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A review by djinn_n_juice
Muscle Memory by Steve Lowe
4.0
What would I do if I woke up with breasts and a vagina? This is the ethical question Steve Lowe wrestles with in his opus, Muscle Memory.
Actually, that's not the only issue he wrestles with here. This is a book about guilt: the guilt of having neglected a person who loves you and not having the chance to take it back. It's about coming to terms with loss, and accepting loss, and accepting your own failures. These issues are just as important as ones having to do with waking up genderly resituated.
This book laughs with you, and tells you funny jokes, and very clearly came here to party. Then, it stabs you in the fucking head and you die before your death even registers. That's what this novella does. Which is a combination I LOVE: comedy by itself feels like angel food cake, but when you mix some real emotional resonance in with humor, you end up with the recipe for my favorite kind of book. This combination is often pulled off by Vonnegut and sometimes by John Irving, but I can't think of many other authors who I've felt truly made it work.
A lot of the humor comes from the fact that this book is a hilarious modern update of the "who's on first" joke, only in technicolor and with dick jokes. Main character wakes up in his wife's body. His own body, laying next to him, is stone dead. He quickly discovers that almost everyone is in someone else's bodies, most of the time spouses trading skins. Almost all the characters are in bodies that aren't really theirs, and they're trying to keep track of who is who, and figure out whether they should refer to the name of the BODY or the name of the person INSIDE the body, and figure out whether a man in a woman's body should be referred to as a he or a she...is all bizarro about gender identity? Anyway, this dynamic adds a lot of hilarity. So do bestiality humor, hiding-the-body humor, and a bunjillion other genres of humor.
I can tell that I should've started reading bizarro much sooner, because I've loved all of it I've read yet. Before trying it out, I was expecting something much closer to splatterpunk, but clearly that's not what bizarro is about. Lowe's main character is in an unbelievably strange world, yet the story really revolves around his attempt to come to terms with his wife's death and how he treated her before she died. The peripheral characters are also struggling with relationships in various ways, some of which are very funny. But, these characters are mainly foils to the main character's maturation.
I usually don't like short stories, and this almost qualifies as one. But, Steve packs a lot into sixty pages, keeping the story moving, showing us his character's internal struggles, and finally reaching a climax that I will say nothing about, because the last two pages are haunting and perfect. If you're lucky enough to find a copy of this, I would definitely recommend it. And if you can't find a copy, I still have Caris's signed copy at my apartment, and I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I gave it away.
Actually, that's not the only issue he wrestles with here. This is a book about guilt: the guilt of having neglected a person who loves you and not having the chance to take it back. It's about coming to terms with loss, and accepting loss, and accepting your own failures. These issues are just as important as ones having to do with waking up genderly resituated.
This book laughs with you, and tells you funny jokes, and very clearly came here to party. Then, it stabs you in the fucking head and you die before your death even registers. That's what this novella does. Which is a combination I LOVE: comedy by itself feels like angel food cake, but when you mix some real emotional resonance in with humor, you end up with the recipe for my favorite kind of book. This combination is often pulled off by Vonnegut and sometimes by John Irving, but I can't think of many other authors who I've felt truly made it work.
A lot of the humor comes from the fact that this book is a hilarious modern update of the "who's on first" joke, only in technicolor and with dick jokes. Main character wakes up in his wife's body. His own body, laying next to him, is stone dead. He quickly discovers that almost everyone is in someone else's bodies, most of the time spouses trading skins. Almost all the characters are in bodies that aren't really theirs, and they're trying to keep track of who is who, and figure out whether they should refer to the name of the BODY or the name of the person INSIDE the body, and figure out whether a man in a woman's body should be referred to as a he or a she...is all bizarro about gender identity? Anyway, this dynamic adds a lot of hilarity. So do bestiality humor, hiding-the-body humor, and a bunjillion other genres of humor.
I can tell that I should've started reading bizarro much sooner, because I've loved all of it I've read yet. Before trying it out, I was expecting something much closer to splatterpunk, but clearly that's not what bizarro is about. Lowe's main character is in an unbelievably strange world, yet the story really revolves around his attempt to come to terms with his wife's death and how he treated her before she died. The peripheral characters are also struggling with relationships in various ways, some of which are very funny. But, these characters are mainly foils to the main character's maturation.
I usually don't like short stories, and this almost qualifies as one. But, Steve packs a lot into sixty pages, keeping the story moving, showing us his character's internal struggles, and finally reaching a climax that I will say nothing about, because the last two pages are haunting and perfect. If you're lucky enough to find a copy of this, I would definitely recommend it. And if you can't find a copy, I still have Caris's signed copy at my apartment, and I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I gave it away.