Johnny Hernandez of Small Press Distribution wrote a beautiful and insightful review of FIERCER MONSTERS. Buy your copy now while they're 20% off!!
recommended by
Johnny Hernandez
To pronounce reality into being, or to extend or seed a part of oneself
into the fabric of the world—this is the material of Youssef Alaoui's
latest collection of short fiction, FIERCER MONSTERS, published by
Nomadic Press. A collection, broken into four sections and bookended
with explorations of the alphabet and the materiality of language and
creation, that explores language as both a means of expressing and
exploring the imagination and serves as a vessel of the narrator,
mooring itself on the shores of reality—hoping to found a new colony.
Alaoui's collection is filled with mythical and spiritual parables and
fables, each centered on the idea of a creator pronouncing into
existence a world that is a negotiation between the voice and the
material of experience. In one of his early stories in the collection,
"Night Window," he writes, "It was at that point that the top of your
head let out a bubbling river of fog. No, it was more like an entire
grey ocean of alphabets scribbled on wave caps pouring from nowhere and
reeking of barnacles voicing unpronounceable ancient languages and
staking claim over the sleep diaries of every misshapen midnight orphan
like you [...] your window is black. There's little reason to stay
awake, and no reason to write unless the dream was mine all along."
Nuggets of gold are dispersed throughout this entire collection, and if
you pay attention each minor proclamation adds and adds until a tidal
wave of reality washes over the reader. Not only does the pronunciation
of a world begin to manifest but the reader also begins to form an
outline of the narrator, as if every word encapsulates a piece of Alaoui
himself. This collection is a statement and a love letter (to language
and the potential of language) to create and transmit worlds both
internal and external. Seek this collection out for every moment you
imagine a world in every word.