#883 Bride- Julia Elliott

#883 Bride- Julia Elliott

This story is the first Elliott story that I read outside of her The Wilds collection. As always she is inventive, original and utterly unpredictable. Always with a touch of goth, this takes place in an abbey during the great plague. Wilda is a young nun trying desperately to stay chaste and Godly. Using extreme self-flagellation, she takes pleasure in punishing herself, believing this form of worship will lead to transformation to the holy.

                                           

“She chastises the filthy maggot of her carnality until she feels fire crackling up her backbone. Her head explodes with light. Her soul rejoices like a bird flitting from a dark hut, out into summer air.”

The plague has hit hard, and as the abbey loses nun after nun, fear leads to a breakdown of daily hours and responsibilities. Wilda and another nun develop a loving relationship, sharing a last meal before Wilda’s final transformation is set.

“Wilda has the strange feeling that everyone in the world is dead. That she and Aoife are completely alone in an enchanted castle. That they are just on the verge of some miraculous transformation.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#882 Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgaiting- Karen Russell

#882 Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgaiting- Karen Russell

This is a pretty hilarious satire of sports and extreme fandom. You think tailgating at a warm weather football game is being a hard-core fan? Imagine being at the south pole for the “Food-Chain Games.” Only the hardiest of the hardy can make it here.

                                        

Like the title suggests, this is a suggested list of rules for how to survive competitive tailgaiting in the harshest climates. It’s not that there might be fatalities, its that if there are, make sure you bury them in the proper container…nobody likes a litterbug!

“Be prepared to see a black-nosed victim of frostbite; a boatload of probable cannibals, suspiciously fat and sheepish in their snug parkas; a scurvy-riddled tailgater in a lifeboat, vestless and begging oranges.”

Rating: 8-9-9-8 Total= 34

#881 Lorry Raja- Madhuri Vijay

#881 Lorry Raja- Madhuri Vijay

Working in the mines is a family affair. Everyone has a job, no matter how young. Guna’s older brother, Siju is lucky that he gets to drive a Lorry owned by the mines. Guna wants to drive a Lorry, too. Everyone else wants him to go back to school. He is a special boy, but they can’t afford to send him.

Back at the mines, he has a crush on his brother’s sometime girlfriend. She represents hope and the world outside the mines. But like everyone else in their world she, like hope, is spoiled. She will have to do things to survive like all the rest of them. The only thing they can count on is inevitability.

“There didn’t seem to be a reason for any of it, a logic that I could see. There was repetition and routine and the inevitability of accident."

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#879 Antonya Nelson- Chapter Two

#879 Antonya Nelson- Chapter Two

Hil is in AA, we see her tell a story at a meeting. The story is about her crazy neighbor that likes to get drunk and strut around the neighborhood naked trying to get herself arrested. Telling stories about other people is probably a deflection about not wanting to tell her own story. But as we find out, she actually is telling her own story.

I’ve never read anything by Nelson before. I liked this. I don’t know if this is her normal tone or if this was just for this story. The dark, heavy sarcasm of Hil is an obvious coping mechanism for such a far gone alcoholic. It’s funny right up until you see that it really shouldn’t be.

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

This is an atmosphere memoir type story about San Francisco in the summer of 1967. It has all the drugs and hippie flair you would expect from such a story:

“The air was thick with the smell of marijuana, patchouli oil, jasmine incense and Eucalyptus trees. Black guys were playing congos and flutes; white guys were playing harmonicas and guitars. It was as crowded as Coney Island on the Fourth of July. Hippie Hill was like this every day of the week.”

Although fun for what it is, Mueller clumsily tries to show exactly how cool the scene is while also trying to show her disdain for it, and thus how much cooler she is than the whole thing. She name-drops all the regulars like Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Carmichael. Like the others from this collection, I see the value of her writing, clearly an edgy and important voice for her time, but one that loses its importance this far removed from the scene.

Rating: 6-7-7-5 Total= 25

#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

This opens up in New York during a protest on Wall Street. The writer does a great job painting a picture of the intensity and emotions of a real-life street protest. Being at more than my fair share of NYC protests, I immediately recalled all the sounds and smells of such an event.

                     

“The protestors stood their ground, shouting their demands. Some of them shouted because their lack of voice had been building in them, some because their patience had finally run out, some simply because they found that the sound from their throats converted fear into courage.”

Our protagonist was beaten within inches of her life and woken up inside a hospital after three days, only to find she was arrested and facing three years in jail. In the story’s reality, the seventh version of the Patriot ACT she was:

“…charged with 680 counts of seditious conspiracy to overthrow legitimate business interests.”

Without her consent or input, the court appointed lawyer took a plea deal and she is sent to prison and a life of prison-sponsored slave labor. There is a lot in this that is outright hilarious, like calling the prison: Sunny Day Prison, or the punishment program Corrective Retail Operation Confinement (CROC). The latter is a program where those that protest against capitalism are required to work retail jobs to rehabilitate their wayward minds.

Like I said there is a lot of hilarity in this, but then there is a lot of outright terror in them as well. As much satire that is in here, there is an equal amount of truth. These programs and laws, and punishments aren’t all that far off from what happens now in our criminal justice system. Protecting commerce over human rights is nothing new of course. When the world equates capitalism with democracy, being against harmful commerce becomes treason.

Notable Passage: “As long as you could find a way to laugh at the madness, they couldn’t reach you. And if they couldn’t reach you, then they couldn’t beat you.”

