Books
Fiction: Love the Bomb
Malcolm Macpherson, Hocus Potus (Melville House Publishing, 2007)
As the country settles uneasily into the fourth year of the Iraq war, and the population learns more and more each day about the fiction spun by the Bush administration, television, film and literary fiction have entered the fray. Last year, Clare Messud’s The Emperor’s Children incorporated September 11th into a narrative, detailing the effects of the terrorist attack on the lives of bourgeois, self-involved Manhattanites, and Sally Field watched her son go off to war on the glossy television show Brothers and Sisters. This year, the New York Times reported in September, Hollywood will offer mainstream America a slew of movies about the war itself, applying the Technicolor war imagery of Saving Private Ryan to a current conflict with no end in sight. A public focused on American Idol and Lindsay Lohan will have to contend with films such as In the Valley of Elah and Lions for Lambs and their consciences if they just stay home.

In the ranks: Malcolm Macpherson’s new novel, Hocus Potus, a brave and successful attempt at absurd realism. Labeled “the Catch 22 of the Iraq War” by Melville House, the novel resembles more of a Dr. Strangelove, blending fantasy with the stark apocalyptic reality of a nation at war at home and abroad.
Hocus Potus introduces a group of 21st-century lost souls, American opportunists who set off for Iraq with motley hopes and dark dreams. There is Rick, a modern-day Thomas Crowne, charismatic and mischievous, flirtatious and dark; Glennis, a bombshell pilot with a greed problem; McNeil, the pothead physicist; Kristin, the OCD young Yalie determined to work her way up in the current administration. All are stuck in Iraq, volunteer prisoners of POTUS (the President of the United States), and all are consumed with the futile hunt for the missing weapons of mass destruction.
Macpherson is a clever writer, and his narrative is written with the assurance only someone who truly believes in his subject matter can muster. All Americans know what the war feels like at home. Only an unlucky few, however, have a sense of what it feels like over there. We do not know the terror of checkpoints, the stench of the desert prisons, the strangeness of swimming in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool. These images, interspersed throughout the novel, lend a stark and pathetic beauty to a fast-paced, darkly comic plot.
Hocus Potus is, in the truest sense, a caper, and a brutal look into the search for, and the fabrication of WMDs. Much like Kubrick’s “love the bomb” slogan, Hocus Potus expresses the warped desire for the big kaboom yet to come. Humans crave purpose; if there is none, it must be invented.
Despite its fantastical elements, what is most effective in Macpherson’s novel is his insistence on the real problem of Bush’s war: there is no justification; we are only fanning the flames of hatred and violence. The novel ends on a disturbing note: in a presidential address at the UN, POTUS announces that WMDs will be found, finally, within days. Rather than receiving the expected “rolling thunder of applause,” he is greeted with scattered clapping and angry silence. The world Machpherson has created, it seems, is as wary of American lies as the real one.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Adam McOmbers Fantasy Kit
By Zach SchwabSEPT 2022 | Books
Adam McOmbers Fantasy Kit is a slender compilation of thirty-five flash-length stories that are predominantly gothic in subject matter, surrealist in method, and genuinely unsettling in effect. The story The Cornfieldstands apart for its realism, and yet clearly has much to say about the collection as a whole.

Matthew Vollmer’s This World Is Not Your Home
By Zach SchwabJUNE 2022 | Books
This World Is Not Your Home ultimately coheres as a collection committed above all to exploring the ramifications of emotional candor, a task it approaches in subtle ways that can alternately charm, haunt, and leave one wanting.
Ride Home
By Yehui ZhaoAPRIL 2023 | Critics Page
Before my seven-day quarantine at a hotel in Fujian Province, I, along with other passengers, were swallowed by a mother sperm whale named Dōng Fāng东方. She was our ride home.
Jami Attenbergs I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home
By Carissa ChesanekFEB 2022 | Books
Jami Attenbergs (The Middlesteins) new memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, is sort of a manifesto to the struggling writer. Well, at least it was for me. Each chapter explored the complications of pursuing creativity while getting knocked down in the process, both by the industry and by self-doubt, only to finally achieve some success and wonder what it all really means.