A Creature Wanting Form

by Luke O'Neil

"In these stories, Luke O'Neil tears the heart out of the dying world and makes us give a fuck that it's still beating. ” —Rax King, author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

"Gorgeous, unsettling, infuriating.” —Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

"Rendered with a lyricism that seems to be in awe of the world even as they describe its greatest pains and profound injustices." —Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation

"A beautiful disaster.” —Dave Wedge, New York Times bestselling author and journalist




A Creature Wanting Form is a bleakly funny work of fiction from a journalist widely celebrated for his wry, mordant take on life.

Filtered through the lens of a writer and characters who are horrified by the earth’s looming mortality, and their own, but still compelled to carry on, O’Neil interweaves science fiction, allegory, fables, poetry, and reflections on the deeply grounded indignities of modern life. In these pages, climate catastrophe lurks on the horizon; animals voraciously devour each other; your parents only call to tell you who from home has just died; and you want to go for a swim, but there’s a shark in the pool.

In short, A Creature Wanting Form is a book for anyone trying to survive with a shred of humanity in the bleak alienation of America, 2022.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[lukeoneil47 · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be pretty funny if I gave this a shitty review.

[Boreal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading this book in early May 2023 - I got my preorder early - and within two pages I had to put it down. The first story, a few hundred words at most, had struck immediately and deftly at the fear of mortality which has been so omnipresent in the world over the past few years that it almost seems passé to be afraid of dying but such fear remains inescapable nonetheless. I kept wanting to pick it back up but I was never in the right headspace for it, because how often do we have the appetite to drag our fears out into the light?

I'd promised myself I'd finish it this year, though, so I sat down and read it cover-to-cover on a quiet late-December day. I had to put it down and take a mental breather a couple times, especially after "Neither deer nor the woods" hit me where I have a particularly deeply-held fear I don't like to think about so I don't will it into being. If you're stoic enough, scary things aren't so scary, right?

If this sounds like I should be giving it a negative review, I might be explaining it badly. Reading this collection wasn't about achieving catharsis or even about gaining perspective on facing those fears. Rather, what I took away from the experience is that, yes, all those feelings of turmoil and chaos and alienation and distress and the barely-controlled panic response to living when we live in a world that visibly glories in its incentivized inhumanity might be the most human response I could possibly be having. There's comfort in that.

[Angyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

"𝘈 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵."

this was a pleasant read of collected short stories. some of them were too painfully relatable but I really enjoyed the writing style and the easy way the author's wit & humor comes through. a good one to annotate!

[Briana Severin · Rating 3 out of 5]

i couldn’t get into it because of all the short stories and like no punctuation. it was still enjoyable but i had to push myself to finish it. my favourite story would have to be ‘Image captured October 2019’.

[asia · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOOF. my phone is filled with photos of my favorite passages.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crushing, bittersweet, and painfully authentic. Hopeful in the same way we all sometimes weirdly indulge in being hopeful despite being so exhausted, beaten, and desensitized.

A Creature Wanting Form oscillates between holding up a mirror to the dark reality we're all living in and moments of tender light because despite all that darkness we have little bits of light inside of us still somehow. Or sometimes it just lingers in between in some kind of superposition because both ends of that oscillatory movement do coexist simultaneously in our real world despite that feeling ridiculous.

I really liked this book because reading it felt like the first thing I've read maybe ever that just nails down what living right now feels like. Every other book feels like it follows how books are supposed to feel or has dialogue that in hindsight feels like it was following the rules (whatever those are). But O'Neil writes in a way that feels uniquely current because of the dialogue, the attitude, and the way it all meanders like my ADHD brain would. All of these aspects make for something that really feels like our actual lives in our actual world with stuff like Instagram, heatwaves, and school shootings. A lot of writing really struggles to acknowledge all of that and then on top of that (or maybe in spite of that?) manages to be beautiful and poetic also - which this book certainly is.

I guess to summarize, A Creature Wanting Form felt meaningful and worthwhile because it deeply connects to what we're all often feeling but not really articulating.

[Simon Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a collection of short stories and poems which I think I’d broadly categorise as ‘horror’, but horror which is grounded in contemporary reality. This is a book about climate change, the breakdown of society, racism, police brutality, gun violence… essentially, all the catastrophes that stalk the Western world, and the USA in particular.

