Far-ranging and Intimate: A Review of Tara Lynn Masih's HOW WE DISAPPEAR

Tara Lynn Masih’s impressive second collection, How We Disappear, encompasses a range of time periods, locales, and styles: two-page flash to novella, realism to ghost story, historical fiction to modern American myth. Luscious descriptions of the natural world help to illuminate a theme bonding these thirteen diverse stories: the mysterious human heart in search of itself and its place in the world.

In the perceptive “Those Who Have Gone,” a weary Elizabeth travels from New York to Arizona in search of something different. Almost immediately she meets Blaze, a local man who looks like her ex-husband and has her pegged from the start. More dialogue than is usual in Masih’s stories effectively develops Blaze’s character, while Elizabeth’s inner life is stated in quiet, compelling prose, “The signs of death and violence before and behind her told her to leave. But something about the man told her to stay. So she stepped sideways in her mind, tried to accept his casual demeanor as her own.” As Elizabeth contemplates the land she’s getting to know, the story’s setting and circular structure deliver even deeper meanings. Some disappearances are forever; but once you know how to look, you can spot their traces.

Traces left behind are a major part of “Notes to THE WORLD,” the story of Grigori’s first hunting season, mere weeks into a months-long contract with a co-op. Told with convincing detail, the survival skills learned from his mother and his neighbors will be tested, nothing euphemistic about what it takes to stay alive in the Siberian Taiga. After a near-fatal accident, recovering in a cabin he’s stumbled upon, Grigori discovers a stack of numbered notes written by Desya, daughter of a family of persecuted Old Believers. He’s drawn into her story of having to live in hiding. He shares her losses and her aching loneliness. “His fear was with him each morning when he woke up in his village to the birds and white sun that fought to penetrate the northern mists. It settled on his chest so hard sometimes, he struggled to breathe and be part of life once again.” Grigori’s growing relationship with Desya’s unseen presence parallels the reader’s experience, a complex blend of immediacy and time-travel.

Even more complex in themes and imagery is “An Aura Surrounds That Night,” an immersive account told by Mercy, the oldest of so-called Irish twins, the dynamic of their farming family an echo of the Biblical Esau and Jacob. The short opening section deserves to be fully quoted, but here’s a snippet: “One memory was once locked up, hidden, in the same way these small colored bits of rectangular prophecies are folded into doughy shells. These papers that stay curled up…until we…tear them out of their protective shelters and examine them privately or read them aloud.” The narrator’s memories are replete with sensory details, such as a childhood outing with the sisters wearing “…dresses ironed so recently that you could still feel the warmth where the iron last passed over the cotton.” The wise woman of their coastal Long Island community hints at a solution for those who leave and for those who stay, applicable to other characters in this collection. The whole last section is a lyrical, place-laden resolution of healing, a way to move forward after tragedy; a rare and precious thing, for the reader as well as for Mercy.

Rarer is the writer who leaves no traces of herself, allowing the characters to wield their own singular voices, yet Masih has achieved it in each of her far-ranging yet intimate stories. Some characters yearn to disappear, some for only a time, ultimately realizing their paths follow or align with another; some characters have no choice. But they all do what the best of fiction does, they stay with the reader.

Fear and Loathing in B-Horror Movies: On Peter Grandbois's Wait Your Turn

Peter Grandbois has presented, in novella form, a double feature of B-horror-film-based stories. Wait Your Turn and The Stability of Large Systems are strung out from the movies The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Fly, respectively.

He takes these movies and creates stories from them. In the first story, he depicts an actual creature, not a man, who was cast in the movie. He shows a monster who desires, and fails, to be human.

When exploring stories structured around B horror films in his double monster feature novellas, Peter Grandbois pinpointed their motive to incite fear.

“What brings you here?”
“I wanted to be afraid.”

If horror movies cause fear, then the behind-the-scenes story is the absence of love. In both of his stories, Grandbois depicts monsters that approach humanity or depart from humanity on the hinge of love. They are monsters because of their failure.

The Creature falls in love and has a child, but he cannot become fully human despite reconstructive surgery in that direction because he has destroyed the ability to love within himself and the object of his love between his strong hands.

