short stories
A Collapse of
Horses by Brian
Evenson. Coffee House
Press, $16.95
Embrace and
deepen the enveloping
darkness of winter
with this fine
collection of short
horror stories. Brian
Evenson has an eye
for subtle unease of
the sort that follows
upon waking from
a nightmare, or that
accompanies the
relating of gruesome
occurrences. However, he doesn’t fixate so much on
graphic specifics as leave you in the dark with a strange
taste in your mouth. Like the eroticism of classic cinema,
where suggestion overrides the pornographic, these
stories are made eerie by what is omitted more than by
what is revealed.
In one story a man reminisces about a brutal childhood
game he played with a classmate that leaves permanent
scars. In another, a series of murders take place in the
oxygen-starved quarters of a mining operation that
is slowly filling up with dust, adversely affecting the
inhabitants that may or may not be on another planet.
Claustrophobic and disorientating scenes abound, and
so does a blood and the theme of wandering, pursued
and lost, through the wilderness. The stories vary in
length and style, making for an easy ride through a dark
landscape. They are well crafted and stylistically pared
down, while remaining literary. — Paul Quillen
Ninety-Nine
Stories of
God by Joy
nonfiction
Shrill: Notes
from a Loud
Woman by Lindy
Williams. Tin House
Books, $19.95.
Joy Williams has
written a beguiling
and damn-near
uncategorizable
book about our
queasy, querulous
search for God in
the most unlikely
places and in
ways that are
not immediately
apparent, even
to ourselves. In
flashes of fiction
that range from a single sentence (one story, entitled
“Sartre to Camus,” simply reads: “You should have
changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were
afraid to change.”) to a couple pages in length, Williams
folds the parabolic concision of biblical mysticism into
a secular freefall that chimes with hidden implications
— as when God shows up to ask a lab engineer why the
water tastes so bad, and the engineer says he thought
all that stuff about the Lord’s “living water” was “just
a metaphor.” In Williams’ stories, faith is complicated,
atheism is undermined and one begins to wonder if we
haven’t gotten the whole God-thing terribly wrong from
the get-go. And yet we slouch on, ever seeking meaning
and reason, as Williams’ stories so wonderfully reveal.
Ranging over time and place, and dropping in historical
figures as diverse as Kafka and Ted Kaczynski, each story
in this collection shoots like a flare over the abyss of our
existential dilemma, flashing the briefest light on the
depths below and above. — Rick Levin
West. Hachette Books,
$29.95.
Seattleite Lindy West
is the feminist du jour,
and I’m glad she’s here.
Former writer for The
Stranger, West is not only
a “loud” woman but a
whip-smart, hilarious and
incredibly resilient human,
which has made her a
primo target for internet
and real-life trolls alike in
the age of alt-right white
nationalism. (Just listen to her “Ask Not For Whom The
Bell Trolls; It Trolls for Thee” segment on This American
Life and, after wiping away tears, be relieved that no one can
take down this badass bitch).
Not only that, but West is an independent thinker who
doesn’t just preach to the choir but takes shots at them, just
as ready to put on blast her former boss Dan Savage for fat-
shaming and the comedy world for rape jokes as she is the
conservative right’s more traditional bigotry.
That being said, I was disappointed with how this book
opened. It felt slapdash and somewhat forced, like trying to
be funny on a deadline, in the same vein as the half-baked,
loosely organized memoirs of female comedians that are de
rigueur these days — books that read like a collection of
emails copy-pasted and bound merely to cash in (I’m looking
at you Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham).
Thankfully, that mush dissolves quickly, as soon as West
becomes focused on meatier targets — her wit, logic and
compassion dismantling patriarchy like it’s her job, which it
kind of is. — Alex V. Cipolle
COTTAGE THEATRE
Great
Holiday
Gift
Buy a 2017 SEASON TICKET and SAVE up to 30%!
February 3 – 19, 2017
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700 Village Drive, Cottage Grove
541-942-8001
www.cottagetheatre.org
eugeneweekly.com • December 8, 2016
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