By Jenna Brown

In a blend of magical realism and surrealist technique, Craig Bernardini’s intrepid short-story collection, 12 OXEN UNDER THE SEA (New American Press, 2025), masterfully meshes domestic concerns with the absurd. In twelve idiosyncratic narratives, Bernardini contemplates death, isolation, parenting, sea creatures, guys named Carl, marital tensions, trauma, and the supernatural. Each story successfully asks us to suspend our disbelief as we encounter: a grieving father turning aquatic in his son’s pond and finding his previously dead wife in its depths; an extravagant hotel continually catching fire for increasingly arcane reasons; a revival house’s playing of Rachmaninoff causing phantasmagoric hallucinations. Or, in 16th century England, the occupant of an inn has his furnishings move due to an inexplicable poltergeist-like disturbance.

What makes Bernardini’s writing so effective is his ability to deftly make the uncanny a part of our world. His literary realms are absurdist, but only to a point. While the stories can be nonsensical, normal rules still apply—there are still bowling balls, bikes, and breakfasts. A child in a Manhattan Italian restaurant can burst into an eternal flame, but the characters themselves still order chicory salad from a menu. But even so, his worlds are not simple and tangible with only one odd thing jarring us. His stories never hinge on that single anomaly, and they hardly ever have a pat conclusion. Almost every time, we are still left in a joyously ambivalent place, thinking, “What just happened??”

Bernardini’s structure and style is consistent. We often get unique casts of characters, surprising and intimate detail, and cartoony events, with (mostly) unnamed male narrators. The stories tend to focus on phenomenon and description rather than dialogue or character sketch. Occasionally we are given physical descriptions and names of supporting characters (strange neighbor, blind boarder, amphibious father, etc.), but hardly ever of the protagonists, especially when Bernardini uses first-person plural narration. In some stories, the protagonist seems to serve as a narrative camera. What we get are a kind of mysterious, engaging parable, but we’re never spoon-fed a lesson.

What Bernardini’s stories may lack in close inspection of character, they make up for in astounding word choice—harumphing, stertorous, up-yoursing, onanistically, avuncular—bombastic add-ons to Bernardini’s literary whimsicality. His detail, too, is impressive. The lagoony descriptions of the narrator’s sea creature father in “The Stability of Floating Bodies” resembles of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. Lines like “a tetherless astronaut adrift in the currents of the void,” as he describes the grieving widow floating in the pond, or “some Ptolemaic mock-up of earth and sky,” as he describes geese overhead, would fit right into Ballard’s maritime London.

There’s boldness too, in his willingness to take risks, not only in the otherworldly events themselves but in risking a certain rudeness/morbidity. In the story, “Fat Kid,” an overweight boy earns internet notoriety when his arm-jiggling rage over his favorite band turns legend. In this first-person plural narrative, Bernardini comments on our group tendencies toward cruelty. On a more envelope-pushing level, “Ambergris” is a reflection on childhood, generational anguish, evolution, museum science, and parenting. The story concludes in the narrator’s presumably allowing the death of his disabled child and the subsequent, and bizarre, assembly of the child’s skeleton into an anatomical model. Aside from the negligence, the narrator and his wife are horrible—they resent the child, who is referred to as “it” for its incapacity to grow or mature (possibly Progenia). His wife, at night, recites to the child all the things it will never be able to do, and crows, “What is wrong with you?” repeatedly. The narrator allows his kid to get lost in a museum; his wife had always secretly wanted this. This all might be a comment on the typical kind of story in which parents want to overcome their own difficult childhoods, but Bernardini explodes it in a wild display of grotesque eccentricity.

His best story in the collection is his seven-pager, “The Death of the Pianist: His Assassination.” The story opens with a pianist playing Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” in a dim auditorium. The narrator, an unnamed male, sits beside a woman and her sleeping husband. A second identical pianist enters the stage and shoots the first pianist twice in the back, tugs the corpse over the piano bench, and resumes playing the sonata. Hijinks ensue as pianist after pianist enters and kills the current player, a Groundhog Day of murder and music. Meanwhile, the audience remains unfazed, excited even. They applaud, whistle, and stamp their feet as pieces of fractured skull fly and dead bodies are whipped around. The protagonist aestheticizes each execution in poetic jargon (“he was no longer a pianist, but a flower withering in a rain of lover’s tears”). The story ends with a smattering of applause, and the narrator, in a turn of events, shoots the fingers on his left hand clean off with a pistol and escapes into the night with a premonition: “The performance had only just begun, and I still had one bullet left.” A Bernardini story wouldn’t be a Bernardini story without some shock, and he continually keeps us enthralled with a combination of morbidity and almost comical wisdom. “But then she must have noticed the still-smoking pistol in my right hand, the missing fingers on the other, the smell of cordite in her nostrils, the gleam in my eye, the way my voice cracked when I said Gesundheit even though she hadn’t sneezed.” Despite the fact that we know what is to come next (another dead pianist), his writing still continues to surprise. Was the narrator inspired by the murderous performances, which nudged him toward violence? What is happening, and why? Are the pianists (who the narrator remarks all look like his uncle) actually his relatives? Why include such a detail? Simply to be nightmarish? Is this all a grand comedy? We find ourselves laughing even as we’re productively perplexed. The collection, described by New American Press, as a series of “rehearsals for the apocalypse” is something more than that. While redolent of doomsday scenarios, Bernardini doesn’t seem intent on preparing us for some societal breakdown. The challenging illogicality of these could not act as a survival guide. 12 OXEN UNDER THE SEA is less of a practice-run than a premonition/life lesson. Each story begins with an ordinary landscape—a theater, a museum, a boarding house, a neighborhood, or a pond. But from there it turns bizarre. For his characters, though, this is simply their way of life, and Bernardini’s stories seem to assert that sometimes strange things, macabre nightmares, just happen. Quoting Lotte H. Eisner, Bernardini writes, “The menace of destruction is always lurking in the inorganic world.” Gesundheit, indeed.

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Jenna Brown is a NOR intern studying English and classical civilizations at Ohio University.