NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ BY MORGAN TALTY

Sometimes it’s not strangers who plague us, but rather those we know best. In the twelve linked stories of Morgan Talty’s blistering and bleak debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, curses come from family and friends, in the form of the trauma that’s passed down through generations, and the people to whom we are beholden.

Early in the second story, “In a Jar,” the collection’s protagonist, David, finds a jar of teeth hidden behind the front steps of his new home. David brings the jar to his mother, who shows it to a medicine man, Frick. Frick deduces that the jar is a curse, the significance of which hangs over the rest of the tales. 

At home in the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation, David is shackled with poverty, addiction, and abuse—shared, intergenerational curses all. Likewise, the secondary characters who criss-cross through the collection both grapple with and impose binds of their own: Frick is not only a nearby medicine man, but also David’s mother’s on-again, off-again boyfriend; David’s friend Fellis requires frequent trips to the methadone clinic, with rides from David; and David’s older sister, Paige, arrives back at home one day, unannounced and pregnant.

Nature, too, is often a visceral reflection of the pressures David faces. In “Get Me Some Medicine,” a card game leads to useless violence and a quixotic quest to catch porcupines. In “In a Stray Field of Caterpillars,” Fellis and David drive over a horde of the titular larvae, exploding them with the sound of “popping corn.” The dead insects, described by Talty in his dynamic, impish prose as smelling “of bait, of something chewed up and spit out or even shit out,” sicken the two friends, twisting this symbol of rebirth toward a potent reminder of all that keeps them tethered to the reservation.

That’s not to say that the collection is entirely grim. Talty has a knack for generating hilarious, surreal situations that reinforce the book’s themes of captivity and obligation. In the first story, “Burn,” David returns from a failed quest to buy weed and runs into a panicked Fellis, whose hair has frozen to the ground during a drunken roadside nap. David eventually cuts his friend’s hair with a pocketknife, freeing him from the ice, and wonders whether the braid can be traded for money.

No, he ultimately decides. Instead, Fellis suggests they burn the hair. “Don’t want spirits after us,” he says. Perhaps, in this fiery, wonderful collection, some tethers can be broken.

Tin House

—Review by Eden Shulman

Read “In a Stray Field of Caterpillars” in ArkInt Issue 12!

LIFE AMONG THE TERRANAUTS

LIFE AMONG THE TERRANAUTS BY CAITLIN HORROCKS

Brimming with loneliness, isolation, and hope in impossible places, Caitlin Horrocks’s short story collection Life Among the Terranauts is a masterclass in how fiction may be “sweeter than the truth” and still haunting.     

Bookended by “The Sleep” (a 2011 Best American Short Story) and the collection’s namesake “Life Among the Terranauts,” Horrocks’s stories encapsulate lives trapped in places they must call home while they look out at unattainable possibilities. The people of Bounty, Minnesota sleeping through the depression of winter and the demise of their small town and the “terranauts'' scrabbling to survive in their biodome in the desert remind readers of the all-too-familiar anxieties of being trapped in one location, needing money that has no chance of arriving, and living in a place humanity has built and cannot sustain.

Between these two behemoths lies a personal mixtape of stories for the lonely. People take pleasure in what intimacy is available, and comfort in regret because it reminds them of who they are. Yet, there is no pity, no questions of “if only” or “what if.” Buried within Horrocks’s collection lies “Chance Me, ” a story whose often-forgotten optimism asserts “uncertainty could be a superpower. It could even be a love story, if you looked at it from the right angle.”

All-too-relevant for a world coming out of quarantine and into the Anthropocene, Life Among the Terranauts is essential reading for the twenty-first century.

Little, Brown & Company.

—Review by D.C. Eichelberger

THIS TOWN SLEEPS

THIS TOWN SLEEPS BY DENNIS E. STAPLES

Dennis E. Staples’s debut novel, This Town Sleeps, takes readers on a suspenseful ride that explores the intricacies of life in a small town by way of its hidden stories. Blurring genre categories, the novel shifts between multiple voices belonging to past and present residents of Geshig, Minnesota; and poetic techniques such as repetition and line breaks which texturize these voices throughout the narrative. The residents of this town carry multiplicities like the language used to describe them. For example, “the dead marble eyes” of one character, which “glower like a spinning nickel,” leaves the reader spellbound in suspense.

