Other People Are Necessary, But They Are Also Hell To Put Up With: A Review of Darrin Doyle's The Dark Will End the Dark

When I graduated, I couldn’t wait to climb onto a greyhound bus and put all that college stuff behind me. I debarked in a small Midwestern town and was roomed with a guy who was three weeks away from sentencing for holding up a convenience store. I went to the local music club by myself to see the bands and to be around the people that I was sure I was meant to belong to. I ate the same limp, greasy pizza the club bought for the bands, and sometimes I even sat at the table with them as we ate it. I had arrived at the most authentic version of myself. But of course, there were problems: employment was one of them. I worked as a dishwasher in college, when no shame accrued to that position. But after college, all I could find to do for money was to wash more dishes. And my emotional life sucked: I’d early on fallen hard for a girl whose bipolar disorder kept pushing me into the friend zone. A year after graduation, I was living the post-collegiate life I thought I wanted. Did I learn anything? It’s hard to know; those five years marked me, for sure, but I can’t say they improved me.

The characters in Darrin Doyle’s stories mostly inhabit the same emotional terrain, order olive patties from the same drive-thru burger joints, and sometimes even drink in the same bar, the Green Top, where I went with some friends to celebrate getting back a clean HIV test report. The Green Top is a funny place—a bar a couple doors down from the club and pizza place, it kept a coterie of townies comfortably numb but probably would’ve never survived if slumming alternative kids didn’t keep turning up there. But along the way, a rudimentary kind of role reversal happened: I remember looking around and thinking, this is what my life is like now, and it wasn’t the kind of feeling you left behind when you walked out the door and back onto the street. If you belonged at the Green Top, it means you brought it with you when you left.

In one of the longer stories in this collection, “Happy Turkey Day,” two of Doyle’s characters face a similar moment of recognition at the Green Top. Jonathan Turkey, high school basketball star and scion to a dwindling fortune and his classmate and lower rung dweller Claude Peuptic (pronounced, unfortunately, Poopdick) are drawn to the Green Top to make a relational swap: Turkey will give some of his prestige and ease in the world to Poopdick in exchange for some recognition that Turkey, too, has struggled, some.

This need for other people to know who you are, to be there beside you, animates almost all the stories in this collection. So, in “The Hiccup King,” the protagonist concedes, “He longed for a comrade. He wanted a companion for his unremarkable misery.” And in the story “Barney Hester,” this need for a companion takes a predictably sad formulation: “three is a good number. In a group of three, you’re always next to someone.”

In Doyle’s funny and disturbing stories, these anxious, all-important connections, hard to admit even when you’re drunk and loquacious, have a way of going wrong. Other people are necessary, but they are also hell to put up with. And so in “Happy Turkey Day,” this moment of incipient drunken bliss and bonhomie leads inevitably to shots fired and unlikely heroic sacrifice, as Poopdick steps in front of a shotgun blast meant for Jonathan. It’s not the death that should concern us, Doyle suggests, but the muck Peuptic crawled through on his way there, the way it didn’t redeem him.

It’s this same muck, this muddy bog beaten down by history and brainless struggle borne of apathy and momentum where most of Doyle’s characters live. So in another long story here, “Ha-Ha Shirt,” three man-children circle the drain of their long friendship, sexually abusing one another and emotionally abusing everyone they else, carrying with them a cloud of toxic emotional fallout. These same guys, they rented a house across the street from where I lived: the lawn was stripped of most of its green; glass forties rested in crook of a tree, and a sex doll held herself up on the front railing. They’d get loud, sometimes, but if you called the police, they didn’t come because guys like Shirt, Ha-Ha, and the narrator take care of themselves, if you just leave them to it. These are not beautiful losers, just losers.

