Trauma Becomes Tender in Paul Yoon's The Mountain

In Paul Yoon’s second story collection The Mountain, people in France, Russia, the Hudson Valley and beyond cope in the aftermath of World War Two. I opened the book expecting the violence and horror of war, but instead found tender accounts of people humbly piecing their lives together. Yoon’s characters tread gingerly in the aftermath of war, nursing the wounds inflicted upon their environment and their bodies. The power of Yoon’s stories lies in what’s not said. By entering scenes after the climax of battle, Yoon bypasses brutality to arrive at the quietly wrenching. His stories made me ache, like scar tissue after the injury has not quite healed.

The Mountain smacks of Tim O’Brien’s classic The Things They Carried, a collection published in 1990 that explores the grim banality of the lives of soldiers who suffer from PTSD after serving in the Viet Nam war. In the wake of trauma, both O’Brien’s and Yoon’s characters experience a muted, dulled version of the world. In turn, the climaxes these authors construct are so subtle you almost miss them. In O’Brien’s “Speaking of Courage,” for example, protagonist Norman Bowker drives in circles around a pond in his hometown after returning from war, replaying his friend’s death on the battlefield. After eleven cycles around the pond he ultimately gets out of his car and walks into the water. Nothing has been resolved, and Norman is still haunted by his memories, but he has done something. He has stepped out of his cyclical thoughts and activity and, in a way, is baptized. In Yoon’s story “A Willow and the Moon,” a woman returns to the Hudson Valley after working to save patients in a bombed out hospital in England. She goes to the now abandoned sanatorium in which her mother, a nurse, worked and eventually overdosed on morphine. She meanders through the empty hallways, finding trinkets she’s hidden under floorboards decades ago and reflecting on the brutality she witnessed throughout the war. Like Norman, she was forced to watch her mother slip away. Like Norman, she has returned home in search of closure. The story ends with her sitting in a rocking chair in front of the sanatorium, watching the sun go down while palming the items she’s found. These are not tales of complete healing or resolution. O’Brien’s and Yoon’s characters remain broken, but they are able to find small tokens of comfort. For those who have survived trauma, the mere act of collecting oneself and moving forward is a victory.

O’Brien’s collection was instrumental in portraying war as banal. He shed the archetypal trappings of war as triumphant, and the idea of men emerging from war as heroes. Yoon carries on this tradition and takes it a step further. While O’Brien fixates on the objects his characters carry, Yoon writes about a different kind of baggage. Instead of focusing on physical objects such as ammunition and dog-eared photos of girlfriends, Yoon emphasizes how people carry their own bodies through the world after having experienced the trauma of war. For Yoon’s characters, bodies are very much things to be carried. Individuals continue to fight internal battles after the war is over.

In Vladivostok Station, for example, Mischa carries his physical disability, a congenital limp that inhibits his movement. As Mischa walks through his town of Primorski Krai, he stops to look at an island in the distance on which his grandfather, a Korean refugee, worked in a labor camp for six years. Mischa remembers touching his grandfather’s hands and spine, which was contorted from years of labor, and recalls wonders if his own “misshapen bones” are inherited from his grandfather. For Yoon, trauma does not die. It takes up residence in the body, and is then passed down.

But Yoon’s characters persist. Mishca finds a job where his boss allows him to work at his own pace repairing trains. He falls asleep on a train and ends up near the ocean, where his grandfather and other men in the labor camps were taken to bathe. He walks around an adjacent town, which is vibrant and bustling. He stops to call his father to tell him, simply, that he is by the ocean. Mischa has carried this ancestral weight back to its origins. Things do not change for Mischa by the end of the story, but there is a shift. It is possible to carry sorrow while relishing the victory of survival.

