The basis for 3:AM’s success is a combination of good editing and good marketing. Good marketing means that the creators of the project have kept tabs throughout on the kinds of readers they hope to attract and have adapted to each cresting wave of trendmatter with agility and confidence. Good editing refers to an understanding that, for an online project to rise out of the swirling mists of the overcrowded internet, there needs to be a focus, above all else, on variety. The 3:AM nucleus has found that opting for breadth and variety among content selections has had the effect of increasing their readership and exposure, thereby also increasing the flow of quality submissions among diverse topics and styles. This grates against the beliefs of many more “specialized” editors, who aspire to be the very best in their narrow fields and approaches. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it’s been forgotten by this second group of online selectors. The end result, although some of you out there will disagree, is that 3:AM offers the best of the web in a grab-bag of unrelated sub-genres of literary art. The casual essay? The urban/ironic coming of age story? The barroom narrative? Maybe, maybe not. But anything shaped like this, with such scattershot peaks, deserves attention.

But this isn’t a review of 3:AM the website or the international piazza. This is a review of a very finite, closed thing, namely a book entitled ‘The Edgier Waters: New Writing from Literary Upstarts’. Though unmentioned in the title, the book amounts to a compendium of the magazine’s best-loved authors. I had decidedly mixed feelings upon seeing it arrive in the mail. It is such a small thing. Not even necessarily small by book standards, at 351 perfect-bound trade-paper pages. I wondered what it weighed, but it was too small to register on my bathroom scale. I considered seeking out the book at a local bookstore, buying 10-15 copies and dividing their combined weight by the number purchased, but this seemed (somehow) abnormal. It’s pretty big for a book, but depressingly small for the summed cultural impact crater of 5 years of whirling international zeitgeist. Maybe I’m some sort of internet slob, a digital elitist. But holding the book in my hands, I was reminded why all the great artists seem to prefer cremation to traditional burial these days, why they’d prefer to be made ethereal, spreading as dust across the planet rather than be dressed up in an old tuxedo, painted with overstated make-up, and prostrated on public display.

Fuck. I am obnoxious. And I haven’t even opened it yet.

Within the pages of the shrunken head of 3:AM (Or the Touring Company of 3:AM. Or 3:AM: The fully-playable demo) there is internal conflict, external conflict, and full-on, joyful scribbling that transcends the printed page to play out as hallucinatory theatre on the far wall of my living room.

By internal conflict, I mean the conflict between what the book claims to represent in its foreword and the reality taking place on its pages. The foreword is written by Michael Bracewell, who gives a very professional imagining of the history of counter-cultural literature from the 1970’s to present day. The subtext of the essay is the idea of 3:AM being home to the most recent additions to this ill-defined slushpile of slanty-looking authors. The problem with Bracewell’s intro is essentially one of underestimation, as well-meaning and at times helpful as it is. How difficult must it be to simplify a cultural history, and to then tilt it in the direction you’re facing for use as background to someone else’s anthology? The truth about 3:AM, in both bound and unbound form, is that it is too big, too expansive and too diverse to fall easily in a train of progressively (giggle) counter-culturallyer (end giggle) movements, trends, and iconoclasms.

The content of the book ranges from story-essays (one of the best being the sad and subtly funny “Eros Essay” by Tim Parks) to drag-em-out love and hate character blitzes (I’ll take Tony O’Neil’s “Ghost Town” and Jim Ruland’s “The Stripper in her Natural Habitat” as respective team captains.) The work jumps across form, structure, and means (there’s a bucketful of rough and at-times unreadable poetry thrown in for breadth, or some other reason I can’t quite reach) It also changes lenses several times in the way it approaches the underclass, from the immensely personal and tragic pieces like O’Neil’s, to the more academic reviews such as 3:AM editor Richard Marshall’s take on Stewart Home.