This book was quite unlike anything else I can ever remember reading, and I’d highly recommend it. Not every story within in resonated with me, and I found that the style of writing meant that I could only stand to read it in short chunks, but it will live long in my memory.

More at https://sjhoward.co.uk/ive-been-readi...

[Alice Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories made me laugh, and cry, and feel seen in the way that a meme you see makes you feel seen and then you text it to your friends with the caption, "It me," and also vaguely sickened and creeped out by the recognition both of myself, and the stupid world we inhabit. And sometimes all of those reactions were elicited within the span of one sentence, and I think if you can pull that off as a writer, well that's pretty fucking impressive.

[leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read A Creature Wanting Form slowly over the course of a year. I kept it on my nightstand, reading a selection or two at a time, doling them out to myself. That's the way to do it, if you ask me. Read too many at once, and you risk becoming numb or overwhelmed. You have to give them time to roll around in your head, and yourself a chance to come up for air.

If you're familiar with O'Neil's excellent newsletter Welcome to Hell World, you'll recognize many of the chords he strikes in A Creature Wanting Form - notes of existential angst, outrage, and suffering, all played with an underlying poignancy, a fragile beauty, and a whisper-thin sense of hope. If that sounds like a lot; it is.

O'Neil seems compelled to explore the darker regions of our society and our collective psyche, and he's intent on bringing us along with him, like an intrepid tour guide who's afraid of what monsters may be lurking, but knows there's safety in numbers.

I'm not sure exactly what the selections in A Creature Wanting Form are — Are they poems, short stories, personal essays, some new form of journalism, a hybrid creature that O'Neil cobbled together using spare parts?

Whatever they are, they're compelling. Unique. Beautiful. They feel urgent. Timely. Necessary. Like this whole thing is about to go up in flames, but if we can only hold our loved ones close enough, we just might find something like salvation.

[Jake Basner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I passed up an overtime opportunity to finish reading this book which seems like a bad idea since you know you need money to feed yourself and what not but also ironic if you’re familiar with Mr. O’Neil’s writing. After I finished it I called my dad and asked him what his grandparents names were and he told me not now the Tigers are playing but aren’t you stopping by to do laundry tomorrow?
I loved this book so much but I knew I would going in being familiar with others works from the author. Reading his work is like when you’re listening to a song and go “oh fuck this song is me,” but it’s a book so I use the song metaphor because I bet I could count the people I know on one hand who have read a book this year.

[Kaleb Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Luke O'Neil's A Creature Wanting Form is a fiction anthology that aims to speak towards the paradoxically dull yet arresting terror that creeps throughout our modern lives. These vignettes — ranging from the length of a short story, to flash fiction, to being nigh-indistinguishable from prose poetry — all deal with the anxieties that insistently prod at our brains. These anxieties are worrying enough to saunter through our minds like they damn near own the place, yet never to the point where we try to do anything about them; perhaps because in most cases, we're resigned to the belief that, as individuals, there's nothing we can do. A Creature Wanting Form describes individuals grappling with climate change, the COVID-19 Pandemic, old age, police brutality, and gun violence, among other topics.

In short, there's a lot of death.

A lot of the feeling imparted by this book isn't due to its plots, but instead due to its form. A Creature Wanting Form, true to its name, has a stark absence of traditional form, making for a read unlike anything I've encountered before. Forget your grammar rules because there are no rules here. Luke O'Neil's prose is allergic to commas, it had a colectomy, and quotations are on its shit list. There aren't run-on sentences, no, we're treated to sprint-on sentences. Imagine the most casual yet chatty texter you know got a publishing deal. They're free to write stories as if they were texting as long as they use autocorrect. That's what these stories read like.

I'm usually not one to praise a novel radically experimenting with form — while I can respect the ambition, it more often than not hampers the story being told. This isn't the case for A Creature Wanting Form. Its eccentric style serves its stories well. Reading this book can be confusing; my eyes have repeatedly darted back up the page to revisit a section I read too quickly the first go-around. I've crowdsourced comprehending sections more times than I care to admit. Trying to parse these stories will make you feel like you're losing your mind. The stream-of-consciousness narration can be inviting — few stories accurately depict how freeform, scatterbrained, and banal our inner thoughts are. As a result of Creature committing to showing this , it feels validating. Yet more often than not, I found this stream-of-consciousness narration daunting thanks to the sheer glut of information you have to wade through, figuring out what's vital and what's chafe. In short, form does a great job of depicting how overwhelming it can feel just living in the world that we do. It's one thing to throw conventional form out the window just because, it's another to do so in service to the story, and I give props to O'Neil for doing the latter.