Yoon has a knack for condensing a life, with all its pain and grief, into bite size fragments that make the reader double take. His prose is simultaneously cool and distant, while also pinpointing intimate and striking moments. In the title story The Mountain, the protagonist Faye moves from South Korea to Lianyungang for a job in a factory. Although she is only 26, she has endured a great deal:

She watched her father die. She left. She worked in a motel. She picked apples. She lived in barns that had been converted into dorms. She lived for over a decade in a country where she was never sure of the language. She was robbed, beaten, had her shirt torn off, and six times she was pinned to the ground while she frantically searched for her knife.

Here a life has been paired down to a paragraph, with strife and the mundane mixed together. The fact that Faye picked apples takes up as much space as being robbed and beaten. One is not given more emotional weight than another. This is also the nature of war: when violence is everywhere, our ability to gauge the magnitude of events diminishes. Story and sentence structure mimic the moral nihilism of war.

Despite the dissolution of his characters emotional responses, physical markings of trauma still must be carried. When Faye gets punched during a fight at her factory job, her face is bruised. After a few weeks she can’t tell if the pain is dissipating, or if she’s getting used to it. The coin-sized bruise on her cheek never goes away. Again, physical ailments become metaphor for withstanding emotional trauma. Although pain is not felt emotionally, it manifests in the body.

Yoon’s characters experience profound loss that ultimately cannot be reversed or redeemed. The collection’s power, however, is its presentation of people’s raw, banal struggle. The very title of the book infers a trek. A mountain is a towering natural phenomenon that one must labor to conquer. One must force their body upwards. Yoon does not describe the glory of the summit, but the view afforded by the footholds and crags along the way.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

There is no book I have wanted to recommend more than Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. I have always had favorites. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy is one the most crushingly believable dystopias I’ve ever encountered, James S.A. Corey delivers a nuanced and heartbreaking look at oppression and the cycles of history in The Expanse, and no matter how many times I read it, I never made it through John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle without Doctor Burton’s monologues moving me to tears. Yet, despite their beauty and the deep sense of wonder these books inspire, I recommend them selectively by audience. Despite its brevity, few of my friends have completed In Dubious Battle; despite its painful plausibility, Atwood’s work can be straining; despite its fun, The Expanse is not a masterwork at the level of the sentence.

Machado’s work is not like my other favorites because there is no audience to which I am not desperate to give it. After reading the collection’s first story, “The Husband Stitch,” I told my girlfriend she had to read it. After reading the collection’s second story I sent an email to my professor telling him that she displayed the concept of maneuverability that we’d discussed in class perfectly. After a friend posted on Facebook asking if anyone had recommendations for books by women, particularly that dealt with mental illness, the collection’s penultimate story jumped to mind.

There was very little in this collection that I did not fall in love with. The stories are beautiful, horrifying, and filled with a cutting observational eye. Machado’s characters are so fully rendered, so empathetically engaged, so painfully confused, that they feel more real than the constructs of any writer I’ve yet read.

Machado breaks every rule of a creative writing workshop. Some of her stories are lists, one dictates impossible instructions for how it should be read out loud, one is a summary of twelve seasons of Law and Order SVU. They display the deepest tenant of writing, not to show instead of tell, not to write what you know, but that if you can break a reader’s heart with every sentence, you can do whatever you want. Machado’s prose is so good that even in the SVU recap, which is long, I hung on the edge of every episode summary, wondering what strange and seemingly random place the next one would take me. Even when the stories in this collection feel at their most dissonant, an underlying logic drives them forward. In this Machado is able to achieve an atmosphere of horror, without ever having to throw a bucket of blood onto the wall.

This atmosphere is perhaps the book’s most interesting aspect, and I think the one that makes the most powerful and unifying statement. In one of the collection’s stories, the protagonist is clearly at the center of a horror cult. Strange boils appear across her body, the mutilated body of a rabbit appears on her doorstep, the name of one her companions remains elusive no matter how many times she interacts with the woman, teeth come up in detail again and again in a way that made me sure someone’s mouth was going to be removed by the end of the story. Still, despite the cloying, ominous environment that Machado establishes, the story’s conclusion was nothing like what I expected.

