We Were Called Specimens: an oral archive of deity Marj… (2024)

This is the story of Marjorie, or to be more exact, “an oral archive of the deity Marjorie.” It’s an extraordinarily well-written collection of interconnected flash, about a “being” named Marjorie who interacts with other “beings” named Leo, and Simon, and Rebecca over and over again—beings trapped in a series of absurdly horrifying vignettes. No real patterns emerge, and there is no real narrative thru-line to speak of, just a central character named Marjorie, supported by other characters named Leo, Simon, and Rebecca, in some of the most beautifully strange short stories you could hope for as a reader.

Marjorie is born and reborn over and over again. Marjorie lives and dies over and over again. Marjorie exists in different lifetimes simultaneously. Marjorie is the aunt of an undead teen she exploits for fame and fortune. Marjorie is the kept woman of a wealthy man dying of cancer. Marjorie is the god of destruction, devouring our world person by person, building by building, while we celebrate the deaths of lovers who’d scorned us.

I admire the sniper-scope precision of the language in stories like “Meat Debt” and “Dumped by Marjorie,” while longer pieces such as “Marjorie and the Mountain” and “Death by Genius” have the garishly apocalyptic sheen of those paintings found in Watchtower magazine. By the time I was done with this book, it really did feel like an oral archive of a deity, a discovered text relaying End Times mythology from a strange alternate dimension whose world and customs were too disturbingly similar to my own.

Jason Teal’s debut offering successfully breaks free from the detritus, and in the process, actively distances itself from a cycle of wretched cookie-cutter assemblage-based musings, doing away with cursed meanderings from a self-reflexive past while sensibly refusing to adopt the American standardised format of the book. Instead, we are presented with a full and original discourse on supermodernity, satirical prophecy and negligible senescence, through a series of carefully inter-linked meta-vignettes that follow the trajectory of one Marjorie (a super-deity), as she traverses through a multitude of (time-spanning) non-linear adventures. The ideas here are so good, that quite frankly, I believe we are not going to be seeing anything else quite like it, for a very long time. It’s akin to a sacred text containing the history of the entire world, as we know it, replete with masterfully-rendered metaphysical interludes and powerful (but very real) expressionistic dialogue moments (all of this, done to great effect). It’s amazing how, with seemingly minimal effort, Teal has conjured these fantastical and oft memorable tales, all the while, never losing sight of the wondrous scope and expansive power of temporal finitism. Truly, WE WERE CALLED SPECIMENS is on par with the warlock-suffused brilliance of Alan Moore’s PROMETHEA, and even, the undying and palpable mystique of Neil Gaiman’s long-running epic, THE SANDMAN. I believe this is Teal at his finest.

"Ask anyone, it was the children-gangs who changed the course of history. Unhuman agents of destruction, weaponized by grief, we watched them slice through Leo, parental locks, little SEAL teams on the footage. Wheezing contradictions: proudly dying of our problems, but we wished relief for their generation. New clean air to breathe. Minutes and Professor Leo's unsealed quarters were ripped open with rifle fire. We weren't interested in failed potions, old trophies. Later, cleaning up after the kids, we dreamed of different pastas, or what we'd steal for dinner, scrubbing circles inside those tall homicides."

This is a deeply strange and non-traditional book, but those who pick it up with that expectation firmly in place will be rewarded. Recalling the early work of Blake Butler and Ben Marcus, as well as Samantha Schweblin, Melissa Broder and Matt Bell, We Were Called Specimens is a kind of mythopoetic fever dream of apocalypse, late-stage capitalist discontent and ruin through regeneration. In it, a shiftings series of "characters" (although it is somewhat reductive to call them that as by the book's end they are much more than representations of people) that all seem to be part of the same nightmarish breakfast club move through a matching series of violent, surreal narrative permutations that presage and eventually become subsumed by an imminent environmental and social cataclysm affecting a world that is both like and not quite like our own. Marjorie, the "deity" at the center of Teal's novel-in-flash (Teal cleverly labels it an "archive" to underscore the the book's status as a found object, an artifact), manifesting and re-manifesting in different physical and/or spiritual guises throughout, is at once girl next door and eater of worlds, grand adversary and intimate co-conspirator, impassioned myth-maker and gleeful destructor. But the highly conceptual framework of the "plot" aside, the real focus here is Teal's language (quote above)--wry and sinister, frighteningly precise and unsettlingly abstract. This is a wonderful book to be able to give yourself over to, letting the darksome flash wash over you one by one, reveling not so much in narrative comprehension as the world of feeling & atmospherics. An exceptional venture for readers and admirers of dark, bizarre, experimental fiction.

