SJ Fowler, BARABUS

Tenement #23 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-08-5
121pp / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves

16.01.25.

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Following the 2022 Tenement publication of Fowler’s MUEUM, shortlisted for the 2022/23 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, a second novella in his percolating trilogy of fictions on the lore and estrangements of work and violence.

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What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job.
I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg.

Luke 16:3

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A medic roams an English city, going from call to call. As our protagonist roves from station to station they encounter accident, amusement, injury and error—minor ailment and major catastrophe alike—as they mis/adventure in the functionary detachment of applied temporary medicine. Whilst one tragedy seeds, another never materialises; whilst fear germinates and unease blooms, the plod and pace of a more pedestrian iteration of life prevails.

In a thread of instances laced with blood and banality, gore and gratuity—horrors both benign and ballooning—the medic is Fowler’s working witness to the body’s frailties. In their encounters, they see the structures and strictures and hierarchies of lived experience. How life can be boiled down to the ‘job,’ how a crisis can be crystallised in a single conversation, how calamity can overwhelm the senses, how hope hides in small rooms.

In riverine prose cooked down to concrete, this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity. About moral honesty, and what it costs to live in service of the needs of others. BARABUS is a novella about pragmatism in practice and the principled contradiction compounded in the idea of assistance and help. In our witness, we’ve the inversion of a god complex. A take on the idea of salvation lampooned in the function of a worker ‘on call,’ and the prospect of salvation sitting just a phone call away.

If a body is our ‘soft machine,’ as William S. Burroughs would put it, BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris, the acerbity of Peter Weiss, Fowler’s second novella is a paean to the disarming directness of such authors as Yoram Kaniuk and, with the crunch of Anthony Burgess, is a book about our unnamed maladies and all our efforts to overlook them, override them, and correct them. 

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Frenetic and exhilarating outbursts, as eye-witness accounts from a mind's eye of true originality. Harnessing a sublime gift-of-the-gab, Fowler—garbed as a healthcare professional—rushes headlong into a world full of genuine trepidation and make-believe. Convincingly performative and harrowingly memorable with great tracts that remain branded-on-the-brain long after the event, he digs breathlessly into episodes of hardcore mundanity as if he/we were actually there. Sometimes some things need to be said ...

Melancholy, an appetite
no misery satisfies [E.M Cioran]

Andrew Kötting

We’ve got a call and this time it’s BARABUS, this yellow body-diary spread flat on the tarmac. It’s too late, or is it? Can we lift it to the stretcher? It’s sharp-cut and astonishing as ever, it’s work and bit-part circulation, it’s pumping and our sickness and disconnects. “I'm okay. I’m not okay,” it screams/mutters. And can we save it? Likely not. It’s searing, it’s devastating; pink-green; it’s brilliant; it’s bone-intense; and tiny bridges of brightness, liquids and sinews keep us raw moving, plasters to muffle and mend and remind us... we’re all a bloody “soft bag of meat one microbe from collapse,” and drained. Self-narration to numb or stitch. But realise this in the ambulance now: everything that folds from Fowler’s soft bag of brain is a phenomenal and precious gift, and one anyone truly interested in language, human coping and the murk-sparks of the mind should know. Now drive and siren back to the station and go on.

Han Smith

Fowler’s BARABUS is relentless, compelling, comic and sobering. Its frank and unsentimental narrator describes a world where every day he encounters the tragedy and absurdity of life and death.

Vanessa Onwuemezi

Fowler’s BARABUS puts us at the very front of the frontline and dares us not to flinch as we share a paramedic’s unflinching gaze. By turns matter-of-fact and darkly funny, the casually vivid prose obliges us to observe everyday traumas that would normally make us wince and look away. A paramedic has no such luxury. Fowler captures the mundanity of the gruesome—a queasy merger between banal routine and grisly shock—and the book’s escalating intimacy with revulsion is skilfully mirrored by the steady distancing of the narrator’s coping strategies. BARABUS is a short book of close focus that concurrently drives the narrator further and further away. Harrowing at times, but immensely rewarding, Fowler’s novella is a moving exploration of the effort required to remain unmoved.

Dan Abnett

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See here for a further word on this title.

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Order SJ Fowler’s MUEUM alongside BARABUS, the first and second volumes in this trilogy on the make, for a discounted price. MUEUM will dispatch immediately, BARABUS on its October publication.

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Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a clipped photograph of parquet pavement, 51.4889° n / 2.5963° w, circa 2025.

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SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and performer living in London. His collections include I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020), The Great Apes (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and The Parts of the Body that Stink (Hesterglock, 2024). His work has become known for its exploration of the potential of poetry, alongside collaboration, curation, asemic writing, sound poetry, concrete poetry, and improvised talking performances. He has been commissioned by institutions such as the The National Gallery, Tate Modern, Wellcome Collection and Southbank Centre, and he has presented his work at over fifty international festivals, including Hay Xalapa, Mexico; Dhaka Lit Fest; Hay Arequipa, Peru; and the Niniti Festival, Iraq. Fowler was nominated for the White Review Short Story Prize, 2014, and his short stories have appeared in anthologies, such as Isabel Waidner’s edited collection, Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). In 2022, Tenement Press published MUEUM, Fowler’s debut novella, which was shortlisted for the 2022/2023 edition of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.