The Dark Will End the Dark alternates between these longer, mostly realistic if cringe-comic stories and short, punctuated bursts of irreality, stories usually titled after body parts, like “Foot,” “Penis,” and “Mouth.” So, in “Foot,” a mommy, trying to find the limit of what it would take to satiate her infant, cuts off her own foot as a chew toy. When the baby isn’t satisfied, the daddy retaliates, taking off baby’s foot, which the mommy discovers isn’t quite what she wanted, either. In another body-horrifying flash, “Face,” a normcore father looks in the mirror to discover his features have slipped out of place, so his eye is embedded in his cheek, his nose and mouth have reversed positions. At first, he wonders if his family will recognize him, but then decides, this is the new normal, and proceeds to get on with it. In the longer stories, Doyle is patient enough to let the characters to do themselves in. The shorter stories, though, are characterized by swifter comeuppances. Characters don’t just have names that are more like job titles or org chart designations, but the stories themselves end so quickly, it’s like Doyle has pulled the trigger so we won’t need to see where it goes next. I like that decisiveness, the cruel shape that Doyle forces onto these stories. If only I’d had Doyle scripting my life. I might have reached a crisis point and moved out of that Midwestern purgatory sooner and saved myself a few years.

Trigger Warnings: A Review of Alana Noel Voth's Dog Men

How real do we want our stories to be? These days, readers go in with their eyes open. We know how the writer plays the reader, how we by turn relax our guard, suspend our disbelief, pull back, check and recheck. We know we’re being taken for a ride — fuck it, if we bought a book, we’ve paid to be taken for a ride. But how far can we trust the author?

Reading Dog Men felt like walking on a melting ice sheet, everything slippery underfoot, liable to crack apart. Voth plays with images and snatches of song, with cultural scraps and genre tropes, like she’s making a jaggy, unpredictable landscape — cityscape, in fact — these stories are nothing if not man-made. Violence erupts instead of happy endings. References are scattered through the trailer parks and litter-blown streets — Georges Bataille, David Bowie, Pulp Fiction.

Plots occasionally break apart, or break down to reveal the tender longing of the heart. Just when I thought I’d fixed the writer’s motivations, they’d shift. Voth seems aware of every potential resonance within her work. Stories like “Reservoir Bitch,” with a protagonist that bleeds (literally), sweats and struggles, and an ending subtly and strongly underplayed, really got under my skin. By the end of the book, I was ready to believe in the fallen saint of Black Tina — a whore who “carries a knife in her bag.”

At times, these stories are hard to read. Voth is not afraid to make us confront the dark, weeping underbelly of the worlds we live in. These stories linger in your guts — I caught echoes of them every time I watched the news, read about rape or persecution, the powerful subjugating the vulnerable.

Willing to write gritty, hard-edged reality and swirl it with supernatural flair, Voth’s writing is supple and relentless. She doesn’t let the reader off the hook easily. She’ll show you the submerged, unarticulated desires of the collective unconscious — however trashy and shallow — and force you to confront your complicity as a reader, and as a human being.

The action here is deep and meaningful — characters make difficult choices, and endure the consequences. Not many writers would have you feel genuine, wrenching pity for the plight of a brain-eating zombie, or the most beautiful man in the world, or a loser who works in a porn shop. But there’s nothing straightforward here — nobody is exempt from the hard pinch of life. “Everyone was a piece of meat in this world.”

The stories are sex-soaked — hustlers, porn shops, trysts that are messy and hot and explicit. People risk everything for sex (“love was holy”) — their reputations, their bodies, their lives. And the sex is not straightforward. This is as about as far from vanilla as I can imagine. Sex with an edge. Failed sex, masochistic sex, salty, painful, difficult and real.

Dog Men disturbed me. Darker than Tarantino, bleaker than fairy tales, Voth’s characters are united in suffering. In here are souls who have slipped through the cracks of contemporary America: people who suffer for who they love, how they look, what they want.

Some of them learn to transcend — flying zombies, a loving hustler, a suicidal beauty. But these are not easy stories. They compel, they demand from the reader. The rewards are: fragments of beauty, scattered through the book; moments of underplayed humour; a faint, warm glow underlying the darkness, that you might recognise as hope of redemption.

The Whole World Is Cry: A Review of Sara Lippmann's Doll Palace

The twenty-three stories in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace, published by Dock Street Press are a lesson in voice. And depth. And characterization. And sentence-making. The writing is so superb I want to recommend this book to teachers of short fiction. But really, it’s about damned good storytelling. It’s a book for readers, first and foremost.

