SURREAL SOUTH 2011 is out, with my story “Pig Hole.”
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It will mess with your head.
Pig Hole is a heart-warming tale of caving and violence I wrote specifically for Surreal South. It’s the first thing I’ve attempted that is set in the South, my newly adopted home. All the rest of my work focuses on Michigan, where I grew up.
“Everything comes back at you one day.”
A black man enrolls at Ole Miss in 1962 and sparks riots on the night a man shoots his unfaithful wife in a town not far away. A generation later a local history teacher tries to uncover his father’s roles in these events, all while destroying his own marriage through infidelity. History is context: opinionated and non-logical. Yarbrough’s skill lies in his smoothness. He effortlessly holds this tangled skein up to the light to show the layers. The protagonist fails to see the loopings of time, the repetitions, the sins of the fathers visited, but the author makes them clear.
“She makes it sound like he’s supposed to save her, doubly unfair, since she knows that’s something he can’t resist. In the dark he can’t see the box, and imagines she’s passing him a loaded gun. His hand closes around it, and it’s his again, or no one’s.”
An account of the final shift at a closing Red Lobster during a snow storm sounds as exciting as watching paint dry, but O’Nan finds elegance here. He doesn’t break through the mundane, but uses it, dives deeper until we inhabit it as comfortably as the staff. We are given the everyday in all its lack of glory—a kid barfing, a snowblower that won’t start, the shit of dealing with a self-entitled public—and what emerges is a naturalistic picture of people surviving at great cost. There are no large epiphanies in this work, only the small realizations that change lives.
“Inchmale’s spirit-beast, the narcoleptic stuffed ferret, still frozen in nightmarish dream- waltz amid the game birds, was waiting near Cabinet’s grumbling lift.”
Gibson was science fiction, but now the exact same work is contemporary. We’ve caught up. He sees life as intertwined with media and trends that are captured on the street, bred in boardrooms, then fed to the masses. Technology advances not for ease or health but only for the cool factor, and Gibson knows cool: hotels, cars, tech toys. He is obsessed with music and clothing as modern fetishes by which we declare our tribes. While guilty of mild escapism (no one works a day job, everyone is a genius of sorts), he can also craft sentences of astonishing beauty.
Why are my book reviews only one hundred words long?
Any reasons I’ve missed?
“The basalt walls are pitted with holes from wind erosion or from the bubbling of gases long ago. These holes catch the shadows and look like the eye sockets of the earth.”
Read this book. Benjamin Percy writes with authority about men who camp and hunt. Cue the Hemingway comparisons, which aren’t fair to either of them. I’m jealous of his ability to cut the fences between genre and literary fiction, and even sneak in the paranormal. His muscular plot could be a thriller, but here it is the inevitable outcome of strong characters (including landscape-as-character) in stressful situations. Two quibbles: the tacked-on epilogue feels editor-imposed, and there are perhaps too many changes in point of view. Hearing every voice removes my chance to imagine a part of this world for myself.
This is going to end badly. I can tell.
We’ll get together, sure. We’ll have a few laughs while we tilt at windmills, drink car bombs, dance and pick out drapes, commit a few petty crimes. Eventually the tears and recriminations will flow. Maybe not today, perhaps not for years, but it is as inevitable as a carny getting a Skynyrd tattoo. I’m laying my cards on the table now so you can’t say you weren’t warned.
