Scott Maddix

This ambitious first novel, by turns fascinating and frustrating, is an experiment in narrative structure that the author has called "collage fiction." The book weaves together dozens if not hundreds of interlocking narratives that seem to occupy not only different universes but different genres and styles: snippets of zombie horror, autobiography, conspiracy thriller, fan fiction, and philosophical tracts are told via prose of various styles, screenplay and stage scripts, poetry, even photography. These fragments of story, most shorter than a single page, are jumbled together with no apparent reason: Maddix leaps between them like an A.D.D. kid with a remote control, alighting on each long enough only to tell a joke, produce a scare, or make a point before flitting on to the next.

Yet after a while connections begin to form between the segments: we return to stories we've seen before, or notice links of varying consistency between them. Certain fragments tease at offering a frame for the others to fit in: are these all shards of an Earth split into parallel realities by a long-ago event called the Shattering? Are they pages spewed from a possessed Japanese copy machine? Files on the hard drive of a frustrated author? Scenes from a reportedly nonexistent video game? But there is no one answer: the book defies easy categorization and abhors easy answers. A recurring theme is the idea of finding information in noise, but also toying with redefining both terms: what if noise *is* the information, or one finds information where none was intended? By the end, the project seems more like an abstract painting than a novel: you are left to find your own patterns in its pages of noise and draw your own conclusions, something which will doubtless frustrate many readers but can be rewarding for those willing to surrender to the experiment.

Chunnel Surfer II is not a complete success: some of the segments fall flat, and there are a lot of things here that a professional editor might have cut (both technical mistakes and passages that aren't as well-written as others). But even the unevenness becomes part of the amateur charm and honesty here, like a scissored-together zine or a handmade photo collage: even the confusing title plays into this (it's not about the Chunnel and there is no first installment). CSII would probably never be put out by a mainstream publishing house, but it doesn't need to be. Rather, it lurks, a testament to what you can find if you go looking under strange rocks.… (mere)