In letting the form do the heavy lifting for O'Neil, he's free to not let the actual narration ever get too depressing. It's dour yes, but seldom depressing. Bad, terrible things happen yes, but they're understated — a tragedy can only happen so many times before it just feels like a grim statistic you have to keep at arm's length lest you lose your mind. There's an absurdity to many events in the story that border on darkly comic.

Again, this obviously speaks to feelings we grapple with every day, feelings that are seldom represented in stories which, by their very nature, tend to be bombastic or, at the very least, moving.

A Creature Wanting Form pantomimes life exceptionally well.

Maybe a bit too well.

I do appreciate how unique Luke O'Neil's writing is in this anthology, but I do think this collection would be more memorable for me if its stories had more solid plots to anchor them. Or, at the very least, more palpable emotion from its characters. While its true that people opt to feel nothing as a safety mechanism against overwhelming despair, I still ultimately read to feel.
There's a feeling of ennui you get while reading this. And while I'm sure its the point, it doesn't make for a very satisfying experience. There's a reason why I skimped out on plot details and that's because I forgot most of the stories in this collection. Without strong emotions, plots, or hell, even imagery to anchor them, most of these stories blow back to the recesses of my mind minutes after finishing them. While there were some stories I really enjoyed such as "Predator Meets Brush," "A really nice watercolor for an alligator," and "The Uninvited Guests Part 1 & 2," it's hard for me not to wonder if this is only because they're some of the first stories. There were some stories that I liked that I didn't recall until reading other reviews of this book.

While I'm impressed with how well A Creature Wanting Form, captures the horror and ennui of life, it's hard for me to recommend the collection as a whole just due to how little staying-power its individual stories have. Beyond that, serving the story well or no, reading these stories can be legitimately frustrating as a result of the form. I remember going gaga over this book about a week into reading it, so it's possible I'd be singing a very different tune if this was, say, about half its length. As is, I found it overstayed its welcome, with the vast majority of its stories being unmemorable.

I don't know, it might just be a perfectly fine book I'm I'm just too stupid for. It's certainly a validating and impressive book, but it fell far short of "engaging" for me nine times out of ten.

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this like the dude in that one I think you should leave sketch, just yelling “that’s my exact style!” over and over again

[Luke Hillier · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a book club and probably would've stopped if not for that accountability. And in the end, I'm glad I pushed through some initial irritations; I think the collection improves significantly after the first third both because the content gets better and you adapt to O'Neil's distinct writing style. The voice was what I found most difficult here -- staccato, disaffected, self-effacing, and paradoxically nonchalant in a way that feels forced. Although this serves the humor really well (I laughed out loud numerous times), it undercuts the heart. I don't need overly sappy, sentimental writing but I guess I just didn't love an entire book written in the voice employed by a millennial texting their friend and/or tweeting. But I probably would've appreciated that a lot more if some of the other pieces here were written more artfully. O'Neil clearly has evocative, intriguing, and creative insights but his aversion to traditional storytelling left them mostly feeling underdeveloped and fleeting.

That said, there are some really clever and even moving gems to be gleaned here. For some reason I really liked the story about him meeting Kirsten Dunst, and that was a hinge-point for me towards digging the whole thing more. The story about his app malfunctioning to show him photos from the future was probably the best one here. There are a number that reflect, either abstractly or literally, on the end of the world and I loved the one about the terminally ill being glad they got to die with everyone else. And the one about how we don't know our great-grandparents names was really piercing too.

[Mike Wojciechowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just picking a favorite from a random page of the many I’ve dog eared—“Then a group of people I’d known but only just so much and mostly late at night bobbed into frame and I thought I might try reading old ear stories about partying and playing music with them but we talked instead about real estate the one thing that ties a people of a certain age together. Good decisions we’d made and opportunities squandered and how certain neighborhoods we’d known intimately had changed over time some for the better and some for the worse and so were largely strange to us now but despite all of that still held onto enough of their original nucleus of identity to be worth remembering and to visit from time to time.”

