Ben Fitts’s bizarro collection The Earth No Longer Exists is custom-made for the media-weary twenty-first-century reader. The writing is clear, concise, and above all, original. The paragraphs are short. The language is modest. Fitts admirably avoids any writerly pretension, and with each entry not only entertains but also tackles contemporary issues with a jocular pessimism that occasionally leans toward hopefulness. Moreover, despite their simplicity, all his stories leave room for interpretation.
Although absurdity permeates them, these pieces are not merely weird for weirdness’s sake. Fitts’s characters ¬¬– sometimes foolish, sometimes silly, and often flawed – operate from a viewpoint of misunderstanding. Political leaders think that replacing the world’s dead superheroes with janitors is a smart move. A man decides he’s going to become the world’s third-sexiest matador… so he can get with a woman. An artist born into privilege becomes so obsessed with the idea that a successful artist needs to be destitute that he loses sight of what he’s creating and what art is. In an insightful exploration of empty sexual encounters versus lasting love, a young man discovers something unexpected in the shoebox of his new lover.
“Raspberry Heart,” an indictment against the chauvinism that still permeates corporate America, introduces a raspberry interviewing for a job. The raspberry grows agitated because its would-be employer is focused not on its qualifications but rather on the fact he’s interviewing a raspberry.
Clearly influenced by COVID and current political conflicts, “On the Back of an Octopus” involves a city on the back of a giant octopus. When a shark supporting another city approaches, the politicians and scientists of Octopolis go into the highest tower and debate an appropriate response. The idea of getting along is, if you’ll pardon the pun, unfathomable to them. Leaders refuse to see somebody else’s perspective… and the public suffers.
The volume’s only non-bizarro work, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” is strong enough to be in a high-end literary journal. After an antisemitic message is scrawled on her son’s locker, a Jewish mother decides to move her family from the U.S. to Israel. Her teenage son resists, partly because he’s terrified of being forced to fight in the Israeli military. This fear plays out in the role playing and video games the young man plays. The story stirs up emotion on many levels, particularly animosity toward the mother, who steamrolls her son’s concerns.
Several stories cover romantic relationships – some elicit sadness, while others end on a more positive note. The man who falls in love with “The Cactus” suffers because of their relationship. Perhaps the physical pain the man feels is a stand-in for the emotional pain that comes with bad matches. That’s the negative side. On the positive side, if a spouse sticks beside a spouse no matter how much pain, that shows love. Regardless, the story punctures the reader with one irrefutable message: love is painful.
In “My Winter Lips,” another relationship-based tale, Fitts takes the current fascination with body modification to the next level by skilfully introducing a new world while avoiding expository dialogue. People can, for instance, get jacked arms or replace their fingers with something that looks like snakes. Unlike many of his peers, the first-person narrator goes to the “parts store” merely to replace his chapped lips with another pair of normal lips. The employee reveals the store is out of human lips, and what transpires is a humorous conversation and a resolution the narrator does not anticipate. The new lips aren’t just lips — they symbolize how openness to new ideas and personal change can allow one to see others in a more positive light.
The treasures in The Earth No Longer Exists confirm an emerging author’s potential to rise as a leading voice in the bizarro subgenre. Fitts’s stories grasp the reader and refuse to let go; he knows how long each entry needs to be before it starts losing its potency, and he never gets preachy or pontificates. Douglas J. Ogurek*****
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