vs. Death Noises - Marcus Pactor

Praise for Vs. Death Noises

Crazy dangerous fuckers come out of Jacksonville Florida. We have Linda Blair and her projectile pea soup, the psychedelic band 1% masquerading later as Lynyrd Skynyrd, James Merrill, and now Marcus Pactor. Pactor writes. The writing is not putatively original but originally original, not muscular but cut, and not gratuitously difficult but difficult. It reminds you of when people tried to say new things in new ways. Who am I thinking about? Burroughs? No. O'Connor? Maybe. Rimbaud/Baudelaire/Blake? Don't know, haven't read them. But I know there is on the radar acts of revolutionary bearing down to do something new, coming from bent brains, and this feels like it.

~ PADGETT POWELL

Marcus Pactor's debut collection of stories is nothing short of dazzling. The stories are fierce, funny, insightful and often lyrical without ever sacrificing the raw power of a character's voice. Vs. Death Noises takes us on a dark, bizarre journey where the ponderings of William Blake and John Locke become bedfellows with group sex and bondage, tears of grief are cried into a discarded thong, an infected toe is the catalyst for a discussion on intimacy and love. The characters in these stories are burdened with loss, uneasy love, mourning and an unceasing hunger to find some kind of meaning in their lives. This search for hints of meaning in the shape of a strand of hair on a bathroom counter, in an ice cooler full of caught fish, in the unsolved disappearance of a loved one forms the heart-wrenching soul of this collection. In reading these stories, I blushed, I laughed, I found myself wonderfully uncomfortable and consistently awed by the originality of Marcus Pactor's style and voice. A brilliant collection!

~ OWEN EGERTON

This story collection stands as a corrective to the pathologist's report: irony is not dead in American fiction. Which doesn't mean that feeling is missing here. Vs. Death explores what it's like to be alive in this country now, with both a brain and a body, neither of which, putative sex of the author notwithstanding, is necessarily male. In fact, this collection contains some of the smartest women's voices I've heard in a while.

~ ELISABETH SHEFFIELD

Vs. Death Noises cuts to the bone like a scalpel in the hands of a master surgeon. Tightly compressed, keenly observed, and scathingly original, Marcus Pactor's debut is as unsettling as it is luminous.

~ MARK ARI