2013, Counter-Currents Publishing, San Francisco, CA, pages 95-105 in Lost Violent Souls

When reviewing short fiction I do not read an entire anthology and try and lump it together. That is a novelist’s or nonfiction writer’s idea of reviewing short fiction, and misses the point. Quality short fiction carries the same key message, and often higher impact messages, than the novel, weighted as it generally is with gaudy reams of serendipity, contrivances, and fictional artifice. Besides, I want to give the short fiction writer as much credit as possible. His work generates little enough income and should at least be given the chance to stand apart as a milestone of the mind.

Andy’s approach to the novel is minimalistic enough that I knew his short work would be stellar. He has the courage to abandon his reader; to make them consider his point as their stomach sinks in the ambiguous lurch. I went immediately for his shortest story of the five in this collection, wanting an opposite bookend to his novel Under the Nihil, that I might be better placed to examine his mid-length works.

Motel Man is about a nameless terrorist; his training, his state-of-mind, his mission, and his triumph. The story is singularly disturbing, as the reader is drawn into the mind of a searingly disciplined person; a mind most of us must find alien in the extreme. The only named character is Ishmael, a Pakistani carryout driver, who understands that ‘economic prosperity and intellectual curiosity did not usually mix well.’ The rest of the small cast is anonymous, including the protagonist, a man who has ‘given his name to God.’

Andy Nowicki uses an anonymous character with zero back-story to connect with the reader on a fundamental level. In so doing he beats Confucius, Machiavelli, and Augustine of Hippo to the human condition as surely as Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston to the punch.