Book review: Notes From The Fog, by Ben Marcus

There are many different emotions and reactions that pass into a reader when reading the work of Ben Marcus. You can wonder at his emotional acuity; you can be dazzled by the intellectual brilliance; you can savour the subtle lyricism of each and every sentence. But in me his work induces a kind of queasy vertigo, and I do not mean that as a bad thing. A book than can create such a visceral response is a rare thing indeed. These stories have that roller-coaster sense of both excitement and nausea. Once you have read them, it is wondrous to unpick how he manages such effects.