Like any good raging schoolboy, 3:AM is full of external conflict. The book knows what it isn’t. It knows what it doesn’t like and is on a constant prowl for walls to kick down. Richard Cabut steps back knowingly from this literary bender party before moving on to the gut-turning tragedy that haunts his “Danger Stranger.” An anonymous inebriated character steps out of himself to ask the room:

Why are tales of poor people, the underclass, those
who encounter daily aggro, crime, humiliation, disap-
pointment and death, so titillating to literary thrill-seekers
looking for books in which the dirt is a credential of reality?

In the story, nobody answers the question. Perhaps because it’s a story and not a literary essay and because the drunkard is really just the author in disguise. If you want literary essays (and good ones, not ones written by academic unpeople with no stake in the trembling validity of real art) you can go to page 5. Or 19. Or 277. I’m liking this book more and more.

And then, there are the real highlights. I want to record here, at the end, three contributions that are a fundamentally different kind of awesome than the superheroism mentioned already.

Steve Almond’s personal essay “Pretty Authors Make Graves” postulates that there is an inherent division in literature between that offered by the physically beautiful and the, shall we say, less aesthetically pleasing. The essay is hilarious and then transcendentally touching, the kind of faux-academic exercise that really wants to tell you about the author, but is pretending to be doing something more outward-looking than autobiography. I am looking for his books in the hive-structure of Toronto bookstores. I want there to be many.

Ben Myers offers a prose selection a notch or two farther down the “story” end of the story vs. essay spectrum from Almond’s piece. It’s about a boy (The author? Doesn’t really matter…) undergoing surgery to remove a bad kidney. This narrative is interspersed with urban legend and modern-day remembering to paste together a story that remains incomplete, mysterious, and all the better for it. It’s in many ways the most (notice the big “L”) Literary moment in the book, but it in no way seems out of place. This might be because 3:AM is essentially a placeless endeavour, both geographically and aesthetically. The homeless are the most welcoming of party hosts.

The top-prize, carried-off-on-the-shoulders MVP of the collection ends up being Ms. Susannah Breslin who pipes in with the first six letters of what I hope to be a 26 part series of flash-ficts called “Fetish Alphabet.” I’m not sure I need to tell you any more about the content of the series, except to wink in the direction of a few choice sections, with names like “C is for Conjoined Twins” and “D is for Dachryphilia.” I took the liberty of looking into the existence of a complete set, and couldn’t find one. There might be one out there. There has to be, why would she stop at “F”? Just think of all the wonderful things that start with the letter G…

There are other notables here too, Paul Ewen’s set of surrealist pub reviews sticks out for originality, as does Daren King’s blink-short posting “Jim Giraffe’s Stories”. On the other end, Kenji Siratori does the public service of reminding everyone how silly experimental cyberpunk writing looks when not lit from behind by liquid crystal.

To wrap up, at a little under eight quid, ‘The Edgier Waters’ is a well-assembled collection of things you can mostly just find on the internet for free. Snowbooks has put together a very marketable primer, but I still don’t see why it exists. Is it meant as a politically-correct outreach for the minority of 3:AM readers allergic to computer screens? For the magazine’s inherently tech-friendly readership, the whole thing must seem like a strange sideshow, not the leap into the mainstream it is positioned to be. I wonder how it will sell, or is selling, not just in terms of quantity but in who exactly is buying them. Unknowing grandmothers out gift shopping for their bearded grad-student grandchildren? Obsessive 3:AM fanboys wanting to have every single incarnation of their lust-smothered pet monster? Indie love-hunters wanting their fellow coffee shop patrons to know they are consumers of the alternative press and perhaps therefore good conversationalists and confidants? Who knows. I try not to concern myself with how the publishing industry thinks.

And, no, the poetry isn’t all that bad. James Sallis’s “Second Generation” is excellent. Like anything, there are flashing moments of shake.

Jacob McArthur Mooney lives and writes in Toronto. He is the poetry editor at Thieves Jargon. Recent online work can be seen at terrain, nth position, and zygote in my coffee.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.