Compelling, confounding and absurd
From Hell to Breakfast Meghan Tifft Unnamed Press
Sometimes a work of art invites us to abandon ourselves to bewilderment, to non-linear narrative, and trust that our emotional responses are all part of the ride. Think of Waiting for Godot: For everything that play lacks — a logical narrative, any sense of closure — it remains endlessly compelling, moving, even distressing. Meghan Tifft’s new novel From Hell to Breakfast works in the same vein, providing a deeply satisfying and mysteriously tear-inducing story to those willing to follow this sometimes confounding journey.
The book starts with an odd scene: Dracula, who has been sleeping upright inside a coffin in his closet and dreaming of sunlight, wakes to find that Lucinda, his girlfriend, is crying. He loves her very much, even though he finds communicating with her difficult. She talks in cliffhangers, never quite reaching her point before getting distracted by some new topic. As she rails on — about her mother, the mail and her certainty that her boyfriend secretly wants to murder her — Dracula finds himself preoccupied by her “raw rustling currents of golden hair,” “the smooth bisque of her skin.”
Dracula is a bit miffed with himself about it all: “How did he take such tasteless and lackadaisical terms here, heading right into apartment living with the first girl he spares, and leaving the night a mere curio outside his window.”
Where are we going? That’s difficult to summarize, but the key elements of the plot include the fact that Lucinda’s brother, Warren, has started creating spray-painted art installations of dead pigeons in an attempt to become a kind of local Banksy; that Dracula works a night shift at UPS and got Warren a job there, too; that when Dracula leaves that job, and Lucinda leaves hers, they can’t afford to pay rent anymore; and then there’s the play. The play, also titled From Hell to Breakfast, is one constant throughout the whole befuddling narrative, as Lucinda goes to and returns from acting classes and then rehearsals, sometimes in costume, always confused and increasingly weak, because she’s stopped eating.
What?
But these plot points aren’t the real source of tension in the book, nor are the disappearances or deaths that occur on the periphery. The engine that propels us forward is a sense of mystery. While the central pair in the novel appears to be just as in the dark about the mechanisms of their lives as the reader, everyone around them seems confidently aware of what’s going on, and they find our collective confusion a nuisance. This gives the book a dreamlike quality, as we stumble around in scenes that alternate between fantastical and achingly, if absurdly, real.
In its opaquest moments, the novel serves ingeniously as a Rorschach test for our own perceptions and concerns, leading us to look for the answers and logic we want and maybe even find them — until the next scene upends our previous analysis.