REVIEW: Begat Who Begat Who Begat by Marcus Pactor

Short Fiction. 116 pgs. Astrophil Press. November 2021. 9780998019963.

A text is a text and we’d be best to remember that. Words mean something. They are weapons. It’s our responsibility to keep them sharp. Reading Begat Who Begat Who Begat, the new collection from Marcus Pactor, is akin to accepting a series of paper cuts in the best way.

Begat is woven together with “male-pattern weirdness” and unsubtle jabs that we, collectively, may not be thinking enough. Or, at least not using our imagination enough. The Cyberlords are coming for us. Cake hoops deliver dread. Flesh eating bacteria haunts a journalist. There are holes in these stories, but they aren’t gaps we are meant to fill with plot.

“Timelines are unconsciously subjective. Any consensus is vague and useless, as when we call 9/11 a dark day.”

Instead, we are meant to read the text, to be conscious of its construction. Some of the book’s best sentences are found in disruptive punchouts. They are black holes, sucking us away from the “narrative” and impeding any attempts to skim. They are memories. They are tokens of love. While reading, I got the itch to take a pair of scissors to them so I could set them aside to read later.

Maybe that’s too profound.

“Such profound sights made me hate words like ‘profound.’”

Throughout Begat Who Begat Who Begat, this reader reread sentences several times over. Not for further comprehension, but for greater appreciation. Pactor is a menace with a sentence. Ergo, the paper cuts. I laughed and I winced and I asked my wife if I looked funny.

The collection is only 116 pages. Some stories are only two pages long. Yet, I sat with them. I let everything stew. I didn’t wish to wash the blood away because the damage was already done. When offered the opportunity to peek inside a closet in “The Remainder,” the temptation was palpable, and the ominous rectangle at the top of each page still beckons me to step inside.

Some of the structures here are familiar Pactor moves. Itemized lists. Dissociated interviewer. Android concerns. This doesn’t detract from the new stuff. Much like an athlete, the moves feel practiced, polished, and effortless. A wordsman myself, I found myself shaking my head the same way I do after a Nikola Jokic bounce pass.

One of Pactor’s bounce passes:

“The idea of a cake hoop, like a sentence or a family, is to milk a finite space.”

Begat Who Begat Who Begat is for the reader who understands the absurdity of suburbia, and language, and androids, and love. It hums with a malleable philosophy, one with which this reader is still coming to terms, and in its hijinks, delivers relief to my own artistic anxieties.