Fiercer Monsters

"Youssef Alaoui's short story collection, Fiercer Monsters, is concerned with the symbology of letters and the word as invocation contrasted with the futility of language. In these stories, Alaoui presents a Neanderthal oracle, a little girl in Venezuela in the 1950s, a 19th-century hallucinating sailor, and a WWI soldier. The voices are sometimes salty, always salient. Each voice ultimately laments the fall of the Tower of Babel and the resulting confusion. Youssef Alaoui's investigation sifts through language finding and discarding gods along the way. Not so much a trip down rabbit holes, but rather the invention of mirrors. Storytelling in which you find instruments where time should be. Or the monologue of a man who is shuffling cards near his own crime scene."
-- Tongo Eisen-Martin, Someone's Dead Already; Blood on the Fog]]