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BARABUS
Following the 2022 Tenement publication of Fowler’s MUEUM, shortlisted for the 2022/23 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, a second novella in his percolating trilogy of fictions on the lore and estrangements of work and violence.
I have seen the world.
Voltaire, Candide
What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job.
I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg.
Luke 16:3
A medic roams an English city, going from call to call. As our protagonist roves from station to station they encounter accident, amusement, injury and error—minor ailment and major catastrophe alike—as they mis/adventure in the functionary detachment of applied temporary medicine. Whilst one tragedy seeds, another never materialises; whilst fear germinates and unease blooms, the plod and pace of a more pedestrian iteration of life prevails.
In a thread of instances laced with blood and banality, gore and gratuity—horrors both benign and ballooning—the medic is Fowler’s working witness to the body’s frailties. In their encounters, they see the structures and strictures and hierarchies of lived experience. How life can be boiled down to the ‘job,’ how a crisis can be crystallised in a single conversation, how calamity can overwhelm the senses, how hope hides in small rooms.
In riverine prose cooked down to concrete, this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity. About moral honesty, and what it costs to live in service of the needs of others. BARABUS is a novella about pragmatism in practice and the principled contradiction compounded in the idea of assistance and help. In our witness, we’ve the inversion of a god complex. A take on the idea of salvation lampooned in the function of a worker ‘on call,’ and the prospect of salvation sitting just a phone call away.
If a body is our ‘soft machine,’ as William S. Burroughs would put it, BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris, the acerbity of Peter Weiss, Fowler’s second novella is a paean to the disarming directness of such authors as Yoram Kaniuk and, with the crunch of Anthony Burgess, is a book about our unnamed maladies and all our efforts to overlook them, override them, and correct them.
I have seen the world.
Voltaire, Candide
What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job.
I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg.
Luke 16:3
A medic roams an English city, going from call to call. As our protagonist roves from station to station they encounter accident, amusement, injury and error—minor ailment and major catastrophe alike—as they mis/adventure in the functionary detachment of applied temporary medicine. Whilst one tragedy seeds, another never materialises; whilst fear germinates and unease blooms, the plod and pace of a more pedestrian iteration of life prevails.
In a thread of instances laced with blood and banality, gore and gratuity—horrors both benign and ballooning—the medic is Fowler’s working witness to the body’s frailties. In their encounters, they see the structures and strictures and hierarchies of lived experience. How life can be boiled down to the ‘job,’ how a crisis can be crystallised in a single conversation, how calamity can overwhelm the senses, how hope hides in small rooms.
In riverine prose cooked down to concrete, this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity. About moral honesty, and what it costs to live in service of the needs of others. BARABUS is a novella about pragmatism in practice and the principled contradiction compounded in the idea of assistance and help. In our witness, we’ve the inversion of a god complex. A take on the idea of salvation lampooned in the function of a worker ‘on call,’ and the prospect of salvation sitting just a phone call away.
If a body is our ‘soft machine,’ as William S. Burroughs would put it, BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris, the acerbity of Peter Weiss, Fowler’s second novella is a paean to the disarming directness of such authors as Yoram Kaniuk and, with the crunch of Anthony Burgess, is a book about our unnamed maladies and all our efforts to overlook them, override them, and correct them.
150 pages, Paperback
Published January 16, 2026
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August 12, 2026
Entered for the 2027 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize by Tenement Press
I first came across S J Fowler, writer and highly creative poet, in the vitally important anthology Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature edited by Britain's most exciting author Isabel Waidner, where he contributed a short story. He had also previously been shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.
Both of the stories formed part of his brilliant debut novella, MUEUM, which, entered by Tenement Press, was deservedly shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland, based on the author's experience as a guard, or 'visitor' host, in the British Museum from 2007-2014.
BARABUS is billed as 'a second novella in his percolating trilogy of fictions on the lore and estrangements of work and violence.'
The narrator here works as an ambulance driver and medic, and the novel is his records of his time in the role, ranging from the visceral descriptions of the callouts, to the more banal aspects of ambulance station politics, mixed in with his own rather odd dependency on pink and green prescription medicines for digestion and sleep (although for a medic, I have to say that he seems to have got Aniseed Gaviscon, which is pink, somewhat confused with Pepto-Bismol, only the latter containing bismuth, although he suggests, earlier in the book than the extract below, that the two are the same, just UK vs US brand names):
VIII Green nurse.