Horror in Machado’s work doesn’t come in the form of a disgruntled ancestor, or a monster on the hunt, or a dispassionate alien abductor. Instead it comes in the lingering look of a suspicious friend, the insistence on the part of a husband that his wife have no secrets, the realization that one’s doppelgänger is out in the world, living a more perfect version of one’s own life. Horror is something to be lived with, worked through, either accepted or confronted. Machado is able to levy the every day cruelties that we heap upon one another and give them the narrative weight that turns them into menacing signs of what awaits on the next page.

The trouble then is that Machado doesn’t even need to imbed a monster within the stories’ conclusions. The signs she uses are self-referential. The horror is the act of living. In her stories, Machado reveals that to be alive and conversant, especially for a woman in our society, is to live already in a sort of horror story, one in which the people around you are suspicious of your motives, your feelings, your dreams. To be a woman in the world of these stories is to feel something looming even when everyone around you asserts that everything is fine, that your fear is unfounded. In this way Machado’s work feels truer than anything I’ve ever read, she’s able to pull something deep, spiritual and wondrous out of the banality of the every day. As heartbreaking as Her Body and Other Parties is, it is equally important. Each time the stories in the collection refuse to flinch away from the uncomfortable truths they encounter, they demand that the reader, too, look into that horror, no matter how small, and acknowledge it. The compassion this book demands is extraordinary, and it’s exactly what the world needs.

If there must be a drawback to Machado’s work then it is this: It pains me that there is not yet a vast library of Machado’s work for me to seek out, there is no long list of books for me to track down. I, and hopefully you, will have to wait, counting the days until this extraordinary writer gives us another glimpse into her mind.

Delta Flats: Stories in the Key of Blues and Hope by Dixon Hearne

I must first confess that I’m probably part of that book reading majority who doesn’t normally pick up a collection of short stories for my summer beach reading. I find myself leaning more toward the depth and breadth of a novel or a memoir and the other-worldliness that sort of immersion in a longer book can provide when one is seeking escape. But when I first encountered Dixon Hearne’s Delta Flats: Stories in the Key of Blues and Hope (Walrus Publishing), I was immediately intrigued, not only by the allusion to one of Stevie Wonder’s greatest records, but by the Southern geography the title also alluded to, a geography with which I am quite familiar, and quite honestly, one with which I am deeply in love.

When I was in graduate school, I was also in love with the short stories of Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor, and opening up Dixon Hearne’s collection was a welcome reminder of what I admired so much in those wonderful Southern tales. Take the opening story, “Somewhere Deep Inside,” for example, in which two young boys learn a hard lesson about the potential dishonesty of grown-ups and the protagonist’s subsequent decision to not let that reality make him a bitter man: “From someplace deep inside, some deep vein of wisdom, he knows that if he threw that first rock [in response to the antagonist of the story], he would never stop.”

This story is followed by other, equally engaging, coming-of-age tales, all organized under a section header of the same name. The next two sections, “Resolutions” and “Turning Points” offer up their own stories featuring troubled characters who are all simply trying to find their way in a fallen world. But Hearne provides them all with glimpses of hope, a welcome reprieve from today’s mostly nihilistic and too-cleverly experimental short fiction (perhaps the reason why folks have mostly turned away from this once-engaging form in the first place). But Hearne promises to bring us all back into the fold with these traditionally-told Southern stories of “blues and hope.”

The final section, aptly titled “The Blues,” contains what are arguably this book’s strongest stories. We are introduced to Cheveldra, for example, the spunky narrator of “Don’t Try Me,” a first person narrative in which the narrator tells us that “I ain’t lookin’ for no trouble ‘tween now and eighteen. And if you get me into any, I’ll cut you, too.” One can’t help but think of Huck Finn here and the poetry that is inherent in colloquial speech like this, its cadences and familiar rhythms. And like Twain, Hearne is able to capture that magic of language effortlessly in these tales.

