Tag Archives: Short Stories

Review | The Redheaded Stepchild, Kelly I. Hitchcock

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Kelly Hitchcock’s The Redheaded Stepchild is an impressive collection of short stories that moves back and forth in time to chronicle the strained relationship between Cady and her stepmother Katrina. It’s difficult to categorize Stepchild as either a novel or a short story collection — while each story stands alone, all the stories combine to form a cohesive narrative thread. I love the dual meaning in the book’s title — Cady is certainly a redhead and a stepchild, but the title also clearly refers to the colloquial use of the phrase “redheaded stepchild,” meaning someone treated worse than both biological children and other stepchildren.

This is certainly the case for Cady. We are treated in the first story to Cady at twenty, home from college and dropping by Katrina’s hair salon. When Cady admits her father hasn’t confided in her about his problems, Katrina reacts with disdain, declaring that Cady should “learn to communicate better with him.” Considering that Katrina herself hadn’t spoken to Cady’s father in a while, Cady understandably gets her hackles up: “I was still his oldest child. […] To [Katrina] my father was nothing more than a worn-out lover.” Unfortunately, Cady is too meek to stand up to Katrina, and instead ends up flustered and intimidated.

This dynamic pretty much characterizes their decade-long relationship, as Hitchcock chronicles it. Hitchcock works well with dialogue, juxtaposing Cady’s awkward, hesitant phrases with Katrina’s biting jibes. We see Cady’s emotional outbursts beside Katrina’s coldness. This is especially evident in “Pageant,” where Cady has her heart set on singing an original composition for her final high school pageant, and Katrina tears her down, saying Cady should instead stick to her usual cover of “Concrete Angel.” I don’t mean to paint Cady as a total victim, because she’s not. The best part of Hitchcock’s stories is that the emotional core is actually rather subdued, so that we sympathize with Cady rather than pity her.

The book as a whole speaks about Cady’s struggle for confidence and independence, for freedom not just from her cold-hearted stepmother, but also from her small-town life. With this in mind, I think Hitchcock’s decision not to tell Cady’s story chronologically works really well. I admit being a bit confused at the beginning — Hitchcock only notes Cady’s age after each story, and I didn’t like not being told how old Cady was up front. That being said, once I got into the rhythm of the book, it became easier to tell, if not how old Cady was exactly, at least at what point in her life we’re seeing her. She does develop as a character, and it’s great to see the subtle shifts in her concerns and her confidence level as she does. The first and the last stories work particularly well in framing Cady’s tale — set just a year apart, we see a marked difference in tone, and we can appreciate this because of all the stories in between.

While much of the focus is on Cady and her stepmother, I also liked reading about Cady’s siblings — by this, I mean her biological ones, since she feels more of an older sister protectiveness towards them. In one of my favourite scenes, Cady comes across an old school paper by her younger sister Teresa from 1st/2nd grade. Filled with spelling errors and an endearing backwards “e”, Teresa writes about how “Cafrin” is her hero. That story ends with Cady telling her father she goes by Catherine from now on, and that just about broke my heart. I love how strong the bond between the sisters is, and I love how Hitchcock used small details (the backwards e, a forgotten apostrophe) to evoke so much.

The Redheaded Stepchild is a touching, sweet book. It’s the small details that get you, and while Hitchcock sometimes has a tendency to go overboard with the emotional scenes, the stories overall do tug on the heartstrings. A very good book.

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Thank you to the author for a finished copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Infernal Republic, Marshall Moore

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Marshall Moore’s short story collection The Infernal Republic is darkly comic, at times downright disturbing, yet in some ways also strangely endearing. Moore’s stories feature characters who, for some reason or other, are alienated from their community, and therefore voice desires that we may censor ourselves from even contemplating. Yet at the root of even the most twisted desires is usually the almost desperate need to connect. Moore’s stories are intense and, when he resists the urge to throw in a surprise twist at the end and just allows the situation to play itself out, his stories are powerful.

