On my way back down the street, the dusk was darkening the houses and shrubs from the ground up, like dye climbing a cloth. This was the shaded side of the hill and on a bright day would be ten degrees cooler than the sunny side.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\nBelow me, in a year that sloped steeply into a deep gulch, I heard the pronounced rustle of disturbed underbrush, and I saw that a large shrub was shaking dramatically. I was reminded of an old dream I have from time to time, wherein a German Shepherd tears off an arm of mine. Then I thought of the old tale of some bush that had once shuddered with the spirit of the Lord \u2013 or had it burned?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Slowly, from the shrub\u2019s thick, dark leaves, a bare arm emerged. Then a denim clad leg struggled forth, attached to a foot housed in a white athletic shoe. It was clear by now that a difficult birth was under way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve always been a sucker for origin stories, so I held my breath and waited to see how this one might begin.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
End story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are so many brutal verbs and adverbs in such a small story, set in the backwaters of any town: disturbed, dramatically, tear, shuddered, burned, struggled, birth. From this archetypical story you can see how Scanlan uses the language of the gothic to imply a darkness not far below the surface of the normal. The unknowable lurks only ankle-deep under the ocean of the recognisable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem is, despite patches of very competent writing, it\u2019s mostly atmosphere to no end. Consider the ending of that story above, Ta-Da. <\/em>My attention is sparked only for the fuse box to blow abruptly and for the story to end. Was the man emerging from the bushes taking a shit on his run? Did he get lost and was pushing his way through the thicket back to the street? I am also a sucker for an origin story but am left waiting forever for it to come forth. <\/p>\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s okay to have some stories like this. But to have twenty consecutively is too much ambiguity, too much whiplash flicking from one un-resolution to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As with all short story collections, some of the stories shine brighter than others. One I did very much enjoy was Shh.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nShh<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The story Shh<\/em> probes the arbitrariness of our sympathies towards animals. The narrator is undertaking surgery and, to distract the mind, muses on the integrity of the surgeon\u2019s character. The surgeon behaves as many rich people do, with a self-righteousness that is unchallenged by society. One of his causes is animal welfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nMy surgeon gave considerable sums \u2013 enough, by the sound of it, to support severable sizeable families \u2013 to animal rights groups. His wife was very particular about their leather. She rescued wrecked racehorses \u2013 doomed for glue \u2013 to keep as pets.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
But when a gang of mice infest his garage and threaten to degrade his expensive cars, his morals lapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe exterminator recommended glue traps. I didn\u2019t think it through, my surgeon said. He shook his head sadly. The next morning he found them \u2013 cruelly stuck, alive and crying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What did you do? I said. I was flat on my back below him, gowned and shaved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, he said, I got my bag. I got my scalpel. I thought I could slice them off of there. They\u2019d have clumps of glue on their feet, but they\u2019d be free, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did it work? I said. Did you save them? A nurse fitted a mask on my face. Somone turned on the gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well , no, he said. The first one I tried, I sliced off its foot instead. There was a lot of blood, actually. I was terrible, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I opened my mouth, but only a little squeak came out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shh, said the surgeon. Over my face, his gloved hand hung \u2013 you could even say it twitched. Then, with his fingertips, he pushed the lids of my eyes shut. You\u2019ve seen this before \u2013 some man, overcome with shame, unable, for selfish reasons, to look at what he\u2019s done.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I thought this was a marvellous piece of \u2018flash fiction\u2019. Firstly, the way this story of the mice infestation is recounted is very smart. The surgeon is hovering over someone lying on a hospital bed. As they are about to go under for what must be a serious, daunting procedure, the surgeon polemises not about the terrifying future of the patient but about firstly his wife\u2019s respect for animals and then secondly the mundanities of their conflict with his personal hobbies. In this way, the surgeon\u2019s character is cleverly rendered. He is just a self-centred man who is the boss of the animals in his life \u2013 both the mice in his garage and then humans who come into his practice. There\u2019s little empathy emanating from the surgeon, just a useless shame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there\u2019s the brilliant parallel of the story of the mice and the story of the patient. Both are at the behest of this man, the surgeon. Both do not trust the motives behind his scalpel but they cannot escape it. The helplessness of mice before men is likened to that of patients before their surgeons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shh<\/em> is in the minority though. Only it and a few others had such a strong, self-contained narrative. The rest had segments of poorly fleshed out plot floating around, looking for a home so that they could eventually, one day, grow into something coherent.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Dominant Animal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The collection is not named The Dominant Animal<\/em> on a whim. Every one of these twenty stories somehow speaks to the way humans live with animals. This theme can be hidden, as it was in Ta-Da<\/em>, with the narrator referencing, as a throwaway line, a nightmare they have repeatedly of a German Shepherd attacking them. Or it can be very obvious, as it was with the mice in Shh<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThis sounded interesting from the blurb, and if there were fewer but longer stories, it could have been an engaging premise. With twenty stories though it felt like the thematic consistency was forced, and therefore it lost impact and purpose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Again, I end a review of short stories disappointed. There was good writing, and I wanted to like it, but it would have been better to a read a (more judiciously chosen) subset of these stories here and there literary journals over the year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Quantity did not ensure quality, and I lost patience and enthusiasm. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ll miss that place, and I hope I never see it again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1948,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1930"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2034,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions\/2034"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}