The Fly becomes less human as his wife observes a change inside of him. “’You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘You’re not the person you once were. Something about you is different.” Helene says these things to her husband before his change. And it is these words that cause him to transform. “I wanted to say I needed her to see me as I once had been, to tell me I was the man she’d fallen in love with, perhaps then all would go back to normal.”

“I didn’t know which was more frightening. The fact that one month ago she no longer loved me because she thought I’d changed, or the fact that now that I really had changed, she seemed to love me more than ever.”

There is this pull on each monster to love and be loved, and it is not necessarily that they are not capable of love, merely that they just don’t. They don’t love their wives and they don’t love their children, and this is frightening.

This is what the author wants the audience to take away from these stories, maybe, but I don’t know if he believes it. “Movie magic is all about illusion. How easy it is for us to deceive ourselves, to be deceived. . . . With time, we see clearly.”

“Love’s illusions are as powerful as any manufactured by movies.” (Wait Your Turn)

“It is difficult to see things clearly in the present… Only with distance can we understand.” (The Stability of Large Systems)

There is this sense of distancing, like how one writes fiction to get at certain truths that feel too close to be spoken of honestly. Love is an illusion, Grandbois writes, no matter how monstrous the opposite of love may be. Time and space are the antidotes, it seems, to both love and fear. Both fear and love are catalysts to keep the human species alive. But what if you don’t feel human? What if you want to do something other than merely survive?

In the end, both monsters have escaped from society, but they can’t escape from themselves. They each try to hurt what they have tried to love. It is an effort to bring that spectrum of love and fear together and make the distance between them negligible.

Grandbois has presented two excellently-crafted novellas, and they definitely made me want to read more of his work, especially the rest of this series.

Lindsay Stern's Town of Shadows

I don’t know what I expected from Lindsay Stern’s novella, Town of Shadows, but it wasn’t what I got.

Waiting for my car to be fixed, sitting in the dealership’s plastic chair with all the other strange folk who drive cars that don’t properly work, I flicked on my Kindle and decided I’d read a few pages while I waited. Luckily for me, the wait ended up being much longer than expected.

It’s not a long read and so I was able to read it in about ninety minutes, but those are powerful pages and an emotional ninety minutes.

It’s a peculiar book, relying on more than sentences and stories to give you the life it holds within. Full of odd math problems and experimental notations and lists and poetry and definitions that seem all wrong, Stern disorients the reader by dropping us in the middle of this town where nothing is quite what it seems to be, where absurdity and magic are just a skipped breath away.

For a long time the mayor required all citizens to wear small wooden cages
on their heads. The idea was to trap their thoughts before they wafted
behind another’s eyes, between another’s ears. At first the results were
satisfactory. Then came the complications: the cages filled until the mayor
could no longer distinguish one face from the next. Through the bars he
discerned only light — red for politicians, for philosophers bright blue, and
for children the glint of candleflame. They were happily blind, watching
their thoughts unfold before them as the objects of the world ticked on.

It is these little touches of magic that grabbed me early on, held me close as it whispered the life of this strange little town full of strange humans doing almost human things that were just a few shades off.

Lately, Pierre has felt his brain expanding. Growing lighter, as if swollen with
air. This morning, a thrust against the roof of his skull. Last night, a pressure
in his jaw. Before long, he suspects, the whole machine will burst. Words will
trickle through his ears, scamper back into the world. So as not to forget
them, he has built a lexicon:

Mirror, n. A palindrome.

Loneliness, n. Wordlessness.

Indigestion, n. Swallowed noise.

Making the disorientation begin to feel natural, I found myself accepting Stern’s definitions, agreeing with them, assimilating them into the fabric of my life. While the novella shifts and bends reality, like dancing shadows, it manages to grow in realness and even the oddity of this town of shadows feels right.

It feels true.

And as I sat there reading, my car forgotten, the people around me just noise, the world Stern created began to collapse and my heart collapsed with it. All that reality she wove so tightly together, making a world like one I would dream of if I only knew to dream that way, began to unravel and it hurt. It hit me hard, harder than I expected.

I was caught in that town with them and I never even realized, never saw it happening until the walls were all crumbling and then I was disoriented in a new way, falling back into the world beyond the page, where I had to go talk to a mechanic about what he did and then drive that car home to see what the rest of the day held for me.