I don't know what gives night nurse its colour but I've stockpiled it. Night nurse is a cold medicine by advertising but I don't think, in my experience at least, that is what people use it for primarily. I justify it that the conditions of going under into sleep are not the same as they have been throughout the majority of history or human experience, whatever you want to say. It is quite hard to rest for most people, in urban environments who work jobs with lots of physical stress anyway. I accept it as a faintness I have, that is understandable, and really common, and as such, you need help. I need help getting over the line. I say this because I didn't think it, initially. I had to be convinced, and to feel it for myself. Because this is admitting the body is not enough sometimes by itself. In certain environments. Or against difficult realities. I find that hard to take though I am aware of the irony. The second of my two medicinal liquids, I don't use it daily, like the pink pepto, the gaviscon, which is more consistent and effective for me. If you know anything about night nurse, you know why that is. It would probably stop working, or it certainly feels like it would have a deleterious effect. I take it when I feel I need it and do this relatively rarely. Weekly at most, normally, and every other day in particularly difficult times. It's not ideal that I'm often on the pink just after I get back from work and then the green soon after to go under, and sometimes a run in between. But it's alright. You find ways to cope with the pressure on the body. These are not prescription drugs for the stomach and the sleep, they are over counter normal people aids. But I do have it stockpiled, as I always worry they might discontinue it.
Perhaps not as distinctive in literary terms as MUEUM, which in addition to its 'darkly wry 'confessions of a museum guard' also included the background of an unspecified cataclysmic event, but still well worthwhile.
The publisher
The book is published by the small independent Tenement Press: "Tenement Press, a house for homeless ideas, is an independent publications project dedicated to the championship and promotion of experimental literary works—in English and first-time translation."
I first came across S J Fowler, writer and highly creative poet, in the vitally important anthology Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature edited by Britain's most exciting author Isabel Waidner, where he contributed a short story. He had also previously been shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.
Both of the stories formed part of his brilliant debut novella, MUEUM, which, entered by Tenement Press, was deservedly shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland, based on the author's experience as a guard, or 'visitor' host, in the British Museum from 2007-2014.
BARABUS is billed as 'a second novella in his percolating trilogy of fictions on the lore and estrangements of work and violence.'
The narrator here works as an ambulance driver and medic, and the novel is his records of his time in the role, ranging from the visceral descriptions of the callouts, to the more banal aspects of ambulance station politics, mixed in with his own rather odd dependency on pink and green prescription medicines for digestion and sleep (although for a medic, I have to say that he seems to have got Aniseed Gaviscon, which is pink, somewhat confused with Pepto-Bismol, only the latter containing bismuth, although he suggests, earlier in the book than the extract below, that the two are the same, just UK vs US brand names):
VIII Green nurse.
I don't know what gives night nurse its colour but I've stockpiled it. Night nurse is a cold medicine by advertising but I don't think, in my experience at least, that is what people use it for primarily. I justify it that the conditions of going under into sleep are not the same as they have been throughout the majority of history or human experience, whatever you want to say. It is quite hard to rest for most people, in urban environments who work jobs with lots of physical stress anyway. I accept it as a faintness I have, that is understandable, and really common, and as such, you need help. I need help getting over the line. I say this because I didn't think it, initially. I had to be convinced, and to feel it for myself. Because this is admitting the body is not enough sometimes by itself. In certain environments. Or against difficult realities. I find that hard to take though I am aware of the irony. The second of my two medicinal liquids, I don't use it daily, like the pink pepto, the gaviscon, which is more consistent and effective for me. If you know anything about night nurse, you know why that is. It would probably stop working, or it certainly feels like it would have a deleterious effect. I take it when I feel I need it and do this relatively rarely. Weekly at most, normally, and every other day in particularly difficult times. It's not ideal that I'm often on the pink just after I get back from work and then the green soon after to go under, and sometimes a run in between. But it's alright. You find ways to cope with the pressure on the body. These are not prescription drugs for the stomach and the sleep, they are over counter normal people aids. But I do have it stockpiled, as I always worry they might discontinue it.
Perhaps not as distinctive in literary terms as MUEUM, which in addition to its 'darkly wry 'confessions of a museum guard' also included the background of an unspecified cataclysmic event, but still well worthwhile.
The publisher
The book is published by the small independent Tenement Press: "Tenement Press, a house for homeless ideas, is an independent publications project dedicated to the championship and promotion of experimental literary works—in English and first-time translation."
Displaying 1 of 1 review