Book Review : Mark Jaskowski - Mutant Circuit (2023)
One freaky thing about getting older is witnessing how people change and drift away from you. It's how you start to understand that nothing's forever and that you should really start fucking caring about one another. It's something everyone eventually goes through except maybe psychopaths with no friends. There's a million stories that have been told about this particular life experience, but none of them was ever told the way Mark Jaskowski did in his body horror novel Mutant Circuit. It is told in a way you won’t forget.
Mutant Circuit tells the story of a Katherine, a young woman who gets something implanted inside her at her local plasma centre. Alarmed, her friends mount a rescue mission in order to bring her back and they realize pretty quickly that the Katherine they knew had somewhat of… an upgrade. A new pet also. The people who did this to her are looking to get her back, though. They’re interested in using other members of the little group of punk to run their experiments on and won't have a reasonable conversation about it.
Body Horror As a Metaphor for Adulting
This is a quite conceptual novel without necessarily being brainy or abstract. Right at the start, Katherine is already compromised. She’s being extracted from the plasma centre (a building which the only reasonable thing about is its name) and reintegrates her group of friends as a different person, being modified in real time by this "symbiont" that was installed inside her body. That thing makes her different, but also makes her mysteriously more attuned to her environment. Almost like a superpower.
One thing I liked about Mutant Circuit is how the idealism of the little group of punks is challenged by the idea that one of its members has been irrevocably changed. That idea puts them in front of a dilemma: are they going to reject the new Katherine or embrace her like a mutation? I also liked that it eventually gets decided for them. The only real decision that the group of friends ended up taking is that they delivered Katherine (and later Cora) from the Dr. Butler and his faceless institutional cronies.
Although it is not meant to be an emotional read at all, I was moved by how Mitch, Cora and the others embraced changed as an inevitability in order to stay together. When you grow out of your youthful exuberance, you find yourself having to sacrifice either your wild and exuberant group of friends or to sacrifice part of yourself in other to keep them in your life and that's what the group of friends did in order to keep Katherine around. I think it's cool. I think they embraced the inevitable on their own terms.
So it’s kind of smart. But is it good?
…kind of? Mutant Circuit makes more sense after you finished it and once you start reflecting on it. I had a pretty embattled relationship to it during my reading, up to a point where at some moment I asked myself whether I hated it or not. It's one of these novels where there’s a lot of characters and none of them have much of a well-defined identity. Mutant Circuit is a short novel (175 pages), so it’s busy resolving its own plot, but I would've loved to get to know these characters better in order for me to love them.
If you persevere through it (and I am nothing if not perseverant), and Mutant Circuit ends up making sense over the last two chapters, like a zombie movie that delivers all the goods within the last 15 minutes. Don't get me wrong, it's a stylistic choice rather than a lack of skill. Mark Jaskowski is a peculiar storyteller. He is quite conceptual and disengaged with what most novelists obsess over. I would say that I liked Mutant Circuit, but I didn’t love it if it makes sense? It’s definitely unique body horror.
*
Should you read Mutant Circuit? It’s the kind of book you pick up when you're looking for a particular kind of thrill. It has a raw, almost delirious energy. It moves fast, but not without purpose. I like my novels to settle into a more precise emotional stance than this one here in order for me to calibrate my expectations while I read, but Mutant Circuit ended up delivering at the end. If you’re in the mood for something freaky, but oddly heartfelt, it’s something you should consider picking up. Definitely an oddball read.
