Stranger Than Fiction: How Will Mackin Blurs Genres in 'Pig Lab' to Highlight the Absurdity of Violence

In the short story "Pig Lab," Will Mackin explores the dehumanizing impact of violence through a farcical and sometimes fabulist tale of military medics training on wounded pigs. The phenomenon—bizarre as it may seem—is rooted in reality. The controversial practice of Tactical Combat Casualty Care, through which soldiers learn to treat wounds in the field by practicing on pigs, was a real thing at least through 2016.

Yet the cartoonish way the story presents this, mixed with some other fantastical elements, makes you question whether this isn't all a piece of speculative fiction. That's not a flaw though. This confusion between realism and fantasy is a feature, not a bug. That's because this subtle blurring of the line between these genres underscores the story's main point—that all the violence and trauma we consider normal are actually ridiculous.

The story opens with an immediate scene of Tactical Combat Casualty Care in action. The main character, arriving late, tells us what he expects and then what is actually happening:

"Late as I was, I figured I'd be walking right into an active scenario. … I assumed I'd find wounded pigs dying on the grass, and the boys elbow deep in their salvation.

Turned out, however, that I hadn't missed much. The pig men were in the trailer, knocking out the pigs with anesthesia. The pigs, perhaps sensing the looming betrayal, or at least recognizing a serious departure from their bottle-fed, sunny upbringing, fought back. Hooves banged against the metal floor. Squeals cut through the cool air."

Opening the story this way immediately drops us on shaky ground regarding the story's genre. "Is this realist fiction or a farce?" we wonder, as we question whether such images of "wounded pigs dying on the grass" or fighting back as they're prepped for some sort of military procedure are meant to be authentic or not. As we move forward and find that the soldiers are practicing on pigs that have been wounded for the sole purpose of their training, we naturally think, "Wait, is this a real thing the military does?" It seems over the top, inhumane, and cruel—but who knows? It could be real.

Then as the story progresses, we encounter elements that are more obviously fantastic. Many of the narrator’s fellow soldiers, we discover, have been badly injured but repaired and kept somehow in service. This, again, could be possible, but then one particular character called simply "Redbeard" because of the color of his beard is described as having light leaking from his joints in the places he's been repaired:

"He'd been blown up, I guessed, then put back together minus some pieces. I suspected this because a curious light shone from around his joints, as if some kind of spell held him together, specifically the type of spell that would break if anyone drew attention to it."

Another character, Bing Thomas, is described as having had his face sheared off by an explosion, yet he too has been repaired and is back training with the other soldiers.

These quasi-fabulist elements carry over into the narrator's descriptions of his personal life. His wife, we learn, is wrestling with some form of PTSD regarding what seems to be an abusive father.

Mackin also portrays this in an over-the-top manner that still sits curiously close to realism. She hides under the bed, under the toilet, and then finally inside a small toy box, which she then demolishes from the inside, in a way that seems cartoonish and somewhere beyond the bounds of strict reality:

"Boom! Allison's foot broke through one side of the toybox. Her bare and scraped-up leg hung out from mid-thigh.

Crack!

She elbowed out the front panel of the toybox, then rolled out of the wreckage and onto her hands and knees."

Here again, we think, "Wait, is this actually what someone with PTSD would do? Is this meant to be realistic or farcically extreme?"

So it’s not the outrageousness of the story that seems odd. Rather, it's the proximity of the story’s outrageousness to reality. “Pig Lab” has a clearly cartoonish and fabulist quality, so, you might wonder, why not lean further into it. Why not make the fantasy clearer, bolder?

We’d be wrong to criticize Mackin for this, however. The story takes this middle, less extreme, path between the fantastic and the real intentionally. This confusion over the genre, in fact, makes one of story’s main points. Forcing the reader to question what's meant to be authentic and what's meant to be over-the-top highlights the extreme cruelty and barbarism we regularly tolerate as part of reality.

As we wonder whether the government would, in fact, mutilate pigs for military training, for instance, we soon think things like, "Well, we do bomb children sometimes, so … maybe." And in that moment, we realize the whole enterprise of government-sanctioned violence is barbaric and strange. Mackin’s blending of the ridiculous and the factual in this way crystallizes the absurdity of the real world.

Similarly, as we question the intensity of the story's portrayal of the main character's wife's PTSD, we realize we have no idea how someone suffering parental abuse might behave. The entire idea of having PTSD caused by a parent is, in fact, ridiculous—and yet we accept it as a part of everyday life.

So, in the end, even if we take the time to look up Tactical Combat Casualty Care and find out that, yes, in fact, our government did do things like this to pigs, the story has forced us to reconsider how we regard violence. Light leaking out of someone’s repaired body is clearly not based in reality, but blowing that body apart—and mutilating defenseless animals—is. Which is more surreal? We don’t have to answer to understand that the cruelty we accept as real, even mundane sometimes, is actually quite fantastic.

At one point in the story, the narrator imagines the roles of humans and animals reversed. He is now a live practice dummy for an army of pigs. They crack open his chest and touch their snouts to his heart as part of their training:

"A deep incision ran from the base of my throat to my navel. My sternum was fractured, my rib cage pried open. Cool shadows of puffy clouds floated across my exposed heart, which the pigs took turns touching with their snouts." 

Here, the story reaches its highest level of unhinged absurdity. Yet, because of the way Mackin has forced us to contend with the proximity between the fantastic and the real, we pause. “Wait,” we ask ourselves, “is this actually any more absurd or brutal than the actual things warfare does to the human body—or the actual things abusive parents do to their children?” In the end, the only answer is no, and the saddest lesson Mackin has to teach is that when it comes to violence and cruelty nothing is quite as absurd as reality.