I didn’t know who Lindsay Stern was before opening Town of Shadows, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget now that I’ve closed it.

Real vs. Irreal: Mining a Thoughtspace Threading out Inner Realities

Prologue

The last two books I read were The Great Lover by Michael Cisco and The Sensualist by Daniel Torday. They were widely different, the first being 300+ pages of dark fantasy and the latter a slim novella set in the real world. It was a coincidence that I happened to read them successively, and I think if I hadn’t read both, if I’d only ever read either one, I might not have posed this quintessential question I’d like to pose to you. What genre, or style of writing, better reflects our modern existence: realism or irrealism? And, what is more important: to recreate the world around you and evoke an emotive experience that possibly transcends it, or to mine a thoughtspace threading out inner realities?

I’d like to take each book in turn as examples of their genre and let me think about these questions.

Irreal

“Do you ever write a story that isn’t weird?” A friend of mine asked me this question the other day.  I told her I didn’t see the point. I write stories to express some inner truth of myself, and a realistic story imitating my own life or someone like me would only be redundant. I wanted to write stories that limned the subliminal.  I wanted to explore only interiority, justifying my self-indulgence as microcosmic. I thought that my subjective feelings could somehow reflect objective, grander-scale issues. But I didn’t write about my feelings in a diary, emo way. I hid them buried deep under imagery and metaphor.

It was because of all these things that I was attracted to The Great Lover by Michael Cisco. Although not set in a traditionally otherworldly fantasy land, it refuses to describe a real world of any kind. It starts in what might be our own reality but quickly transforms everything into landscapes of pure language. The Great Lover doesn’t describe a real world; it is a real world. By eschewing any semblance of “reality,” it itself becomes hyper-real, the only reality we can be ensconced in and enveloped by. The words themselves and the emotions they evoke are the terrain for the Great Lover to frolic in.

It starts with the protagonist, only ever deemed the Great Lover, dying. He dies and his afterlife or resurrected body or zombie soul carries on trudging through sewer systems, given power. One of his powers is the ability to build a Prosthetic Libido for a scientist who can’t be bothered with his own urges as they distract him from his work. So the Great Lover cobbles together a robot golem to bear the burden of all of the scientist’s lust.

Even though there are these ideas and sometimes only ideas devoid of plot strung together, it was the prose that really encapsulated the tone of the novel. It was rich and chthonic, transporting you into different thought processes where pure emotive mandates were viable.

The book is published by Chômu Press who champions new irreal novels, works that explore the way life feels and not the way it occurs merely to our primary, primate senses.

In a chaotic world in which “truth” and verifiable facts seem to be a commodity, it may be of more value to trade in concepts.

This isn’t fantasy genre with wizards, dragons and zombies. This isn’t Twilight.

“It’s like time travel or music. . . . Don’t try to fit it all together into one story line, but transfer from line to line,” it says metafictionally. The book is self-aware and uses itself to its own end.

Real

After reading The Sensualist, I began to reanalyze the possibility of writing stories that were based on real experience. Because the environment is real, emotions evoked feel real as well.

The Sensualist doesn’t just take place in the real world, but specifically Baltimore. Torday, by reducing the focal point of his gaze, is able to make subtle and passive generalizations that are universally applicable.

The story tells “[t]he events leading to the beating Dmitri Abramovitch Zilber and his friends would administer to Jeremy Goldstein.” It is told in the first-person narrative of Samuel Gerson who falls in love and tries to stay true to new friends.

Readers can identify with a story set in reality or a realistic setting. They are more easily able to comprehend and empathize if they are not always required to decode the language. There is a given template which we all understand as the thing we have been raised in and guided by. Stories set in the real world obey laws and theories that we are familiar with. The readers can exchange themselves in the roles of the characters even if they don’t understand the characters’ exact motives or actions.

Because realistic story-telling is so enterable, it also has the potential of being less engaging. There is a thin line between the familiar and the rote or boring. It is possible that the flaw of realism lies in its closeness to reality, a reality that has its moments of overwhelming boredom. In human experience there tends to only be a handful of distinct stories, but a million ways to tell them. Which is why I left in all of those qualifiers like “possible” and “potential.” In Torday’s hands the story never feels stale even though it is intentionally modeled after classic literature. It directly points out its homage to The Great Gatsby and The Idiot, which strengthens the prose as part of a lineage.

