Praise for The Sea Beast Takes a Lover “A debut short story collection that treads the line between the speculative and the satirical with vivid prose, fatalist joie de vivre, and wild imaginative turns. Andreasen's style is reminiscent of George Saunders. . . . Energetic and engaging, these stories benefit from the sheer vigor of their telling.” –Kirkus Reviews Publisher's Weekly -Booklist San Francisco Chronicle Michigan Quarterly Review The Sea Beast Takes a Lover is a treasury of fantastic tales—full of mermaids, prophetic dancing bears, exploding children, and distraught time travelers. It's also a collection of longing, of loss, of loving deeply, and of learning what it means to care for others. A brilliant book, daring and wonderful." –Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World The Sea Beast Takes a Lover sits on a small shelf of books that I will read a dozen times over. It is full of explosions of magic, aching tenderness and star-bright writing. This is a book that will make you want to tap the person next to you and say, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but you have to hear this.’” –Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and A Guide to Being Born "Andreasen has a big, roomy imagination, and a command of language to furnish the worlds he creates with both precision and grandeur. These stories are, by turns, timeless and urgent, dreamy and nightmarish, heartbroken and hopeful. A brilliant collection." –Charles Yu, author of Sorry Please Thank You and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe “The world is a very strange place. Michael Andreasen’s fantastic storytelling, ripe with tender monsters and understandably tortured humans, opens the window to our weirdness just a crack further, reminding his reader that the human heart is and always will be filled with wonder.” —Samantha Hunt, author of Mr. Splitfoot The Dark Dark The Sea Beast Takes a Lover is such a wildly imaginative work that the book itself could be an artifact drawn from one of the sui generis stories it contains. Uncannily inventive yet unfailingly grounded in all-too-familiar struggles of the heart, these are stories that vary widely in subject matter—paternal pressures, the terror of stasis, our jealous hunger for love—but never in the confident distinctiveness of Michael Andreasen's voice. What a voice it is! What a vision! For what is more exciting to a reader than discovering a new way to see the world? This thrillingly original debut gives us just that in every story, on every page." –Josh Weil, author of The Age of Perpetual LightThe Sea Beast Takes a Lover is a beautiful Wunderkammer Madeleine Is Sleeping and Ms. Hempel Chronicles “There really is a lovesick sea beast—along with many other magical creatures—but Andreasen is interested in religion, love, loss and all the stuff of real life. There is so much depth and whimsy in these pages.”–Oprahmag.com
In a think piece in The Guardian, critic and author Chris Powers had fun dissecting the media's boom-and-bust mythmaking about the supposedly alternating vitality or inanition of the contemporary short story collection. Dispensing with the whole false template and regarding the short story's virtues as eternal, he nonetheless saw 2017 as a year that featured many outstanding single-author short story volumes. If he had extended his nominations into 2018, he would surely have singled out Michael Andreasen's first book as a contender. Andreasen's assured voice is a blend of quietly brooding naturalism and blithe surrealism, a kind of Raymond Carver sensibility and style mated with Mark Leyner's fizzy, mad ideation. Employing sharp-edged yet deceptively unadorned prose, Andreasen succeeds in sucking the reader into his drolly insane and charmingly ghastly scenarios. In a mini-interview in The New Yorker, accompanying his story "The King's Teacup at Rest," Andreasen tosses out the descriptive phrase "inherent silliness and . . . grim earnestness," which gets at something of the allure of his tales. Name-checking George Saunders and Donald Barthelme as inspirational ancestors, Andreasen can proudly stand shoulder- to-shoulder with them.A Natural History of Hell, where neighborhood exorcisms are a given, will detect a resonating voice.
