P-Cock Time #pcock #gaylifestyle #poolparty (at Mantamar Beach Club ∙ Bar & Sushi) https://www.instagram.com/p/B4QLe8pF8M28OtzwDUY97PIv_tXEk0iCZuGzks0/?igshid=ap5uqnw096ik
Poland is a nation of 40 million with 4 winners of the literature Nobel. Those are insane numbers, and it would seem that as a people the Poles just know how to write. For this reason I was excited to happen upon Pacze Moj's collection of short stories Pcock while sorting through the heap.
In the course of reading I got the sense from his language that most likely Moj is an Englishman of Polish extraction. While many of the stories take place in England, Budapest and even North Dakota.
Moj can write, but he doesn't know how to cut. Short story collections are generally the product of many years of attempting to get published in magazines, so that the finished collection of stories is likely the result of hundreds of failures and abandoned efforts. While there are strong pieces in the collection there is also a superabundance of filler, stories that don't particularly come together. The worst of these is "Fitch and Baumgartner Kill a Cougar," where two men apparently are hunting a literal cougar, which then turns out to be a woman, a figurative cougar. That's really all there is to it. Maybe I just didn't get it.
Moj has a good eye for macabe, surreal detail and strings words together attractively. Consider this weird, frenzied scene from "Don Whitman's Masterpiece":
Don Whitman saw the vastness of the interlocking chambers and, within thm, the writhing, ecstatic, no-people of the underground, human-like but non-human, cross-bred mammals draped in plaster-white skin pinned to numb faces, men, woman and children, male and female, naked, scared, dirty, with humans -- humans Don Whitman knew and recognized -- among them, on them and under them, hitting them, squeezing them, making them hurt, making monstrous sounds with them, all under slowly rotating heat lamps, all open and together, one before another...
The longer pieces are generally stronger, giving Moj a firmer structure to build around. "Don Whitman's Masterpiece" is bizarre but disappointingly straightforward. "Johnny Firecracker" describes a German man's telepathic pursuit of his mother's killer in Tokyo, a freaky setup that plays to the author's strengths. The story's climax is pretty stupid, unfortunately.
My favorite story in the collection was "Vista," a well-shaped science fiction piece where Moj really seems to be hitting on all cylinders. He creates a world and presents his hero with fascinating quandary, and for once his penchant for ambiguous endings delivers a real emotional impact. If Moj asked for my advice I'd say keep "Vista," but stick the rest in a drawer for a while.