The concluding story, “Angels of Mercy,” is perhaps my favorite. It tells the story of Lazarus, who dreams of leaving the cotton fields in northern Mississippi to attend college with his girl, Marva Lee, whom he doesn’t know is pregnant with his child. Marva Lee doesn’t tell him because “fieldwork doesn’t set aside time for having babies.” But when near-tragedy and then real tragedy occur, Lazarus, like his namesake, “rises straight up in the night,” suggesting that there’s indeed hope that can be found in despair, a single beam of light in an otherwise dark cave. This is why readers come to good fiction, to see that light—and Hearne does not disappoint. His beam shines through each page.

As variegated and as beautiful as a Southern flower garden, Dixon Hearne’s Delta Flats: Stories in the Key of Blues and Hope hits notes that range from tragic to comic to hopeful, all with a consistency in theme and tone that makes this collection as satisfying and engaging as any novel you’ll find on the shelf this summer.

In fact, the collection—much like the great music album to which its title alludes—has an overall musicality about it that makes readers feel as though they are in a smoky juke joint, dancing with abandon to the expertly hammered-out riffs on the worn ivories of a well-tuned piano. So pack this book in your beach bag this summer and get lost in its contents as the sand covers your toes and the waves crash offshore, salty and green. You won’t soon be sorry you did.

It Begins with a Very Simple Incident: A Review of David S. Atkinson's Not Quite So Stories

One of the most common questions in the world of fiction is, “Which form is superior: the novel or the short story?” (That is, if one extreme must be taken over the other. The novella is usually a suitable compromise.) While it’s impossible to pick one over the other with complete objectivity, there is one important factor to consider: the latter typically allows storytellers to unleash their most unconventional concepts with maximum brevity and pacing, ensuring that these peculiarities leave an impression but conclude before they become laborious or unremarkable. Case in point: Not Quite So Stories, the newest collection by David S. Atkinson (whose previous two books, Bones Buried in the Dirt and The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, were copiously acclaimed within the indie publishing scene). Comprised of roughly two dozen quirky vignettes, the book proffers an abundance of colorful slice-of-life situations and philosophical ponderings. Although there are a few stumbles along the way, the bulk of the sequence is highly engaging and memorable, making it a very worthwhile read.

Aside from alluding to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, the title Not Quite So Storiesprepares readers for what’s inside: a chain of eccentricities. Atkinson describes it as follows:

The traditional explanation for myth . . .  is an attempt by humans to explain and demystify the world. That’s crap. We may be able to come to terms with small pieces, but existence as a whole is beyond our grasp. Life is absurd, ultimately beyond our comprehension. The best we can do is to proceed on with our lives in the face of that. The stories in this collection proceed from this idea, examining how the different characters manage (and/or fail) to do this.

The majority of the tales included here capture this outlook, with the best examination being “An Endless Series of Meaningless Miracles.” It begins with a very simple incident: one day, “aging [and] pudgy” William P. Forsmythe (who feels a bit like an elderly version of Alvy Singer from Woody Allen’s brilliant Annie Hall) gets into his bathtub for his daily soak and notices that the water level sinks instead of rises. Relentlessly perplexed by how “the tub water had acted contrary to universal laws [of displacement],” he sets out to experience a few more acts of God in a single day and discover a new purpose in life. Despite the pacing sometimes getting bogged down by clarifications as the narrative unfolds (which, to be honest, is a reoccurring issue throughout the collection), the text is nonetheless consistently intriguing and inventive, with a plethora of subtle details that make it feel very realistic. After all, “it did not occur to Warren that the miracle was utterly insignificant, however inexplicable it was. Warren’s life was too insignificant as it was; he craved significance,” and the way Atkinson uses his character’s trajectory to comment on humanity’s need for self-actualization (as well as how easily we ascribe to fantastical beliefs to assuage our sense of desperation and loneliness) is understated yet masterful. It’s definitely a highlight of Not Quite So Stories.

