Sip

Sip arrives billed as Brian Allen Carr's first novel. In addition to collections of his short stories, I actually thought I had read two novels already, The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World and Motherfucking Sharks. (Yes, that is the title.) They were short and published in individual volumes, but I suppose they are now officially novellas, giving Sip pride of place as debut novel.

Sip is longer than the previous works and more ambitiously conceived, but the elements do not always gel as they do in Carr's novellas and award-winning short fiction. We find ourselves a century or so into a crisis begun when children discovered they could get high by drinking their own shadows. Addiction follows, and shadow sippers turn predatory, stealing shadows from others. Victims whose shadows have been sucked dry become vampiric seekers of shadows themselves. Animal shadows will do in a pinch. A decimated population is divided into the addicted, the cursed, those who have retreated into domed enclosures free of the natural light that produces a true shadow, and groups that live on mile-long trains making their slow way along circular tracks that produce the equivalent of a pioneers who perpetually circle their wagons. (I confess, I never quite got that part of the story.)

Sip may have many "first novel" flaws, and readers, myself included, may be suffering from post-apocalyptic fatigue syndrome; but, the story is fueled by Brian Allen Carr's rampant imagination. Settle back for his disorienting dark comedy that is equal parts obscenity and elegy. The violence is outrageous, the imagery grotesque, and the dialogue an artful vernacular that rings true even when at its most literary.