Review: Mr. Average and the 12th Stone by Ben Run

A microcosmic drama with existential implications, Mr. Average and the 12th Stone: Watch Your Mandibles by Ben Run is a mind-bending work of experimental fantasy, told from a thoroughly unique perspective.

Ave may be the best optimizer in the Ant Nest ant colony, but even his eternal loyalty and devotion to Hari isn’t enough to make him forget about the woman who has been visiting him on New Year’s Eve every year for the past eleven years. She is the reason he has been saving up all of his reflection time – all those carefully guarded seconds and emo-seconds – for the chance to finally be something greater than himself.

Despite his deepest desires finally being within reach, fate has other things in store for Ave, and in the midst of his long-awaited freedom, he is stopped by a priest and offered an epic honor. Not only will he be meeting the Great Shepherd Zorax himself, but will also play a crucial part in a sacred ceremony that will finally stabilize Ant Nest. However, unknown to all, someone else is in control of the essential 12th stone, and its power is growing in force within Ant Nest with every passing day. Without Ave’s help, Ant Nest is doomed, but saving his world may require too great a sacrifice, no matter what the great Hari demands.

It is quickly easy to forget that this bizarre cast of characters are indeed ants; instead, they read like souls in an endless machine of life and death, fulfilling a purpose greater than their comprehension. Within their perpetual mental calculations and strict orderliness, there is a culture of respect and promptness – of hierarchy and purpose and unquestioned duty within the greater whole. Ave’s role as a disruptor to this finely tuned mechanism, and a potential liberator for all his fellow antsources, makes him an everyman hero, and an easy-to-support protagonist, similar to other chosen one fantasy stories, but within a world seldom explored.

The prose is clever on multiple levels, as an allegorical play on humanity’s anesthetized masses, as a philosophical exploration of our cognitive prisons, and as a tongue-in-cheek jab at efficiency and order. For example, there is a constant obsession in Ant Nest with time and accuracy, yet their circuitous deliberations and long-winded manners of speaking are at direct odds with the very seconds they are perpetually trying to save and accrue. This ironic elbow nudge in the writing is a particularly effective commentary on how much time we, as humans, waste on deliberation, rather than action.

A novel centered on going against the grain and thinking for yourself, this fantasy story is anything but one-dimensional, but does demand investment from the reader. The density of the prose and the cerebral nature of this dystopian world can make the reading experience a challenge, and the sporadic lapses in tense agreement, spelling, and grammar don’t help the occasionally confusing stream of consciousness. Some amount of control and reason need to be relinquished in such a fantastical scenario to fully immerse in the strangeness of the author’s literary construct, but its originality and clever use of parable overcomes any issues in execution.

In the niche genre of insects or animals in fantasy fiction, this novel is a standout for the reason that classics in the genre are as well – it tells much more about us than the fantastical characters that inhabit their world.