Fiercer Monsters

"Youssef Alaoui’ s short story collection, Fiercer Monsters , is concerned with the symbology of letters and the word as invocation contrasted with the futility of language. In these stories, Alaoui presents a Neanderthal oracle, a little girl in Venezuela in the 1950s, a 19th-century hallucinating sailor, and a WWI soldier. The voices are sometimes salty, always salient. Each voice ultimately laments the fall of the Tower of Babel and the resulting confusion. [[Youssef Alaoui’ s investigation sifts through language finding and discarding gods along the way. Not so much a trip down rabbit holes, but rather the invention of mirrors. Storytelling in which you find instruments where time should be. Or the monologue of a man who is shuffling cards near his own crime scene."
— Tongo Eisen-Martin, Someone’ s Dead Already ; Blood on the Fog]]