The novel opens with the main character, Marion Lafournier, having already left Geshig to live and work in a nearby area—an attempt to escape the jaws of small-town life. However, he finds himself returning to the “town with no dreams” for its love, rumors, community, and deep-rooted history—one that stakes its claim on Marion through the spirit world and connects him to his Ojibwe ancestry.

With a keen sense of humor and lightness, mysteries begin to reveal themselves and converse with themes such as friendship and childhood, intergenerational struggle, sexuality, and toxic masculinity. In investigating these ideas, the novel poses a genuine question: what makes a small town “sleep” and not dream? Is it the lack of a true “spirit” and a “bootstrap-strong” pride that fails to acknowledge progress? Through a meticulous weaving of backstories and present-day scenes, Marion and other characters who grew up in Geshig must come to terms with what it means to both resist and appreciate the place that roots them.

This Town Sleeps unfolds like a dream as we travel through time and voice—and discusses the consequences of escaping or never leaving one’s hometown while reminding us that “it’s better to wake up than fall back asleep.”

Counterpoint Press. 

—Review by Shalini Rana

JUSTINE

JUSTINE BY FORSYTH HARMON

Justine, an illustrated novel written and drawn by Forsyth Harmon, is an intimate, little thing meant to be swallowed whole. We meet Ali just as she falls into the cavern that is Justine, the girl behind the counter at the Stop & Shop. Throughout Justine, Ali intensely studies the titular character’s embodied chaos through the lens of longing, and while this is the engine of the book, it is a quiet one, because this isn’t just a story about the sexuality of a teenage girl: it is about all the forces leaning in on her, bending her toward self-destruction.

Though Justine seems to envelop this story, it is Ali who we know intimately, whose supremely adolescent existence burns quietly on the page, while Justine remains something akin to a spiteful phantom, thrashing around and breaking things, but doing little to prove her existence. For Ali, though, the slightest contact with Justine leaves a deep impression, evidenced by a rapidly-developing eating disorder and a newfound penchant for shoplifting.

Forsyth Harmon’s sweet illustrations lend a strangely immediate nostalgia to the experience of reading—as though we’re looking through the scrapbook of a life, simple objects and small moments gleaming with importance. It is fitting, then, how defined this book is by its era, the 90’s serving as just as much a setting as Long Island for these teens.

I’ll forgive Harmon the rude punch that ends the book (no spoilers) for the charm that emanates from its pages and for my satisfaction with the way it is cut off right at the moment where many storytellers would lean in. Harmon is not concerned with punchy plot points, sentimentality, or wise commentary. The result is a book so intimate it feels wrong to read—something deeply honest, and painfully relatable.

Tin House.

—Review by Lucy Shapiro

THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH

THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH BY PRIYANKA CHAMPANERI

Banaras, India, a city on the banks of the Ganges, is a sacred place for Hindus, where the souls of the dead may pass on, released at last from the cycle of reincarnation. It is here that Pramesh Prasad has lived for ten years, an outsider who escaped the family farm for the city, and who serves as manager of Shankarbhavan, a hostel that houses the dying. Pramesh lives a life of focus and routine with his wife, Shobha, and his daughter, Rani, tending to the needs of the families who accompany their ailing loved ones, until the day a body is found in the holy river that looks uncannily like Pramesh. What follows is an astounding mystery in which nothing cooperates as it should—not even the dead.

In his daily duties at the bhavan, Pramesh has always marveled at how the souls around him “would soon slip out of their bodies as easily as he slipped out of one shirt and changed into another.” But in Priyanka Champaneri’s debut novel The City of Good Death, nothing is so easy, and memory proves as persistent as a lingering spirit “determined to be heard,” holding tight to the living until fulfilling its purpose.

This novel could be seen as one cleaved in two, with mysteries unfolding discreetly in the realms of women and of men, and Champaneri deftly balances the weight of expectation and introspection, of skepticism and faith, and what is sought out and what is hidden. As the city stirs with gossip and intrigue, Pramesh and Shobha deal with hauntings of all kinds, their stories weaving around one another to reveal the intersection of love and grief, and perhaps even illuminating some of the mysteries of the Land of the Dead.

Restless Books.

