Fire is typically anathema to books. Yet five new works by four male authors—Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine (Muumuu House, 2022), Delicious Tacos’ Savage Spear of the Unicorn (Independently published, 2020), Bud Smith’s Teenager (Vintage Books, 2022), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris (both Knopf, 2022)—make a case for at least the symbolic combination of literary fiction and conflagration.
Midway through The Passenger, a friend tells the protagonist, “any number of . . . books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire.” You need look no further than Zac Smith’s story “I Am Going to Burn Down the Mall of America” to believe he has contemplated arson. Savage Spear of the Unicorn’s narrator, who keeps a blog like Delicious Tacos’ own, writes: “I must keep posting, or mail bombs.” Toward the end of Teenager, Bud Smith’s main characters burn down a horse barn with a dead body in it (although not before freeing the horses). As for Cormac McCarthy, his protagonists are the very progeny of annihilating fire, their father having worked on the Manhattan Project; across the cardboard box collecting The Passenger and Stella Maris an atomic “sunset” radiates, dyeing a cumulonimbus sky red, yellow, orange—from clouds of flame a face rises shrieking, flayed of skin. (The cover of Tacos’ previous book, Finally, Some Good News, also boasts a mushroom cloud, cartoonishly illustrated, with blazing buildings in the background.) Put another way, when Alfred tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” he might be speaking of McCarthy, Tacos, and Mr. and Mr. Smith.
