By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work. Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness.  The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia.  He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He i...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis  Borges’ “ The Library of Babel ” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno , and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “ Time Enough at Last. ” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible. Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape.  It feels lik...