The collection opens with one of my favorite Lippmann stories: “Whipping Post,”originally published in Our Stories. The story is a brief and powerful look back at an incident at a state fair when the narrator states, “I was so young I jingled.” Lippmann’s narrators are smart, observant, sometimes world-weary and never self-pitying. The voice throughout is strong, direct, honest, while at the same time loose, conversational.

One imagines sitting across from the one friend we all have who has been through some shit and has a thing or two to say about it. As in lines like this, from another favorite from the book,“The Best of Us”: “The day we found out there was nothing wrong with me, I cheated on Neill.” Okay, tell me more. Please.

I love the way Sara Lippmann’s characters talk to each other. How she moves them around. I love being privy to all the couple-trouble, teen angst, existential terror, the women and mothers’conversations, the veiled and unveiled threats, and subtle flirtations. These people and their secrets. They’re all so real I feel I know them, even the teen girl who performs as her knife throwing father’s human target. Who writes a story about a girl like that? Well, Sara Lippmann does.

Very often bravado masks a certain vulnerability. A brokenness that’s not asking for your sympathy, only that you pay attention. When the mask finally comes off it’s breathtaking and Lippmann delivers these moments with impeccable timing, as in this moment from the story “The Best of Us”:

“I wasn’t always like this, I want to shout. I once was interesting and alive and somewhat likable and not the least needy, not this pathetic shell, although I’m not sure how true that is. Maybe I’ve always been this way, only everything is forgivable when you’re young, like poor fashion taste. She wraps me up in her flesh and I stay there long enough to feel my heart thrum: change your life, change your life, change your life.”

In the story, “Houseboy,” Lippmann writes the voice of a young former officer in the Israeli Arm who now works as houseboy for a wealthy family in the U.S. It’s a risky choice that pays off. I recommend reading this particular story aloud just to marvel at the music she achieves here:

“I vision Bette. There is something shell shockage about her. . . . Bette have shoulders ripe as Jericho oranges from once upon a time. I do not go there. Where do I go? The whole world is cry. Water flood her cup, spill her wrist, soften the elbow, I drain in tears, but when she close the tap to breathe I pray maybe she have place inside her deep rise and fall of lungs for me.”

There are the sentences themselves, swoon-worthy and sharp:

“Leather sandals hung from cords like cured meat.” (from “Jew”)

“It’s his enlarged prostate, mom says. She slides on her oven mitt, speaks to the roast she’s been basting. Looks like Blade Master’s sprung a leak.” (from “Target Girl”)

“Snow fell from the sky like tiny stars. He was a man.” (from “The Last Resort”)

“There’s something to be said for people who know exactly what they’re doing.” (from “Everyone Has Your Best Interests At Heart”)

“Later, Frank will become my summer lens.” (from “Human Interest”)

“Free-loving goddesses traipse through the grass in a yogic haze, breasts cupped in cabbage leaves, their hair trailing like kite strings and dip into wide, glittery pools. We are in the desert. This is called a mirage.” (from “The Best of Us”)

These are stories filled with talk, conversations, recitations, memories, flirtations (often dangerous ones) and hard-won epiphanies I think what I love best about these stories though is their refusal to dot every i. There are no simple answers and lessons aren’t always learned. A deft writer, Lippmann displays control over her narratives even as she achieves a certain wildness and strangeness that both fascinates and feels entirely true. I love the fearlessness of these stories (see “Target Girl” and “Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart” and “Babydollz” and “Talisman”among others).

An inescapable sense of danger and vulnerability permeates many of the stories of the collection. There is so  much growing up to be done. Lippmann avoids sentimentality. Rather, she tells her stories with such grace, sensitivity, and compassion as to evoke the same response in her readers. These stories, and the characters who inhabit them are unforgettable. My biggest challenge in writing this recommendation was reining myself in. I could go on and on. But as the young woman from the story “Come See For Yourself” observes: “Some things fill you up and you don’t need to say another word about it.”

A Delectably Linguistic Read, for Poetry and Prose Readers Alike

In his famous essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” Gary Lutz writes that the books he fell in love with were the ones “in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude.”