All hail deity Marjorie, for she contains multitudes. She is the Sun in the East, and the sky in the West; the heat in the South, and the light in the North. She is both war and prosperity; content and celebrity; chaos and reason; life and death. On the first day, she built a miniature town and shrank down to live amidst its dioramic denizens. On the second day, a single house grew and expanded until it had consumed her and all the rest of the world around it. On the third day, she shot up 20 stories like a rampaging Kaiju and crushed the town back to the Earth. On the fourth day she spurred on evolution in the future and saw some apartments in the middle ages. On the fifth day she starred in a circus, a reality gameshow, and a handful of major motion pictures, all to some acclaim. On the sixth day she died in a hail of gunfire while working at a mall kiosk. On the seventh day she rose again, just in time for the apocalypse. On the eighth day she began anew, for Marjorie never rests - only endures. All hail deity Marjorie.

I couldn't really figure out how to write a straightforward review of Jason Teal's We Were Called Specimens, but my hope is that this will do it more justice in the end. One of the most unique literary experiences I've had so far this year - and y'all know, I read a lot of weird sh*t - this exceedingly strange, funny, and beautiful little book pulled off the uncommon trick of having me already looking forward to rereading it before I was even done reading it the first time. It had me daydreaming about carrying it around in my back pocket (for it's definitely small enough) and revisiting it's 30 crypto-parables in completely different order, never the same way twice, opening it at random while waiting in bank and grocery lines (for they're definitely short enough), and letting the time-toppling, genre-destabilizing, language-frolicking, transuniversal mysteries of deity Marjorie find me again and again, at different times, in different ways, for months, if not years on end. It's that kind of book - the kind that nestles into your neural net and tickles your synapses until you can't help but dive back in; the kind that gives the distinct impression of holding fast whatever you might need from it within its deceptively diminutive proportions, for as long as you're willing to look.

To try and explain it further seems to me largely beside the point. Like trying to tell someone what a Kandinsky painting or a Cecil Taylor composition "means", I find that writing about "experimental" fiction (whatever that "means") is best approached as a matter of conveying sensations - of saying "this is how this made me feel" - and that when I get too far away from that approach, I more often that not just end up saying something I later regret. The best I can do here is to say that deity Marjorie, upon my first time through her fascinating, cantankerous lore, feels like a kind of conduit for all concepts. In a story nominally about a runway show, she is fashion. In a story nominally about a mayor, she is politics. In a story nominally about a murder case, she is violence. In a story nominally about religion, she is God. None of that is probably exactly right, but it's how the book made me feel. And sure, I can imagine a reality in which Teal's dreamy, squirmy, inveigling poetics origami and interlace their way into a clarified whole, but it feels like the type of "big picture" that will take a lifetime of study in bank and grocery lines to fully materialize - a kind of literary enlightenment to contemplate and strive for (and possibly never reach). In this way, We Were Called Specimens will "mean" something different to everyone, and just like the most enduring of civilization's communally recognized sacred texts, therein lies its power. It's about the seeking, more than the finding (though there is surely much to be found here). That's how it made me feel anyway. No telling what the next time will bring. But until then, All hail deity Marjorie.

“Ask anyone, it was the children-gangs who changed the course of history. Unhuman agents of destruction . . . wheezing contradictions: proudly dying of our problems, but we wished relief for their generation.”

This is a “difficult” book. I finished the first “chapter,” a few pages visually resembling what you’d expect from Sam Pink or Noah Cicero. I thought, Okay. Again and again, following chapters unsettled. Took the foundation I’d assembled pages ago and set that sh*t ablaze. If you enjoy difficult books—reminding one of Steve Erickson’s "Tours of the Black Clock," or recently, Directory," by Christopher Linforth—where time and space are ever changing but ever keeping it relevant, character is static but honestly just their name, Jason Teal’s "We Were Called Specimens" is an out-of-control coaster ride over bleak corners of history and hallucinatory nightmares. At book’s end we learn nothing and nothing gets better. I got the sense, while reading, the book was yelling at me. I’d go to the bathroom and catch in the mirror my hair blown askew. Something happened reading this. It either broke my brain or healed it.

Jason Teal is a madcap Metatron, who, with nothing up his sleeves, spins magical magician's patter that transcends any trick, that lures you into the cult of Marjorie, making you feel like you've always been here, here where you belong.