Another metaphysical gem is “The Bricklayer’s Ambiguous Morality,” which concerns an inexplicable accident involving two friends, a brick, and causality. While its surreal events may suggest mere superficial entertainment at first, there’s definitely an underlying commentary on how misguided gun enthusiasm can conflate with misplaced senses of patriotism and masculinity. Atkinson demonstrates skill in capturing the conversations and reactions of conventional adolescent males, and the way he puts a spin on the familiar condition of two kids goofing around until something horrible happens is clever and refreshing. In other words, the catalyst for the tragedy may be purposefully silly, but its implications are strikingly relevant to modern America.

Among the peak creative concoctions in Not Quite So Stories is “60% Rayon and 40% Evil,” a fascinating and novel take on the killer doll cliché. Told from the perspective of a “five-inch stuffed bear” who “fully acknowledge[s] that [he has] a desire for murder,” the story is remarkable because of how the barbaric and remorseless actions of its protagonist are juxtaposed with his intellectual rationalizations. Rather than act as a soulless, bloodthirsty creature from hell (as is usual), Mr. Rictus (as his owner, Tristan, names him) is a product of his own backstory; Tristan pretends that the bear is a homicidal maniac, and, as Mr. Rictus suggests:

However, strangely enough, and according to no mechanism that I at all comprehended, it all became true. In fits and spurts, I found myself becoming aware . . . . After all, it was a game, a theatrical trick, which Tristan had developed. The intent would have been spoiled if it had to be suddenly acknowledged as fact. One of the core features of Tristan’s fiction was that I killed when no one, particularly him, was looking, so that is exactly what I did.

From there, the two develop a relationship akin to the one explored in the Twilight Zoneepisode “Caesar and Me.” The way the piece ends isn’t entirely surprisingly, yet there’s no doubt that its final line—“Colloquially put, you people blow my mind. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I kill so many of you”—is chilling.

Filling its hyperbolic central conflict with practical insinuations, “Domestic Ties” feels a bit like a lost Vonnegut effort. It centers on Charlotte, an archetypal 1950s-esque housewife (her husband is even named Ward) who’s preparing her home for the impending arrival of a prisoner. You see, a jury notice:

notified that the state would be requisitioning the use of her home for the purpose of providing shelter to a convict. The prisons were impossibly overcrowded, the letter informed. Unable to determine any other immediate solution, the state had no choice but to place prisoners in private residences.

Once he arrives (and is confined to a small space in her kitchen), the two engage in various instances of uncomfortable cultural shock, as Charlotte is dutifully respectful yet cautious because the prisoner is both incredibly meek and inherently threatening. All in all, it’s a very engaging and tastefully written tale, with a conclusion that, while not overly dramatic or substantial, makes readers question the nature of Man.

Although most of the book is wonderfully captivating and idiosyncratic, there are a few missteps along the way. The most glaring issue (aside from the aforementioned repetitiveness) is that some of these selections fail to warrant their length. In other words, either the premises themselves aren’t appealing enough or not enough happens within them. Works like “G-Men,” “Cents of Wonder Rhymes with Orange,” and “The Elusive Qualities of Advanced Office Equipment” are certainly written well, but they aren’t especially compelling; instead, they just kind of happen without leaving much to reflect on or remember. The biggest offender of all is “A Brief Account of the Great Toilet Paper War of 2012,” a lengthy exploration of how a simple marital squabble over pride escalates into ridiculous territory. The issue at hand is certainly relatable, and even a bit humorous, but the joke wears out its welcome far too soon, resulting in a tedious slog to the end. Empirical resonance notwithstanding, even people who’ve been in the same situation before will want to move on ASAP.

Not Quite So Stories succeeds far more often than it fails, and honestly, isn’t that the real test of a short story collection? None of the pieces are without merit, and the bulk of them provide resourceful plots, three-dimensional characters, and best of all, enthralling writing on a technical level. Atkinson has a gift for fleshing out strange narrative shells with dense minutiae, articulate wording, and weighty meanings. He certainly has a distinctive perspective on life, as well as an equally original way to deliver it; anyone looking to be simultaneously entertained and enlightened should read Not Quite So Stories.