Robert Vaughan’s newest book, Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits, which manages to pack thirty pieces in fifty-five pages, is a beautiful example of the kind of attention to detail that Gary Lutz admires.  Some stories are stronger than others, certainly, but the language jumps out on almost every page. Take, for example, the following sentences from “Lawyers, Guns & Money”:

He bust a button on his blazer. The testimony reeled in his head, churned, too many cracks.

Say that out loud. They’re sentences you can taste, clicking through your lips and teeth and tongue. Throughout the book the language rarely feels heavy-handed, but rather miraculously obvious, as if these words were always meant to go together, pairs and triplets of words working to create a phrase that feels just right, as in “influx of dwellers” and “sucker lists.”

Although he calls them stories, Vaughan’s work reads more like poetry. Perhaps the pieces are somewhere between, a kind of prose poetry that has found room to stretch out and get comfortable without the need for straight narratives. Most of all, Vaughan succeeds in conveying a mood in each vignette, aided by the titles and categorizing system he uses to arrange most of them. For example, the story “Hexagon of Life” is divided into six single paragraphs that are each headed by a number from one to six. “The Three Stooges” is divided into the sub-titles “Shoebox (Larry),” “Steps (Moe),” and Sidebar (Curly).”

The tone as a whole is deeply personal, and whether you imagine yourself, the author or an anonymous narrator within the stories, you are sure to be moved. The characters tend to be unnamed, lending them an everyman feeling, so that the described occurrences feel painfully familiar, as in “Modern Day Symphony”:

The lingering questions came in the form of water, piss, trees, green, trade. Everyone said live for the moment, but have you ever tried to do that? Forget about the past, no such thing. Holidays? None. No religion either, except in some climactic nightmares.

Some stories are definitely weaker or less satisfying, but it is unsurprising that within a collection of so many short pieces some would stand out more than others. On the whole, however, Vaughan’s book is a delectably linguistic read, for poetry and prose readers alike.

To Feel What Only Humans Feel: A Review of Vanessa Blakeslee's Train Shots

As life gets busier and busier, I find myself reading a fair amount of short fiction lately. Story collections offer perfect mini-reads to occupy my mind in airports, doctor’s office waiting rooms, and in between periods during a hockey game. Accordingly, I enjoy short fiction published in Cimarron Review and The Southern Review, as well as story collections by Alice Munro and other storytelling masters.

Most recently, I read an advanced copy of Train Shots, collection of eleven stories by Vanessa Blakeslee, an emerging short story writer whose work has appeared in various literary journals. While not a themed story collection per se, the tales in Train Shotscollectively show how people deal with whatever life throws their way.

Shorter stories in the collection offer readers an opportunity to eavesdrop on young adults working minimum wage jobs or sharing quarters with “quirky” (crazy) spouses or roommates. “Clock In” brilliantly captures the rhythmic patter of a server at a Mexican restaurant training a newbie to use the computer-driven ordering system, replete with snarky digressions about the managers and staff. Same with a married couple bickering in “Ask Jesus.”  In “The Sponge Driver,” a sponge diver tries to persuade his girlfriend to (ironically) try a contraceptive sponge (described as a “miniature inflatable raft”) as an alternative to condoms, with hilarious complications.

Yet another story, “Princess of Pop,” explores a young entertainer’s suicide attempt with insight and—at times–wit. The setting is the hotel where Janis Joplin OD’d and died. A dancer-turned-pop-diva contemplates her sense of self and self-worth (or lack thereof) and decides to off herself by mixing Xanax and Ambien with Fruit Loops and milk. The “Princess of Pop” survives, but her tale evokes Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe and other ordinary-people-turned-celebrity who feel like strangers in their own skin, at odds with attention and acclaim.

Other pieces in the collection probe torment and angst prompted by disquieting events in the lives of  adults at or approaching midlife: An expatriate’s disillusionment with life in Costa Rica after her rescue dogs are stolen (“Welcome, Lost Dogs”). A divorced woman facing life (or death) dealing with an emotionally disturbed teenage son (“Barbecue Rabbit”). A young woman is torn between loyalty to her fiancé and looking out for herself when he is busted for securities fraud as the couple vacations in New Orleans (“Don’t Forget the Beignets”). A cancer survivor keeps his excised lung at home in a bucket as a gimmick to help him quit smoking once and for all (“The Lung”). And last, the stunned emptiness a train engineer feels after his freight train fatally hits a suicidal young woman (“Train Shots”, the title story).

