The Revolt of the Oyster

Don Marquis, the manic mind behind archy the cockroach, turns his satirical eye toward the evolutionary chain in this gleefully absurd 1922 novella. Our hero is Probably Arboreal, a proto-human navigating the perilous waters of love, neighbors, and existential doubt on some primordial beach. He spies on carefree beachgoers, bickers with his neighbor Slightly Simian (because of course that's the name), and pursues a red-haired woman with the desperate intensity of a creature who hasn't quite figured out fire yet. Then things get weird: Probably Arboreal finds himself in mortal combat with a giant oyster, and the absurd confrontation somehow becomes a spectacle that comments on humanity's place in the natural order. Marquis uses this ridiculous premise to poke fun at evolutionary theory, romantic Idealism, and the ridiculous ways humans (and proto-humans) try to assert dominance over nature and each other. It's cheeky, it's silly, and it absolutely earns its strangeness.