The Ice at the Bottom of the World

author
Mark Richard

the spiel
Mark Richard is a brilliant writer.  His prose is brutal, macabre, funny as hell, searing, and sharp, sharp, sharp.  Seriously, you’re going to freak out.

In his first book, a collection of stories called Ice at the Bottom of the World, the reader is introduced to an alarmingly quirky cast of characters.  What’s thrilling about this book, though, is not so much who the characters are but how they’re rendered.  Richard has what feels like an otherworldly grasp of voice and structure and uses prose to defamiliarize pretty much everything.  The result is that at the start of most of the stories in the collection you have no idea what’s going on, and slowly Richard builds up a world around you.  You will be an outsider in his work until you relearn how to read prose, his writing not only demands that of the reader, but makes it possible, almost effortless.

His prose is nutsy, graceful, sparse, and basically the best thing you’ve ever read.  Observe:
My brother and I hand out in the side yard, doing handstands until dark.  We catch handfuls of lightning bugs and smear bright yellow on our shirts.  It is late.  I wash our feet and put us to bed.  We wait for somebody to come back home but nobody ever does.  Lucky for me when my brother begins to whine for our mother the stray dogs show up under the house.  My brother starts making up lists of new names for them, naming himself to sleep.

He’s hard to compare to any other writer but if you like Dennis Johnson, Amy Hempel, or George Sanunders (and you should!) then Mark Richard will probably be a hit.  For those of you reading Richard for the first time: I’m jealous as hell.  You’re in for a fabulous ride.

what really matters
how many kittens you're going to shit while reading this.

some other things this author has written
Charity
Fishboy