Stepping Outside the Genres: A Review of Melissa Goodrich's Daughters of Monsters

I’m a fan of literary fiction that dips into the strange. As much as character development can be interesting, characters arguing in coffee shops get dry after a while. Similarly, ghost can be entertaining, but weird occurrences by themselves don’t always provide enough to really chew on. However, literary fiction that isn’t confined to our precise everyday world can take advantage of the best of both while avoiding the respective drawbacks, being both entertaining and mentally stimulating. That’s why I jumped at Daughters of Monsters by Melissa Goodrich, hoping to find enjoyment as well as something to think about.

For these aspects alone, Daughters of Monsters delivers. By way of example, “Lucky” centers on a young child fleeing with his family from a mysterious and immediately deadly toxic gas that is quickly sweeping over the country. The apocalyptic elements of the story were inventive and captivating, but the realistic behaviors of the characters give the story a great amount of depth. The behavior of the children is particularly interesting. The adults are panicking, trying to figure out how to save themselves. The children know what is going on, but they still react in the situation as kids. Deadly gas nearby; they are still playing:

Elsa goes sailing into the next room and jumps knees first into a beanbag sack and Eric and I surround her with the other beanbags, mashing them over her head and making her punch at us through them. Her voice is small underneath, and I kick her beanbag several times, and I like the games I can win.

Breathe! I dare her. I dare you to take a big breath in!

Then later when we’re done being jerks, the three of us lie on our bellies and wonder how long we have to live in our neighborhood together.  The gas is already at the edge of the Carsons’ property, three blocks down, and they up and left, the doors of their house wide open and definitely haunted.  Their laundry gets up in the night and walks around the place, turns on faucets, locks and unlocks windows, punches holes in the screen door, rattles the chain link of the old dog fence.

This contrast between the situation and how the children behave, which is likely exactly how children would behave in such a situation, both adds tension as well as makes the story more than a simple apocalypse evasion story.

That kind of stepping outside the genres, as well as it’s done here, is interesting enough on its own. Quite a few of the stories are interesting on a language level even beyond that, though. Perhaps it’s Goodrich’s poetic side creeping in, but there’s an ethereal feeling to many of the lines that makes the rhythm and word choice at least as intriguing as whatever is going on, as in this section from the titular story:

Your mother throws her breasts over her back when she’s cooking so they won’t bother her. She’s boiling corn, she’s shucking it over the stovetop and she’s half-naked. Her hair’s in a towel. It’s hissing. Your boyfriend sneaks up behind her and takes a wallop of a suckle. Ew Henry, you tell him. Your mother turns around and says, Normally I would kill you but since you sucked my milk…merely whaps him with a broom. But she’s still thinking of killing you. You can see it in her eyes, the bugling way she watches you.

Your mother is a mystery. You don’t know how it is she lays eggs and makes milk. You don’t know how it is you look okay, your sister looks lovely, and the new baby your mother is making will be stunning, will be fire, will make hearts snap like celery. Your mother is wildly pregnant. Your mother never nursed you. Your mother packs you a basket with cheap wine and cold pancakes, hands you an ax, sends you outside, and you know your luck is beige.

I found the stories in Daughters of Monsters to be wild and wonderful, plenty to dazzle while still having plenty to think about. There’s a great deal of poetry to the language of the stories as well, making them as intriguing on a microcosm sentence level as they are on a macrocosm plot level. Indeed, this book is interesting on a number of levels. I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

So Much Depends Upon A Title: A Review of Kathy Flann's Get A Grip

So much depends upon a title. Titles can do a lot of different work for a book, but a truly useful one is invaluable. I found the title of Kathy Flann’s new short story collection Get a Grip particularly significant. It’s possible that I’m going off on my own a bit, but I think the math adds up regardless.

Playing devil’s advocate against myself briefly, “Get a Grip” is the title of one of the stories in the collection. Many collections take their title from one of the stories and there’s no more to it. It’s a tradition. However, all of the stories in Get a Grip seem to involve characters getting some kind of grip on some aspect of their lives.