In the real world with real problems, the only solution or salve must be couched in experiences that reflect that reality. Torday’s story is structured so that you feel every emotion as it piques itself viscerally towards its conclusion.

Epilogue

There are strange parallels between The Great Lover and The Sensualist whose titles might almost be interchangeable. They both deal with unattainable love, alienation, and the rites of tribes. They each use exquisite craft of language to evoke their respective ethos.

Here are passages from each that could almost be describing the same scene but to disparate ends:

I pulled her to me by her upper arms. I put my bare arm across the back of her neck and mashed the top of her head against my face. The move was clumsy, and after I had acted I hoped that at least some semblance of intimacy might come across. She pulled away. The momentary rejection of it made me want to grab her, hold her against me. . . .

I got in my car. In the rearview mirror I saw that Yelizaveta was watching. She had already lit another cigarette, and as I pulled away, the burning red ember glowing between Yelizaveta’s fingers became the only thing clearly visible.

—The Sensualist

I live borne up sustained held and tensed in a gossamer medium of will. Walking up the hump of the street, I have a yen to lean forward arms outstretched. Its slope receives my remains as easily as if they were tipped from a can: and this vile city that barks its hate at me from passing cars, whose buses and streets roar hate at me, whose hysterical citizens recoil from my bland, sallow, wickedly-vacant face. No I don’t belong among you with my nails imbrued in the loam of graves, my breath foetid with my own stale words. Coiled like a turd on my warm mattress, nestled in a chilly reckless draught I bring with me wherever I go. I am a spacious ruin. I am made, and despicable, and I will recount to you your crimes against my sainted person like beads of glowing amber. I have an excellent memory and nothing to gain from forgiveness; I have stored up the venom of blighted days, and trample out your pollution, your stupid trouble, your irreverent work. The music of my soul the world hates.

Ah, Vera!

—The Great Lover

In the end, I couldn’t tell which was more important or if such a distinction could be made. It might have expected that one relationship to the external world – mirroring or symbolizing – would be superior. But I just couldn’t determine the winner. It is like pitting photography against abstract expressionism. I would definitely recommend either / both of these books to see for yourself which reflects your own worldview.

Creating Negative Space, Showing Us the Ways We Fail, the Ways We Lose Our Humanity

I’ve known Caleb Ross for a few years and his writing’s always visceral — both grotesque and erudite — and As a Machine & Parts is no different.

A man, inexplicably, begins to transform, and his transformation is almost Kafka-esque. But, more than his transformation into a machine — certainly the most obvious part of the novel — is Caleb’s focus, which is not about becoming a machine, but what it means to be human.

This novella is about relationships, how they’re formed, and the ways they can fall apart, and the ways we change. This, I think, is what all great literature does, and I know it’s the question at the center of my own writing: what does it mean to be human?

It’s a quick read and it kept me up while I raced through its pages, even sending him a Facebook message when I finished, sometime in the middle of the night, which, I suppose, is just when I tend to be wandering the Internet the most. But his novel really hit me, not just that night, but for the rest of the week, and even now, three months later. It still sticks in me as I battle with the questions that haunt me, trying to sort out what it means to be human, and how, perhaps, one day I’ll be one too.

To be human, all my life grappling with that desire. And it’s stories like this that make it somehow clearer, by creating negative space, showing us the ways we fail, the ways we lose our humanity, the ways we long to even just cling to that which makes us human, that we learn how to be.

Human.

And even while our narrator loses his humanity, so too does the text lose its humanness. The page itself transforms, the structure moving from a standard storytelling model to schematics and diagrams, an instruction manual designed to show us what we’re reading. Something I’ve always loved about Caleb’s writing is how visual and gripping his images are, and, here, he’s married his language to concrete visuals, pushing his storytelling past what I thought it could be.

This novella about heartache and love and identity and humanity is also just completely fun. It never gets bogged down in its own peculiarity or tragedy, simply accepting the transformation as a matter of course, allowing for laughs even while the story reaches deep into your bowels.