America is a hellish dystopia but Luke is a great writer and finishing this book made me feel good like one of those feel good stories from the news where they explain how a kid has been walking 12 miles to work a shit job but it’s all good now because someone bought him a bike

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard one to review for me because while I very much enjoy Luke's writing and think at least from his publicly-available internet persona that he's a good dude, both his newsletter (the excellent Welcome to Hell World), his previous books, and this book all tap into my brain's worst impulses -- to build on my anxieties and make me feel like things can only be but so OK. The way his characters think and react to things is all-too-familiar, and reading it from a third person perspective is a little distasteful. It's a lot to deal with!

Anyway, go Luke.

[John Mihelic]

A Creature Wanting Form – Luke O’Neil

O’Neil is one of my favorite writers working today, publishing in his “Welcome to Hellworld” newsletter where he shows his readers things to be both sad and mad about. This is a related text to that project, but it is his fictions (fictions that are very close to the real world but that allow him to shape the narrative some). They’re short and punch you in the gut and the best description is that these stories are like what emo would be if emo were a literary form and not a musical genre.

[Brienne Daugherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really interesting, and at times emotional, read. O'Neil powerfully describes what it feels like to be alive right now. Now's about the time I wish I were part of a book club because there is so much here to discuss.

My 3/5 rating is based on 1.) not connecting with a few of the stories, though most were great. Additionally, the author's writing style in reference to language/grammar can make it a challenging read. There's a lack of much punctuation, for example, which was a cool choice stylistically, but presents some difficulty.

See my full review at www.briennethebard.com

[James Worth · Rating 5 out of 5]

ohhhhh my god. every single one of these stories feels like it came directly from my own head. the voice is so clear and fun and cutting and in tune with my own way of thinking about the Current State Of The World. it's surprisingly dense for a collection of short stories but they all go together so well. I have never made so many out-loud noises while reading a book before. haha's and fuck's and wow's, etc. also so many stories set in Massachusetts which is always a plus for me

[James Mackinnon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never imagined I'd be a guy to return to a book repeatedly - I'd much rather move on to something new - but I keep coming back to this. The writing is beautiful and haunting, comforting and discomforting, visceral and ethereal.

As a parent or person in an age of nihilism, this book is what you need.

[Zach Church · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed seeing Luke do his thing in fiction and semi-fiction. The themes are tough, the vibe is a cosmic 'Well, shit,' yet it's routinely funny, insightful, and sweet. I would love to see what a novel looks like and would certainly read another collection of stories.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I’m sad it’s over. I dragged it out as long as I could. Reading one story and letting it sit till I needed another. To me it’s a book about loving life so much that it hurts to see truths so clearly and pain both unavoidable and unnecessary.

[Joey Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect short story companion for this modern day dystopian hellworld.

[Laura Borealis · Rating 5 out of 5]

luke writes beautifully, strong recommend

[Michael Sweriduk · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most remarkable books I've ever read. Beautiful, depressing, haunting. So many stories and passages and particular turns of phrase are going to stick with me for a long time.

[MB Hodgkiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked his writing. Some thought-provoking.stuff here. Offbeat and at times too much so for me but overall, I really liked this collection of stories!

[Ashur]

I kind of talk like Luke O'Neil writes in this collection and I find that simultaneously delightful and concerning.

[George Pollard]

One of those books that makes you want to Clockwork Orange people and shout at them: “Look! … Look!”

[Harrison Wheeler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not used to reading ‘unique’ prose, so it definitely took some time for me to get to grips with the author’s writing style- And to be frankly honest, I don’t think I still am to grips with it. Regardless of the uniquely chaotic prose, the short stories tend to detail and describe a sense of fear that I think all people feel at some point in their life- It capitalizes on the liminal nostalgia of a childhood gone, and the pressure of growing up under the unique conditions of the 21st century. 


I regret not taking my time on some of the short stories and it is definitely a collection that benefits a thorough reading rather than an intense devouring. But I enjoyed my time nevertheless.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this! It's weird, funny, and grounded in a dark kinda way. Fantastic.