Backwaters

Backwaters 

By Lee Rozelle 

Montag Press, 2024 

Paper: $17.95 

Genre: Fiction; Horror; Science Fiction; Bizarro 

Reviewed by Polly Schattel 

Along with the typical tropes of small-town southern lit—barbershops, pickup trucks, swampy outbacks—there are signs of a changing world: yoga classes, college towns, Mexican restaurants, brain surgery laboratories. Elements of science fiction and body horror burst into Rozelle’s intricate narrative, along with touches of the curious outsider genre known as “Bizarro.” Using metaphors, dreamlike narratives, and incongruous genre elements much in the manner of filmmaker David Lynch, bizarro fiction has its roots in absurdist writers like Gogol, Kafka, and Burroughs. And while these masters prove jarring symbology and dreamlike juxtapositional touches can certainly be effective, their material also walks a delicate line: if inexpertly constructed, what delights the bizarro writer can leave readers scratching their heads. The work can become a closed system of spiraling, self-indulgent grotesqueries. 

Rozelle, a Professor of English at the University of Montevallo, mostly avoids this pitfall. At first puzzling and generally creepy, the stories in “Backwaters” take on a kind of cumulative opacity as they proceed, and the final tale, “Hydromaniacs: A Novelette,” answers most of the important questions. The prose crackles with energy and detail, and the author’s ideas are never less than vividly inventive. But with limited emotional resonance, conventional readers may wonder why exactly they should care about these characters.  

Rozelle’s vision is ambitious. He demands a close reading (sometimes a re-reading) to really get to the purposefully murky bottom of his conception. Watersheds are spoiled, crazed evangelicals and masked wrestlers lurk about the periphery, prog rock echoes in from somewhere, raccoons attack, and plenty of fishy mutations occur, leading to a pervasive paranoia where tangled moments of physical revulsion and half-remembered medical procedures give clues to what may or may not be happening. Credit Rozelle for temerity—his stories are kaleidoscopic in their relentless instability, in their horrid accretion of unsavory sudden turns and gory developments.  

In the end, the author satisfies by bringing the whole thing together with a deft touch. But the prismatic nature of the narrative—multiple characters, multiple POVs, and a need for the reader to piece together multiple unreliable narratives—ultimately robs the work of a sense of greater cohesion. Some readers may be left with the feeling that less, in this case, could have been slightly more. Rozelle is a stylist of unusual power, with a sure hand for the incremental moments that make fiction come alive, but just as with Lynch’s work, his vision is so strong, so robust, that these stories are at their best when the surreality remains peripheral, and their focus finally settles upon the people they’re about. I would love to read Rozelle in (dare I say it) a more conventional form, something more akin to Joyce Carol Oates’ or Peter Straub’s approach. It would be a book for the ages. 

But perhaps that’s the nature of bizarro fiction—for better or worse, it’s not necessarily interested in character. And one could argue that these stories, burbling and bubbling as they do with striking imagery, both organic and inorganic, are structural and stylistic reflections of their contents—they’ve become what they’re about. It’s an impressive trick.  

Polly Schattel is a novelist and filmmaker living in Asheville, North Carolina.