The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

I placed this book on my ‘to read’ list many many months ago. It was recommended to me by a fellow in my writing group who is incredibly well read. He plows through novels, and has an eye for incredibly books and authors – the kind you do not stumble upon by happenstance. After our writing sessions we drift to the nearest pub and chat all things literature, and it is often here, in the midst of new pints being pulled and shifts in the conversation, that I note down books and authors of potential interest.

So I found myself with Steven Sherrill’s book in the month of December, and it’s telling that I am writing this review and not a review of Dune Messiah, which I finished reading just before it. The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break stuck with me in a way that Dune Messiah did not. Perhaps it was the Raymond Carver-esque tone of Minotaur that pulled me in, for Minotaur is bursting with the collective experiences of the American working class. It’s a camper van environment, families crowded into small spaces, it’s working long hours in the kitchen of a local restaurant, finding solace in the free days to work on a project you find engaging.

This is another book in which I don’t want to give the main game away – not that it’s a book defined by a definitive turn – it’s more that I feel this is a book that anyone could pick up. I say this knowing that we are creatures that know what we like, and that the genres of fantasy and science fiction are, for some, difficult to get into. Perhaps the best thing I can say is that this is no ordinary fantasy, and I would consider it more magical realism – the ordinary, with a touch of magic. Go in expecting a slice of American life, rather than a fantasy romp. This is a cerebral, emotional, and sometimes difficult book, a story focusing on isolation, and the cruel machinations of ordinary people.

The writing is fantastic. Sherrill does a great job of presenting the main characters emotions through movements and gesture to the extent that, by the mid point of the book, you already have a sense of the way in which the main character is reacting through his movements. It’s quite a feat. There’s a wide array of characters who feel authentic, feet firmly placed in the real, and whose actions feel realistic and of-the-world. There’s a sense, too, of something being said – the nature of the narrative and the situation the protagonist finds themselves in suggests something more than what is simply happening within the text, but the meaning of the moment is lost to the characters. It’s a glorious way of presenting the absurd nature of the real world, and I think that may also be a characteristic of Minotaur, is it a work of absurdism? There are certainly touches of absurdism throughout.