The elderly mother in “Neuropathy” struggles to get a variety of different grips, both literal and metaphorical. She (phrased as a second person “You” in the story) struggles with metaphorical grips, coming to terms with the death of her husband and increasing independence of her son, as well as a literal grip relating to a crippling arm injury she received in a car accident. In fact, she desperately needs to get a grip on living life in general:

Ever since Wayne died, you crave a calling, a flourishing endeavor, like the ones church friends have—Monique gathers restaurant breath mints for women’s shelters, Pat takes old people to The Golden Corral on meatloaf night, and Ken fills out tax returns for the needy. You have tried some things that fizzled, like a used medical equipment bazaar and a clothing drive for big & tall homeless men.

But then God showed you. A junkie you’d given a dollar staggered off the harbor wall. Dropped. Disappeared under the brackish film. His matted hair drifted on the surface like seaweed. You watched, frozen. It seemed like a long time before that soldier in fatigues brushed past and sprang from the edge. He lugged the incoherent, babbling man, shoved him onto the retaining wall. The soldier, freckled baby-face all red, climbed out and hurried away, trailing water. Didn’t even give his name. This was it. Could anyone be more inspiring, more filled with the holy spirit, than a warrior, someone who tamed death?

Similarly, in “Show of Force” Franz tries to get a grip on his son and wife, hoping that they haven’t drifted so far away from him as to be unreachable:

“I’m the champion of the whole country. I’ve got an ATV and ten grand and, as of next year, a learner’s permit.” He leaned forward, making sharp, angry gestures with his hands. “What happens is I go to Korea for the World Cyber Games. Mom’s talking home schooling! She says we’re moving to Vegas!” He laughed and put his hand up for a high five. “I’m going to be the Tony Hawk of Firestorm3.”

The 1980’s Tony Hawk reference, he knew, had been for his benefit. And some distant part of him, in a windy backwater of his brain, knew the high five was a monumental gesture from Rory. But he was too stunned to return it. Korea? Vegas? Home schooling? Why hadn’t Babette mentioned any of this? He touched his forehead, cold from the air conditioner.

Alexander is trying to get a grasp on the fact that his driven career isn’t the personal connection he really needs in “Little Big Show.” Ned grips his life failures relating to his intense feelings for his ex-wife and love for his current wife in “Homecoming.” “Leaving Reno” involves Fiona trying to get a handle on various complex family relationships. All of the stories seem to involve getting a grip in one way or another, grips that the characters desperately need to have. Some get them to one level of success or another, but some do not. Or, perhaps the grips are more complicated than can be evaluated with a simple get/not get analysis.

Personally, I found this to be particularly compelling. Whatever people want to consider universal, trying to get a handle on the significant forces in our lives has to be on that list. Some of us do better jobs than others in looking like we know what we’re doing, but (unless you all are way better than me) we spend most of our lives just trying to keep up, keep our heads above water as the tremendous flow of life’s complexities blast at us. I must spend most of my time trying to get a grip. How could that sort of struggle fail to engage me? My empathy is flaring as I read, each and every time.

These are some intense stories. The different ‘grips’ that these wildly different characters are trying to get are unique, but share the same level of urgency. I can’t imagine reading Get a Grip and not getting pulled in by that, feeling it with the characters. I don’t know if Flann intended to indicate that commonality when selecting the title, but it works for me. The stories all certainly do.

Colin Winnette's Haints Stay Is A Solid, Layered Work of Genre-defying Beauty

““Left to their own devices, people will live out every pos­sible variation of a human life.” ”

— from Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay

Every possible variation. The unexpectedness of Colin Winnette’s fiction is nothing less than thrilling; so much so that I fear writing this review will steal this thrill from you. Haints Stay is a western; this is the first surprise I must apologize for ruining. And as westerns go, there’s quite a lot of shooting and choking and . . . well . . . gnawing, but this will come as no surprise to you if you’ve read Winnette’s prize-winning Coyote and the two novellas collected in Fondly. Exploring the instinct to kill has always been there in Winnette’s stories. Haints Stay begins with Sugar and Brooke, two carnivorous killers wandering towards civilization, but I see these two characters as a sort of parental unit to the main story—which belongs, in my opinion, to the character of Bird, a naked boy dropped out of nowhere into the care of killers.