As I read each of their stories, I couldn’t help wonder, What would I do? If indeed literature shows us what it means to be human — to feel what only humans feel — then this story collection is masterfully revealing. Peppered with wry and witty zingers, the dialogue and narrative of each story show humor and irony in even the darkest circumstances. Combined, the stories in Train Shots leave you wanting to read more from this talented emerging author.

Anything Is Possible Here: A Review of Dan Powell's Looking Out of Broken Windows

“Imagining fiction without family is like imagining life without a head. There’s so much organic tension, drama, joy, confusion.” Ben Marcus said this in a recent Salon interview with David Burr Gerrard, and I can’t think of a better way to sum up the themes in Dan Powell’s debut collection of short prose, Looking Out of Broken Windows (shortlisted for the Scott Prize). Confusion. Joy. Drama. And above all, organic tension — friction even, and the moments when friction becomes impact.

Powell builds up to these moments so well that my reaction to each narrative is, without exception, physical. My chest tightens, my heart begins to race. I care about what happens to these characters, and a lot happens to these characters. In fact, Powell’s style finds its roots in a story arc in which surprisingly active, explosive moments urge the narrative along toward a well-conceived climax — a traditional element of good storytelling lacking from much writing today.

This is not to say that Powell’s collection is conventional. It’s anything but. The opening and title story, “Looking Out of Broken Windows,” tells the reader that anything is possible here. It tells the reader this will be a collection that deconstructs metaphor in so many creative ways through magic realism, but it will also be a family of stories that fearlessly goes where most writers have gone before, exploring infidelity, relationships in crisis, children’s complicated relationships to their parents. Loss.

To say merely that Powell “explores” these issues wouldn’t explain exactly what the author is doing with this collection. He’s not exploring so much as inhabiting. A few of these tales are told from a child’s point of view, a few from the vantage point of a male; but many of the 27 stories are told from a female character’s point of view. Powell’s women are dealing with the stress of pregnancy, betrayal or grief — or all of the above—but most often they are simply taken for granted in their roles as wife, mother or sexual partner.

The wife/mother in the story “What Precise Moment,” who wakes up one morning to find she’s become a vending machine to her family, represents this unappreciated woman most concisely in this collection; the wife/mother in “Demand Feeding” is so unappreciated — so pale — that we never even know her name. She’s also a sort of vending machine for Andy, her viciously insatiable newborn, and Chris, her sex-starved husband. All the while, she feels her self vanishing:

Looking at yourself in the mirror, hair in need of a stylist, the maternal uniform of joggers and sick-stained tee hanging off you, it’s like staring at your life disappearing into the distance, the woman you were blinking out at a vanishing point, leaving behind this shambles, this outline.

Bleak, yes, but the women in these stories are astoundingly assertive and self-confident considering their situations; Powell’s men, on the other hand, tend to be weak, ill, dying or already dead.

Take Calvin, the 40-something, overprotected protagonist in “Did You Pack this Bag Yourself?” He never really finds the strength to free himself from his unhealthy relationship with his mother, though he struggles. Powell keeps the central mother/son conflict one breath away from implosion, keeping Calvin distanced from his raw, real emotions until the very end. And even then, we get merely a smile of satisfaction.

In fact, most of the male characters in this collection live lives at a safe distance from their feelings, as in the acclaimed “The Man Who Lived Like a Tree” and “Baggage,” a brilliant tale of magic realism about a man who buys bags to store his facial expressions.

So many of these stories surprise and delight with elements of magic realism, the most endearing of which is when the foetal twins in “Ultrasound II” turn and see their parents for the first time through the ultrasound. In “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Cancer,” the main character’s illness becomes a character with a voice. The death scene in this story is emotionally crushing.

