Notes from the Fog: Stories

Diehard fans of the dystopian futurist series Black Mirror will undoubtedly love the stories in Ben Marcus’s collection Notes from the Fog. It is the kind of literature that thrives on the illusion of literary and the mystique of speculative fiction. However, when one sits and thinks about Marcus’s prose for a moment, the realization soon sets in that these stories are about insufferable people doing insufferable things, oblivious to their banality. Nearly every story is less about parenting, sex, terrorism, technology, or finding love in an increasingly distracted and distant society than it is about marketing these concepts in grandiose and empty language.

Perhaps Marcus is being serious and darkly comic. And, if so, then when we read these stories, we’re meant to be reading them with an eye toward high literature often obsessed with the collapse, whether it be and of an individual, a relationship, or a culture. Yet we are never given reason, causes, or really even consequences; rather, readers get chatty, easy-to-digest, precocious prose. It feels as though every story in Notes from the Fog has an unearned pride in its existence. It’s difficult to take this seriously or even chuckle about it.