Pay the $14.99 monthly membership fee and log on to learn the ways in which her senses have been fundamentally enhanced. Listen as her weekly podcast describes how she can feel satellites as they pass overhead, how she can hear the sizzle of sunspots. Believe her when she says that her thoughts are more focused, that her food tastes better, that her sex is more profound. Ultimately succumbing to the anomie of his condition, the Man of the Future commits a most unsatisfactory and disturbing self-mutilation. There is no relief even in this extreme.SpongeBob SquarePants . A ship named the Winsome Bride, of indefinable provenance (it boasts an old-fashioned bosun in a crow's nest, as well as flat-screen TVs) is all at sea, literally and metaphorically, permanently entangled in the tentacles of a horny kraken, ever on the verge of sinking but never quite going under. Its starving, abused crew lives out a Beckettesque existence marked by petty bickering. "The King of Retired Amusements" is the title of the monarch in the story "The King's Teacup at Rest." A buffoonish figure whose Lear-like hegira is marked by food poisoning and amusement-induced vertigo, the King shares the narrative with the Scout, a young fellow on his own spiritual quest. He meets tutelary spirits who greet him thus: "Hail, John Bennington, son of Bryce and Courtney, who walks the Unmanicured Path." This bit of speech, blending the trite and demotic with the hifalutin' and pseudo-bardic, is typical of Andreasen's angle of attack. He follows the advice of the anonymous Zen Master: "When someone speaks of the everyday, you speak of the numinous; when they speak of the numinous, you speak of the everyday."Borne was your cup of tea, then you will surely enjoy "Rockabye, Rocketboy." In a future metropolis alienated from nature is perpetually seen the mysterious airborne Rocketboy, beloved by millions. One of his most faithful fans happens to be a naïf of a porn star known as -- perfect! -- "The Plug Detective." Their intersection will change both lives.Moderan by David Bunch, due soon to receive new fans in a NYRB reissue. A passage like this captures Bunch's voice exactly: Granted, we are built so high now that we can hardly see it ourselves, but at least we, in our tall glassed-in neighborhoods and elegantly domed towers, are aware of its existence. At one time or another, on a school field trip or arboreal holiday, or during a bout of youthful rebellion against the high places we come from, we have each endured the long, pressure- shifting elevator ride to feel the soft soil beneath us, to hold the cold shake of it in our hands, to press our faces in deep and breathe deeply. A mutant child who wreaks havoc on his hapless community? Could "Andy, Lord of Ruin" be Andreasen's updating of the famous Jerome Bixby/Twilight Zone classic "It's a Good Life"? Only if the image of a giant semi-molten adolescent trapped in the deep end of a drained swimming pool is a valid cognate. This is Andreasen's most thorough send- up of suburbia and its discontents, as he shows us the unnatural doings through the eyes of doomed Andy's classmates, who cherish the disruptions that enliven the stale neighborhood. The melancholy ending -- "[Andy's legacy] wouldn't last long. Nothing kept in that way ever does" -- marks their passage into disgruntled adulthood.Officiant: As [name] now floats silently down the Baptismal Canal, past the emergency exit and the wicker shrines erected to Our Lady of Baffled Wonder, we recall Our Lord's encounter with the Sawmill, activating the whirring blades and lighting the trash fires to remind us of the industrial perils of the River. We also point the PA system directly at [name] as [he/she] bobs between the miniature cranes and smokestacks, playing a recording of Sawmill sounds at maximum volume to remind us of how loud the actual Sawmill must have been, how it must have rustled the water and shaken Our Lord's infant resolve. Lastly comes "Blunderbuss," in which a group of third-grade students, visiting a museum staffed by lunatic time travelers possibly out of one of Stanislaw Lem's wilder moments, barely escape with bodies and souls intact. "Something similar happens when you get too close to the time travel device, except the conflicting reports are coming at you in four dimensions instead of three. Everything should sort itself out after a few minutes. We call this getting your time legs." The time travelers' hopeful smiles are met with pinched noses, bloodshot eyes, and the spittle-laden breathing of the miserably ill. Manifesting both the wise-old-sage chops of Robert Coover and the newfangled youthful freshness of Karen Russell, Michael Andreasen wraps his readers in literary tentacles that both stroke and throttle, and pulse with fervent alien life.Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul Di Filippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award -- all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Reviewer: Paul Di Filippo
The Barnes & Noble Review
12/11/2017
A conventional collection of short stories this is not. Michael Andreasen’s stories feature the surreal and the odd, along with a healthy dose of science fiction and the absurd. The narration for such an offbeat collection is decidedly a mixed bag. Some narrators in the cast of many well-known names do manage to capture that darkly witty element to great effect. Other narrators strike a tone that sounds overly earnest and enthusiastic, when a more deadpan and sardonic tone would have been more fitting. It may be that the unconventional nature of the stories, featuring the titular amorous sea beast and a headless girl whose brother is her caretaker, makes them difficult to categorize and, thus, results in varied success in narration. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
A conventional collection of short stories this is not. Michael Andreasen’s stories feature the surreal and the odd, along with a healthy dose of science fiction and the absurd. The narration for such an offbeat collection is decidedly a mixed bag. Some narrators in the cast of many well-known names do manage to capture that darkly witty element to great effect. Other narrators strike a tone that sounds overly earnest and enthusiastic, when a more deadpan and sardonic tone would have been more fitting. It may be that the unconventional nature of the stories, featuring the titular amorous sea beast and a headless girl whose brother is her caretaker, makes them difficult to categorize and, thus, results in varied success in narration. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
2017-11-28
