A COLLECTION OF OTHERWORLDLY TALES
Lori McNulty’s collection of short fiction is a book full of surprises.
As a regular reader of literary magazines, I’d already encountered a few of the stories, but I still found surprises. Making my way through the book left my head sometimes spinning.
Unlike so many contemporary collections of short fiction, these aren’t the novel-like “linked” stories we’ve become so accustomed to, so they don’t need to be read in a specific order to be understood. I might suggest reading them randomly and taking a break before going on to the next, as each of them is rich enough in detail to fill your head with wonder — and sometimes wondering — for quite a while.
Aside from sharply intense writing, one of the only threads connecting them is the word “Mars,” which appears in various guises in just about every piece. After a while I found myself on the alert, watching for the word to show up. In one story, Mars turns out to be the name of a character — another of those surprises McNulty slips in so deftly.
Yet this isn’t to say this is a book meant to trick the reader. It’s simply that the stories go all over the place — even geographically — as the territory they cover ranges from Thailand to Newfoundland, with quite a few stops in between. Even the range of characters is broad — male, female, in-between, teenage, decidedly grown-up, or at least old enough to qualify as grownup.
Characters in the stories bear (and often live up to their) animal names: Aardvark, Badger. On the other hand, there’s an injured squid with a human name, Dan, who leaves cryptic messages by spraying words in ink.
Whatever McNulty’s characters’ names may be, nearly all of them portray people who might be considered “flawed.” But then, that’s part of what makes them so heartbreakingly real, as with the two brothers from a story called Finger-necklace.
“Donny could tell Gus was on a mounting high, had seen him go from glue-headed to God in a matter of hours. His head a red planet, light screaming through his skull. Gus said the meds were like sparks shooting off. Flash fireworks, followed by the inevitable hours of blind panic. Then it was like gravity had given up on him. His head floated in air, thin as the atmosphere on Mars.”
Then, when considering the background of a girl Donny wishes he were brave enough to ask on a date, he offers this contrast between their situations: “Her family was an empire. His was a broken tenement.”
So much revealed in so few words. That terseness, the condensed scene, the quick shift to the next event — all of these are what set McNulty’s writing apart from that of so many others. Dialogue and description seem to fly almost breathlessly across the pages. It’s no wonder her stories have been nominated for the prestigious Journey Prize, the award for best short story by an emerging writer.
But the work shines for more than just the pacing. There’s an undeniably gutsy essence to her writing, in part because she writes about situations not everyone would take on — the goings-on and mutual support among patients at a gender-reassignment clinic, or the aftermath of an organ transplant in which the patient has conversations with the obviously deceased previous owner of the heart. And even when presenting such complex situations, McNulty does so firmly, believably.
Some readers will find her words distasteful, beyond politically incorrect. Others of us can only revel in them, and look forward to wherever she next extends her talent.