Simply put, these characters and their stories are memorable. Powell’s ingenuity proves that we’ll never be done with the family as motif, that we haven’t yet exhausted the possibilities fiction holds when channeled through a superb mind. By blending solid, well-developed familial dramas with magical realism — as well as the occasional experimental post-modern twist — Powell offers his readers a visceral, sometimes troubling and ultimately satisfying reading experience.

The Night It Happens the Moon Is Murderously Bright

It’s a slim collection of just six stories (two of flash length), but Claudia Smith’s new book, Quarry Light, from Magic Helicopter Press, is dense and deep and brilliantly written. It is a book to read slowly, to let sink in to one’s heart and mind, and to ponder long after reading.

I’ve been a fan of Smith’s work for many years, having workshopped with her in Kim Chinquee’s Hot Pants group and having read her chapbooks, The Sky is a Well and Other Shorts (Rose Metal Press, 2007) and Put Your Head in My Lap (Future Tense Books, 2009).

The stories in Quarry Light display Smith’s lovely prose and use of specific detail as well as her gift for keenly portraying the lives of young girls and women. Particularly in her evocation of childhood, one feels as if these memories and details remain as clear and tangible and compelling to Smith as the present day. This serves the stories and the reader both.

The opening story, “Catgirl,” is one that Smith notes in her acknowledgements as “taking [her] writing into a new direction.” Written for the anthology Lone Star Noir, the story is indeed deeper and darker than anything I’d previously read of hers. Yet, it opens with the sort of winsome image familiar to fans of her stories:

The girls are waiting for the ferry, dangling their legs out the side of the van, popsicle juice dripping down their chins. Four girls: Trina, Tricia, Grace, and Allie.

From there, Smith builds her story, brick by brick, detail by detail, going deeper into the lives of the girls, taking the reader along on this weekend trip to the beach with Tricia and Trina’s divorced mother. The story is juxtaposed with a children’s rhyme/song the girls sing throughout, Miss Mary Mack. As the story takes a darker turn, so do the stanzas of the song.

On display here and in all the stories of this collection is Smith’s masterful storytelling, her ability to build tension, set a tone of foreboding, to draw the reader ever forward, to make the heart beat a little faster. Things grow increasingly off-kilter as Smith introduces a new character here, an ominous detail there, weaving past and present and even the future with subtlety and control.

The reader begins to know the girls are not safe even if they are unaware of any danger and at one point, they laugh and sing:

She cannot cry, cry, cry

That’s why she begs begs begs

She begs to die, die, die.

The story takes its inevitable turn and Smith punctuates it with one perfect sentence:

The night it happens the moon is murderously bright.

The imagery of the last two paragraphs of this story is among the most haunting and devastating I’ve ever read.

Always in Smith’s stories we see how deeply she understands, and uses, the past as an illumination of the present. Stories can sometimes get bogged down in this way but Smith makes both past and present so alive, so compelling, that the shifts in time feel seamless and right.

In the story, “As If Someone Had Polished the Air” an intelligent and imaginative child befriends first a rat, then small girl she discovers living in her closet. Her father is rarely around and her mother is troubled, alcoholic. Smith makes the child’s fear and loneliness palpable:

That night Agatha felt sick. Her mother had been dead drunk; she wouldn’t remember what she’d said or done. Her mother, she now know, was kind of a loon. In the dark, the flowers on her walls were scary. They looked as though they might grow right into the room and strangle the dolls, the furniture, her.

In “Lucy,” the longest story in the collection, a young woman returns from her grandmother’s funeral to find a dog left in her yard, a dog she takes in and cares for. Throughout, the prose is clean, precise, and evocative, always hitting the mark, as here where the woman recalls a chance encounter on a bus trip:

New Mexico in darkness was bare mountains looming outside the bus window like a giant’s bones, giving their conversation a solemnity and proportion she appreciated. She was weepy without being drunk.

“Lucy” is another story where past events, heartaches, and losses impinge on the present. In this way, Smith draws us in to her characters and makes them unforgettable.

There is a gothic feel to Quarry Light, inhabited as it is by ghosts and rats, imperiled and abused children and dysfunctional mothers. Gothic, with a strong, beating heart. Claudia Smith mines the depths of sadness and loss and human frailty with bravery and compassion. These stories will leave their mark.