Archaeologists? Even in this question there is a profound thought: why do we, as a culture, have forgotten that we once spoke a common language? And why doesn't the 'system' (word used with it happy left wing meaning) promote the knowledge that we all come from common culture? The Katkian situation is follo web by a Pirandellian paradox: while the Ur Language was used to communicate across Europe and Asia in the past (though we non have cause that even the Americas might have used tris Language) at a time that we now call 'barbaric', its rediscovery becomes the source of fighting, power struggles and ultimately distruction,

How profound a thought Nd statement within one thousand words!

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Verbose viscosity. Too clever by half. My favourite was "The New Editors". The quality of my brain is strained against the quality of the writing. Best to read one or two at a time and let them settle. Reading Marc Nash's work, I'm reminded of my own lexical limitations. Marc paints with words.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marc Nash's 28 Far Cries is my first encounter with flash fiction. Before starting I had to Google what flash fiction is. Nash's book made a good first impression. 28 brief pieces of 3-4 pages, the subjects range from the mundane to the nightmarish. I am willing to fess up to the fact that I did not "get" every story. But I am comfortable with that because it seems consistent with the intent of book.

I read the pieces in random order, chosing them as curiosity moved me. I also backtracked and read some pieces more than once as the mood struck me. In this way I felt I personalized the reading experience for myself.

As a logophile, Nash's book is a treat. He is obviously a lover of words. Although a short book, I think I learned more new words in this short book than I normaly encounter in much longer books.

Nash writes with imagination and exactitude - this is not unexpected if your chosen form is flash fiction, every word must count, no malingerers.

After reading about half the pieces I began to get a sense of connectivity between them. I was uncertain of this was vestigial trappings of outmoded literary analysis. But this sense stuck with me so I decided to put it out here. The sense I find connecting the pieces is anxieity or malaise. Stated or implied, real or imaged. Whether in 1) villagers anxiety of the unknown in "The Road to Nowhere", 2) a Nightmare's implied anxiety that the horror of waking hours has made it impotent in "Night Terrors", 3) a writer's anxiety at having his literary intergrity randsomed for obscene sucess by a faceless system employing viral frontmen in "A New Editor", 4) or a father's anxiety at the prospect of his young son growing up to become just like him in "Root and Branch". Each piece showcases how anxiety, like toxic creosote, binds togeather and anesthetizes the modern human experience, real or imagined.

[Don Sloan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collection of flash fiction entitled 28 Far Cries left me wondering if I was smart enough to review it.

Marc Nash is obviously a talented author who is also something of a word artist. In fact, that's the closest analogy I can make: I feel as though I've been to a prestigious exhibition of modern art paintings by a new artist and cannot comprehend much of the work.

His careful interplay of words and images are often first-rate; and the stories DO have points, although sometimes as a reader you must hunt for them. They all jump right into a narrative, usually fully underway, leaving you feeling as though you just barely jumped onto the trailing car of a fast train, pulling out of a dark station without a clear destination in mind.

And some of the stories take place seemingly at the cellular level, where you must hack your way through jungles of microbes and nanobots to find the story's true meaning.

But I am convinced the author isn't much interested in whether the reader can fully comprehend each piece. Rather, again, like a good -- and possibly great -- artist, he has penned his stories with guile and a liberal smattering of arcane and truly unusual words and phrases as though he would be delighted to know his readers were having to re-read entire long passages to uncover the hidden meaning embedded therein.

I rather liked "The Road to Nowhere," which chronicles the efforts of an unnamed people trying to figure out where a road goes. In the end, however, they stop exploring, afraid to see what lies beyond the seemingly endless horizon.
One phrase from that story, at the very end, is worth noting: "It kept them from wandering, from encountering the dark, unknown parts of themselves."

In "Cop Aesthetic," we seem to see two sides of a police officer, who begins the story by taking his daughter to a zoo, but ends by sitting across the table from a shackled, dangerous felon. The imagery evoked, regarding predatory animals, is chilling.

In "Still Ill," a man who has been posing as a silver-painted mechanical man, apparently in a large city, has developed a reaction -- possibly fatal -- to his silver body paint. Best line from that one: "My mind focused in on emptying itself, devoted to harnessing the body to its strict oversight. And yet behind my paralyzed husk, my mind is free to roam."

In "Type O Negative" the main -- and only -- character has been irradiated, subjecting her to bizarre speech patterns. At the end, she cries for help. But you can tell it's too late.

Wikipedia defines flash fiction as fiction of extreme brevity. Works can range from three hundred words to a thousand. The genre has a notable past, stretching apparently into prehistory, and practiced by no less than Walt Whitman. No wonder these stories sometimes seem closer to long poetry than prose.

As I said, this sort of fiction is new to me and, while I'm not sure everyone will appreciate what Marc Nash has written down for posterity, I am convinced that he puts a lot of thought into his craft, and I applaud him for his artistry.