The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, by Steven Sherrill

In this lovely little novel, the once-fearsome Minotaur is no longer a monster hidden in a labyrinth, demaning human sacrifice, but a half-man, half-bull oddity hidden in a trailer somewhere in the anonymous Midwest, working as a short-order cook in a restaurant, and, when he gets the chance, fixing cars. Though immortal, the savage bloodlust of his youth has faded, leaving only a quiet, lonely melancholy and occasional nightmares of violence and gore. The Minotaur can speak, but only barely, and prefers, generally, to spend his days in silence, with occasional grunts of assent to sustain conversation with those around him, his colleagues at the restaurant who, maybe, could become friends. Yet even small acts of reaching out are difficult for him, and easily misdone, since, as Sherrill writes, “in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of scracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.”

This last, though, this quest to accept tenderness and return it, is the focus of the novel, and as such it offers a measure of hope: the Minotaur, strange and freakish though he may seem, is, deep down, more man than bull, and “like everyone else, mythological character or no, the Minotaur leads a life fraught with incongruity and contradiction.” In his very strangeness, the Minotaur reveals the fundamentals of human life, the sympathetic contacts for which we all long.

The novel is clever on other levels too; the descriptions of how the Minotaur manages the details of daily life—how he moves his horns around a trailer, how he fits his cook’s uniform—are well thought-out and interesting; the writing, though less than fully confident, has a sort of understated beauty; and, most of all, the occasional references to the Minotaur’s past—his desire for Greek coffee, his dreams of divine bloodlines—make this absurd situation somehow, strangely, believable.

On the side of criticism, this is a first novel, and it shows; some scenes are slightly too long and others too short, and somehow it contains that tint of timidity, unsureness, that too often haunts first novels. Yet Sherrill, a winner of several creative writing prizes, clearly has great potential, and this work itself, while not destined to be a classic, shows off that potential and talent. Strange that it would take such a monstrous character, a hybrid mythical abnormality, to reveal to us the fundamentals of life, but such is the mystery, and miracle, of fiction.