—Review by Lucy Shapiro

THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS

THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS BY DANIELLE EVANS

Danielle Evans takes on both the vagaries of time and the inescapability of history in The Office of Historical Corrections, a thematically-linked collection of a novella and six short stories. The settings and backgrounds of Evans’ tales lean into the more surreal side of the realistic—a not-quite-life-sized replica of the Titanic, an art installation consisting entirely of apologies—while the plots follow happenings that feel all-too everyday. A white girl thoughtlessly dons a Confederate flag bikini and is unwilling to face the consequences. A family deals with the multi-generational fallout of racism and unjust imprisonment. Two Black historians are forced into simultaneous companionship and competition. As the denizens of The Office of Historical Corrections wind their way through a series of repeating images—gift shops, estranged families, cancer-stricken mothers—they are confronted time and again with “the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.”

One of the many stand-out skills of Evans’s writing is the flexibility of her narrative voice, drawing in the reader with close, self-aware first-person speakers as well as ironically detached third-person reports. These engaging narrators, coupled with the finely-balanced juxtaposition of the very serious with the seemingly absurd, make for a mesmerizing collection that it is easy to get lost in. Structurally, the stories in The Office of Historical Corrections have a fascinating tendency to end in the middle of a moment, without coming to a complete or entirely comfortable resolution. Such is the cyclical nature of history, Evans seems to say. No moment is ever truly over.

Riverhead Books.

—Review by Lily Buday

THE CONTRADICTIONS

THE CONTRADICTIONS BY Sophie Yanow

Sophie Yanow’s Eisner-winning graphic novel, The Contradictions, is a revelatory exploration of hitchhiking across Europe, living other people’s journeys, and finding out that anarchism isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Politics, poverty, loneliness, parenting, the law—all are fraught with contradictions.

Yanow does her own black and white illustration providing the thin lines of the world, and the people in it, space to breath and exist. Whether it is finding out that the promised zen does not appear from a road trip or from motorcycle maintenance or from brushing off a badass museum, Sophie, Yanow’s self-protagonist stand-in, learns that living someone else’s story by fitting in will cost more than anticipated.

 All good coming of age stories deal with pushing back against rules and expectations; Yanow’s contradictions show her own self-acceptance. To use a term like autofiction wouldn’t be quite right, but it gets at what Yanow does so earnestly and sincerely—telling a story about learning who you really are and what boundaries are needed to preserve that self, and of course there is the always fun lesson of how to use wikis to find the right French gas stations to hitchhike a ride away from Paris.

The humor in this book shines at its brightest in the myriad of characters which offer to give rides to Sophie and her anarchist vegan friend Zena: Greeks speaking Turkish, a famous Belgian photographer who walked from Amsterdam to Istanbul, and two stoners speaking English in a wonderfully crafted French accent.

 Yanow’s art is breathtakingly understated and masterfully weighted. Yanow, when asked about the difference between comics in France and America, said that in France, all comic artists are trained as fine artists, and Yanow’s emotive, thin lines do more work developing character and theme than most fiction does with entire plotlines. Sophie Yanow is a revelation.

Drawn & Quarterly

—Review by Scot Langland

BRIGHT AND DANGEROUS OBJECTS

BRIGHT AND DANGEROUS OBJECTS BY ANNELIESE MACKINTOSH

In Anneliese Mackintosh’s Bright and Dangerous Objects, commercial deep-sea diver Solvig is one of 100 finalists selected for the Mars Project, an ambitious, private space venture to send a handful of people to settle Mars. This may be the thirty-seven-year-old’s dreams made manifest, but if she is selected, it will likely mean she will have to leave Earth forever, separating herself from her long-term partner, James, and his hopes that the couple will soon raise a child.

Solvig spends long hours in high-pressure saturation for her deep-sea dives, leaving her time between spurts of dangerous work to pick through her mind, where childhood dreams of reaching the stars conflict with the reality of her life on Earth. Through a story which is equal parts meditation and action, Mackintosh engrosses the reader with her tale of a determined character who tries to balance ambition and care in her regular life while facing interplanetary possibilities. When Solvig meets another finalist, a mother who is set for life on Mars where she will likely die away from her many children, Solvig realizes she must confront her own desires, and her final destination. 

For a novel that confronts some of humanity’s largest quests, Mackintosh keeps Solvig firmly grounded in human problems. While none of us may be getting on a ship to Mars this year, it may be soon that we will be asked if a better future exists for us in the stars. Mackintosh skillfully explores the anxieties and possibilities of motherhood, showing us the complex possibilities that science may soon present to us.

Tin House.

—Review by Sidney Thomas