In one of these short stories a man visits his parents, and something is terribly wrong, and the way Ben Marcus ekes out the facts and the emotions is exquisite. He reminds me a bit of Christopher Coake, another American writer of beautiful short stories. Here, in another take, a man is teaching creative writing classes on a cruise ship, and even though his wife isn’t there, you see right into his marriage, his life, his deep despair. Marcus writes with rare economy. He is interested in disgrace and humiliation, in the idea that some lives are like tiny dystopian worlds. One story appears to be set in a real dystopian world. He’s a master.
