Fish Cough

by Craig Buchner

What if your possessions, the painting hanging in your living room or the photograph on your bathroom wall, could influence you to the point of action? Or worse yet, pass on some innate degenerate trait? Disease? Neuroses?

In Portland, Oregon, an inquisitive soul, Thom, spends much of his day having these thoughts. Obsessed by what is around him, he begins to question his own wishy-washy life philosophies. But as he and his husband, Howard, struggle to navigate their rollercoaster relationship and their shaky careers as freelance writers, Thom is faced with a challenge far greater than the persuasive power of their possessions. During a once-every-33-years meteor shower, an evil unlike anything on earth lands in their neighbor's tree, setting off a string of puzzling and unsettling events - beginning with the appearance of an anthropomorphic squirrel named Gordito and an invisible presence capable of mind-control.

222 pages, Paperback

Published February 14, 2023

About the author

Born and raised in the Adirondack Mountains, Craig has lived in Idaho, Oregon, Tokyo, and today he lives in North Carolina. All of these places have greatly influenced his work.

He is the recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in Tin House, Baltimore Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, and Puerto del Sol, among others.

Brutal Beasts is his first book.

Reviews

[Plagued by Visions · Rating 4 out of 5]

Admittedly, this novel is very much out of my comfort zone. There is a "hysterical romance" quality to it, with the characters confronting cosmic, calamitous apocalypse whilst a large part of the narrative actually focuses on their more personal "micro" interactions. Since there is lots of left-field quirkiness that lends this narrative sometimes an even Korine-like quality of malformed but tender humanity, I think what I appreciate most about Buchner's writing is his ability to work such potentially dangerous ideas into a warm, deeply humanistic narrative. Even though I approach thematics from a very different angle, to me that is always a useful end goal of literature, and so to me, the resounding humanity in this was what made it shine through.

[Rupert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any book that opens with an awkward sex scene is good in my book, and Fish Cough gets better from there on in. I feel like books like this are hard to pull off – it's about a relationship falling apart and most of the action takes place in the couple’s apartment, so you could say it’s minimal? Except stylistically it’s pretty vivid and the language is lush. Sorry for using that word, maybe I should say the language is rich, but that also sounds cliche. What I’m trying to say is that books like this are hard to get right because without some sort of subterranean force energizing the action they fall flat. But this doesn’t suffer from any form of flatness whatsoever. In fact it’s very multi-shaped and emotionally and surreally dynamic. Like a dodohyderondon or whatever those ten-sided beasts are called. The forces that energise the story from beneath (and above) are the most powerful forces of the universe – time and matter and all that big deal stuff. In the book this is represented by a piece of meteor rock that Thom, the main character, finds in a tree after a meteor shower. The presence of the rock fucks shit up. The couple’s love life unravels, and Thom’s insanity does too. I loved this book from the jump but I REALLY loved it when a squirrel called Gordito turned up, who seemed to have the power to communicate through telepathy. The novel is at its best when it’s at its most unhinged, but it's also at its best in the small observed moments. I loved the way Thom watched and kind of spied on the trendy couple next door, and I love anything that plots the slow and confusing downfall of a relationship, because we’ve all been there and we’ve all struggled to make sense of it, and Fish Cough is an ambitious novel that grapples with some pretty massive and confusing issues like love and the universe and sentient squirrels.

Wait, aren’t all squirrels sentient? Whatever. I like the way that sounds.