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The King of the Sea Monkeys (ePub)
Guernica Editions, Spring 2015
210 pages
ePub (eBook)
ISBN13: 9781550719918
ISBN10: 1550719912
English
$9.95 Canada, $9.95 US
Centered around a young high school teacher, The King of the Sea Monkeys is a novel in two parts. Because the protagonist suffers from a traumatic brain injury, the first part is fragmented, finding its way in the narrative in disorderly pieces. The protagonist's “normal” life disintegrates when he is involved in an altercation at a convenience store which ends in a shooting. He survives a terrible injury but his world is undone.
There isn't time to be shocked by the image of his forehead spitting red all over the glass. In this instant he is deaf. It is as if God dropped the thread of his life and has forgotten his name.
The King of the Sea Monkeys works on several levels: a thoughtful family drama, a sharp story of action in the world and in the mind, an emotional and philosophical look into a neurologically shattered life, and an inquiry into the experience of faith. Mark Cull understands and is able to recreate the experience of perceptual fragmentation, the way brain-injury can show us what is strange but also what is normal in human behavior. This is an unusual, haunting work of very real fiction.
Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory
The King of the Sea Monkeys unfolds a lot like the creatures of this novel’s title. The promise of this new world, the promise of life, the promise of beginnings, is at first so real and then it is all taken away. A novel about love and innocence and wisdom and surrender, the good kind. Mark Cull has shaped a fitting lesson in this era of passivity and neglect.
Percival Everett
Books by Mark E. Cull
