Jellyfish are Loading Their Guns by Ed Adams – review

 

Jellyfish are Loading Their Guns by Ed Adams – review

@aestheticregime

A lexicon of fragments that refuses to behave

Ed Adams’ Jellyfish are Loading Their Guns is not a novel in the conventional sense, nor a reference work in the traditional one. It presents itself as an alphabetised glossary — from “Aardvaak” to “ZZZZ – Snap Out of It!” — yet what unfolds is part dictionary, part poetry cycle, part political archive.

The entries read like signals intercepted across time. A definition of “Average Age of a Bomber Crew” sits beside riffs on cryptocurrency, AI surveillance systems, and nightclub gestures filed under “Hip Wiggle.” There are sly asides on laundering networks and shadow governance, followed abruptly by RAF Scampton, or a whispered meditation on desire.

It is a book that makes dipping and flicking its primary reading method. Open at random and you may find an entry that stings — a compact satire of financial corruption, Cardinal-era populism, or militarised absurdity. Another page might glow with pathos: a brief, devastating note on Bomber Command or an almost haiku-like fragment about loss. And scattered throughout are provocations that flirt with the reader, as if the lexicon itself were complicit in seduction.

If this sounds chaotic, it is. But the chaos is carefully pitched. Adams’ writing thrives on dissonance — history colliding with technology, philosophy with slang, solemnity with play. The result recalls Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet or Sebald’s Austerlitz stripped down to lexicon form: fragments that accrue their power through juxtaposition rather than narrative.

The title’s joke — jellyfish interrupting nuclear power stations, “loading their guns” — is telling. This is a book about disruption: of systems, of histories, of reading habits. What it refuses to do is settle.

Jellyfish is best approached not as explanation but as experience. It’s a lexicon that declines to define, an archive that questions what belongs in an archive at all. In a publishing landscape where novels often lean on neatness, Adams offers something riskier: a text that hums, stings and glows, much like its namesake.

Recommended for readers of Pessoa, Sebald, or the more hauntological reaches of contemporary experimental fiction.