Synopsis:
Hallucinatory and darkly comic love stories are set against the gritty backdrop of the city, where guns and drugs collide with tales of paranoia, pursuit, and revenge. Here, a middle school biology class spirals into a surreal vivisection. A man returns home each night to chew the freshly grown fingers off a corpse to avoid going into withdrawal. A monster in an upstairs apartment kills people, records songs about it, and retweets his victims postmortem.
In these stories, love arrives wearing the mask of addiction and absurdity. If Brian Evenson and Ottessa Moshfegh wrote for The Wire you’d get the unique style of David Simmons. Fans of body horror, transgressive fiction, and literary surrealism will find themselves unable to look away as Simmons explores the intersections of violence and dark humor with a razor-sharp voice.
Review:
What, and I say this with genuine affection, the hell, was that? A book that made my teeth itchy, and my stomach turn, and my innards want to crawl out of my body, David Simmons’ “Fetty On The Switches,” is a damp, leaky, grubby, grimey and bizarre little number that I prodded, circled and then promptly fell headfirst into. From the corner of Mrs Linthicum’s rather hectic classroom to one of the sticky booths in Vonyetta Mosley’s Marizpan Palace, to the pew at the very back of one of Mother Colethia’s sermons, within the pages of almost every story in Simmons’ debut collection is a wholly unpleasant, profoundly strange, morally sticky and frankly fucking weird place to be- big fan. Exactly the kind of bat-shit, debauched, phantasmagoria I long to be able to write myself, Simmons is an author I will be keeping both eyes on from a safe distance. So, kneel at the gospel of the immaculate forefinger, remove the withered hand of Gigi -take communion, and indulge in the hatred of quinoa- “Fetty on The Switches,” hits shelves June 30th 2026 from Clash, and it’s one hell of a high.
I am so ferociously excited about this author. Simmons seems to have this unteachable, unrepeatable way of writing. That describes both his prose and his imagination. Simmons’ writing is witty and sardonic, and utterly insane without losing lucidity- borderline batshit if you will. It’s, in a side-ways, sorta sickening way, absolutely hilarious, it reads unruly and unsanitary and ridiculously clever- I learnt many a new word. Beyond the left-field vocabulary (which was to clarify, one of my favourite aspects of the collection) I was really very puzzled for the majority of my reading experience, and yet I still absolutely devoured story after story. Aside from a couple that simply flew too high over my head, I enjoyed the lot, but if I may, I’d like to tell you about my favourites.
Simmons kicks off the collection as he means to go on with “Frog Money.” I was sold by the title to be honest, but still of course wildly underestimated just how unhinged and bizarre, and at one point deeply uncomfortable, things would get. Mrs Linthicum’s biology class are dissecting crabs, as the school has run out of frog money, but things are overwhelming, the kids, of which Mrs Linthicum certainly has a favourite, are not paying attention, it’s a pressure cooker, and there’s something rotting inside of it- obviously things quickly go pear-shaped. There’s little recovery time because Simmons straight away presses us into “Gigi’s Hands,” which as I referenced sneakily to you earlier, are regularly removed and placed in the mouth of our suicidal main character- you know, as a comfort thing. Both of these are unflinchingly nasty and strange to the point of abrasion, and whilst I was going to say they’re a good indicator of what one might expect from the collection, I was still blindsided… again and again and again.
“The Language of Goats,” was one that I enjoyed immensely despite it making me feel rather unsafe in my own perception. It’s dedicated to Brian Evenson, which, taking that into consideration, didn’t come as a surprise really. This one is a paranoid fever dream that follows Hrandis. He’s, really quite rightly, in therapy, when he sees upon the shelf of his therapist “Skins and Hides: Better Living Through Improvisational Taxidermy.” He continues to see this book in various other places, as well as noticing people’s pupils warping and widening, and looking generally goat-like. It’s a spiral that corkscrews tighter with every page, really well done. I don’t know why my favourites seem to come in pairs but “Glock Dookie,” (what a title right) was another one I was a rather big fan of. It follows “Scarface,” who is building the titular fecal firearm in his SHU cell, when a gall wasp, with better manners than most humans, whom he names Buzz is locked up opposite. I shan’t say too much more about this, but despite it’s absurdity, is a quite touching and really very clever little tale about karma, humanity and ethics.
This is already too long, and it’s so very hard to pick favourites. “Liturgy,” was certainly one of them though- this is The Immaculate Forefinger one, and that forefinger is connected to The Very Long Arms. This divine anatomy is the subject of Mother Colethia’s service, and ironically, it’s certainly a non-liturgical one. Theological body horror- superb, heretical stuff. “Quinoa,” follows a fellow named Palaver DeGroot, who has a snake inside of him and hates his Auntie on account of quinoa, and her commissioning of a gazebo. “Nobody Gives A Shit About Donald Dafoe,” may well be my very favourite of the whole collection, go in blind to that one though.
What I’m trying to demonstrate to you, badly, enthusiastically, really, is no matter how weird you think weird is, “Fetty on the Switches,” is weirder. If you think you’re familiar with the absurd, Simmons’ debut collection is still a stranger, and now I’m acquainted, tentatively, I must introduce you, see how you get on.
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