Haints Stay is a solid, layered work of genre-defying beauty—albeit a bit of a gory one at times; there is that. The overall work is circular like an absurdist play, returning to the same towns, the same camps, the same crime scenes; but also the same characters and their similar pursuits: killing, avenging, slaughtering. There is the exception of Mary, Bird’s fake wife, who hates killing and hates spiders, which is one of the funniest parts of this book by the way. As always in Winnette’s fiction, “horridness and dread” are tempered with razor-sharp wit and purpose.

We’re let in on this purpose by the character of Brooke. As he’s wandering through the desert, he muses that there has been a lot of middle in the tales of his killing but not much beginning or end. And that’s exactly how the tales wind through Haints Stay, edges “worn and indistinguishable”. This doesn’t stop him, though, from expecting things to end in total devastation; and more often than not, in this narrative, they do. True to this purpose, it is actually Bird’s story that has no beginning and no end but lots of middle.

Bird—as his name suggests—is a grotesque programmed to kill, but also to seek safety and food. His character, along with all of Winnette’s creations, is original and meticulously drawn, mostly through dialogue. Winnette’s dialogue uses repetition and stark, simple phrasing to reduce the characters’ motivations to instinctual impulses: “I want to kill it.” “Are we safe?” These phrases, and others like them, are guiding refrains in this story.

The most frequent refrain is Bird’s line that he’s going to be ready for anything that comes at him. That’s what his known life—his time with Sugar and Brooke and his not-so-pleasant time in the cave (which I’ll let you discover yourself)—has taught him: to be ready for anything that comes at him. “‘Lots of things are going to come at you,’ said Mary. ‘It is only the world saying hello.'” But Bird, who’s been crippled by the world, doesn’t really see it this way. The world sometimes—often really—wants to hurt you. And most of what comes at you is not what it seems.

In fact, the characters in Haints Stay are often not what or who they seem: complete strangers who pass as husband and wife and who later live more like brother and sister, children who aren’t really their parents’ children. Relationships come and go and seem to mean something for the moment but then morph, become meaningless after the next violent act. As important as these false relationships are to this narrative, an emotionless lack of self-awareness is even more central. The best example of this is Bird, who simply appears with no knowledge of who he is or where he came from, but there’s also Mary, another child with no past; there’s Sugar, who doesn’t even know his own gender. These are simple-minded creatures occupied with the satisfaction of their most basic needs.

Like food, water, and safety. The bands of marauders, wagon trains and ranch families spend most of their narratives worrying about where their next meal will come from, whether it’s safe to eat or drink. But there is also music; there is Martha, Bird’s fake mother and Brooke’s fake wife. Her piano playing serves as a placeholder for the sublime: for the feminine, for the civilizing of the lost and violent masculine—masculinized?—soul.

Most of the characters in this story are lost souls—as the title of the book suggests—in between towns, in the wilderness, wandering. Migrating? Like migratory birds? Wild animals? Herds? Creatures who are most dangerous when they happen upon oases of civilization? I think I could remove all these question marks, but I’m still trying not to ruin the surprises in this brilliant work of art.

And speaking of art, there’s a touch of surrealism in this story. I want to leave you with the conceit of a seemingly pointless, freestanding spiral staircase with an eagle sculpture at its base—a bird; the association is unavoidable. It’s in the middle of the town where Bird finds work as a killer. Does it lead to the higher calling that Martha pities the birds for not having? Or is it merely another metaphor for a life leading nowhere? A path of no certain origin and no apparent destination. But lots of middle.