Rating: 7-8-8-8 Total= 31

#876 Train- Alice Munro

#876 Train- Alice Munro

Wow, seems like ages when we last read an Alice Munro Story. She is always a joy to come back to, one of the legends of the short story genre. It helps keep in perspective the few hundred other others read for this blog. This story settles in to Munro’s slow fluidity right away.

                       

Jackson is a man coming home from the war (WWII?) and finding himself a little lost. Instead of returning to his life, he jumps off the train, literally, and decides to start new. When he comes across a lonely woman living in near squalor next to a Mennonite community, he decides to stick around. For many years they live as non-intimate life partners, co-habbitating for mutual benefit.

“He had emerged as just one of those loners who may have got themselves in too deep some way or another but have not been guilty of breaking any laws.”

It was the perfect situation. He could live a bare-bones life, un-stressful and unashamed and never have to come into contact with his past mistakes and hurt. He didn’t expect to become old their, but life moves on.

“It made him realize how he must have aged and changed over the years, and how the person who had jumped off the train, that skinny nerve-racked soldier, would not be recognizable in the man he was now.”

When the woman became ill, he brought her to a hospital and left to, once again, run from responsibility and attachment. This is not a “new start” story, it’s about escapism and denial.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#874 The Ring of Kerry- Dennis McFadden

#874 The Ring of Kerry- Dennis McFadden

Lafferty was working a long con of a seemingly shy and gullible woman named Eena. She was running from her violent ex-boyfriend was now in prison, or so she said. He knew the girl had known the whereabouts of her grandmother’s old ring. Her family finally convinced her to allow him to dig up her grave to get it. But what about his wife? He had to shed himself of his old entanglements.

“Betrayal was not his currency, but there were degrees of betrayal, and accommodations could often be reached, given the right rationale.”

While digging up the grave he learned that there was a decoy ring, and we find out both sides are playing each other. When a third party gets into the act, things get messy. Don’t they always?

Notable Passage: “He was accustomed to cheap rooms, some of the happiest moments of his life had been squandered in cheap rooms, and he could only hope this would prove to be another.”

Rating: 7-6-6-7 Total= 26

#873 The Crawl- China Mieville

#873 The Crawl- China Mieville

This is a written breakdown of a two-minute clip of a zombie attack film. Not much to it, as far as analysis goes. Pretty fun.

“Close up, a dead man’s face. Camera pulls back. He is one of many zombies in a city square. They crawl toward the camera. They do not crawl on their knees but on their toes and their knuckles or fingertips or the palms of their hands. They move as odds with their own bodies, like humans raised by spiders.”

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total=27

#872 Ragnarok! The Day the Gods Die- Randall Kenan

#872 Ragnarok! The Day the Gods Die- Randall Kenan

The Reverend Barden has been living in sin. His wife has not given him all he desires, so he has fallen into the arms of another woman. He is ashamed of this bow to temptation, but he is more ashamed of getting caught. His lover is now dying. He has lost his wife, his lover and the respect of his son.

“Who shall hide me now? I have no place to go. I am the living dead denied the grave.”

What does a shamed preacher hang onto. That’s right hope, it’s the only thing left.

“But without hope? He’s like those dried bones full of wind and sound, cut off from his parts. He is not alive but just exists. There is no life without hope. It is hope and only hope which gives his existence meaning.”

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#871 Why Aardvark Never Landed on the Moon- Chuck Palahniuk

#871 Why Aardvark Never Landed on the Moon- Chuck Palahniuk

Rabbit, Rooster and Aardvark were the fifth-grade nerds. They were undersized and over-brained and because that made them stand out, they were ostracized and bullied.

“…came from clean homes and parents who expressed love and respect for them. It goes without saying that they were beaten by bullies almost weekly.”

This aggression would not stand. They were at their wits end, so being geniuses, they came up with a genius solution. They would start failing and drop back a few grades. Then, they would be bigger than their piers and could once again be as smart as they wanted without fear of retribution. In a fun reference to one of Palahniuk’s most popular books, they called it “Flunk Klub.” And as you might have guessed: “The first rule of Flunk Klub, is you don’t talk about Flunk Klub.”

“Watching television seems to help, but it took brainpower to be so dumb.” They were so intent on their own dumbining, that they started sniffing glue to seal the deal. Their success at hand, their plan caused unintended consequences and instead of graduating to the next grade they just graduated to harder drugs.

This is one of a few stories in this collection that use animals as human characters. It reminds me of the Far Side cartoon by Gary Larsen.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#870 Moving On- Diane Cook

#870 Moving On- Diane Cook

This is kind of a Stepford Wives look at widowhood. If you die here before a certain qualifying age you are sent to camps for re-learning and re-assignment to another spouse-- if you are lucky. We see a woman go through this process. She is not really taking well to it, but then again she is not trying to escape like some of the others.

“We are woman with very little to do and no certain future. Aside from the daily work of bettering ourselves, we are mostly left alone.”

                                                         

More than the Stepford wife thing, is a 1984 Orwellian vibe. The re-training of this woman and the way she just can’t move on is very much like the protagonist in Orwell’s novel not quite taking to newspeak and all the rules. There are rules for everything, just follow the manual and change will happen.

“Maybe I’ve changed. The manual says that in order to move forward we must change. But this change feels more like a collapse. And that is not how the manual says it will feel.”

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30