Take for example “The Infinite Monkey Theorem,” which attracted me to this collection in the first place. Yahweh and Lucifer have placed bets on the idea that ten thousand monkeys with typewriters will, given an infinite amount of time, be able to re-create the complete works of Shakespeare. The story’s protagonist is Beëlphazoar, a demon tasked with supervising the monkeys and the team of demon guards. I love the concept — it’s absolutely ludicrous! — and Moore amps up the absurdity throughout. For the few thousand years, Beëlphazoar is so bored by his job that he teaches himself Mandarin, then Cantonese and other Chinese dialects. The demons get so desperate they beg Beëlphazoar to count “Some1” and “saxifrage” as words. “This isn’t Scrabble,” Beëlphazoar argues, but even he is soon desperate enough to consider cheating. As his fellow demon Nabob points out, “Boredom is death when you can’t die.”

The story itself kept me laughing throughout, but beneath the humour is the utter despair of all these demons stuck with a thankless, ultimately pointless job for all eternity. If you’re fortunate enough to have never felt that way about your job, watch Office Space. Beyond that is the relationship between Yahweh and Lucifer. Beëlphazoar describes the rift between Yahweh and Lucifer as a “vicious divorce,” and I was struck at the depth of emotion suggested by that term — one deity the spurned party, longing to rekindle the relationship, and the other unwilling to take him back. So when one party looks “crestfallen” at the outcome of the bet and Beëlphazoar suddenly understands what was at stake, I just love all the emotion seething just beneath the lines.

Much darker and angrier than “Infinite Monkey” is “Town of Thorns,” possibly my favourite in the collection. The story is almost painful to read — Michael was the victim of a hate crime and deals with the experience by getting tattoos, which alienates his partner Wade. “The heartbreaks, like the gods, are in the details,” Wade thinks. Michael has changed so much of his physical appearance that the only thing that remains unchanged are his sexual organs. “Why are you looking at my dick like that?” Michael asks, and Wade thinks but is unable to say aloud, “Because I miss the guy it’s attached to.” Just as Michael is having difficulty dealing with the violence to which he’d been subjected (which the cops claim is a matter of bad luck rather than gay-bashing), so is Wade unable to break through the barriers Michael has put up. Michael’s hate, fuelled by pain, is almost palpable, as is Wade’s love, both his desire and his inability to help Michael move on from the experience. We want Wade and Michael to re-connect, to be as happy as they were before the crime, yet we also feel Wade’s helplessness, that maybe things have just changed too much or, worse, maybe Wade had never really known Michael at all. I love the push and pull within this story, the pushing away and the clutching on. This is probably Moore’s most serious story in the collection and, for me, the most powerful.

I also liked the story “Flesh, Blood and Some of the Parts,” about a suicidal teen in a world where children were literally indestructible. How can one kill himself if doctors can easily remove one’s arms? It’s a twisted concept, yet also thought-provoking: how far would you go to prevent someone from taking his own life? Another story has a couple of strangers bonding over a man about to jump off a ledge, while still another has the narrator running over the man he loves and wanting to make love to his injured victim. Both stories very much twisted, and the narrator of the latter story actually psychotic. Yet Moore’s writing is compelling, and while I may not sympathize with the characters, I certainly perceive their obsessive need to connect. I also loved “Still Life with Pterodactyls,” about a man who has the power to make people disappear, but is unable to control it. He is doomed to loneliness, and I love how this is downplayed by Moore’s matter-of-fact recitation of disappearances.

Some of Moore’s shorter stories — about a condo literally ejected from its building or a woman who recruits beautiful young women for supernatural beings — just fell flat for me. They felt gimmicky, and I was left at the end wondering, so what? “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” inspired by the Damien Hirst piece of the same name had potential, but also left me with the “so what?” feeling at the end.  “215,” about a house that has become self-aware and whose owners want to convert it to an apartment complex, had an interesting horror-story approach but was a bit heavy-handed with the existentialism.

Infernal Republic is an intense short story collection. Some of the works try a bit too hard to be funny or to have a surprise twist, but many others delve deep into the darkness of human desire. The stories I enjoyed in the collection are disturbing and, more importantly, compelling. The experience of reading this collection is much like the cover image suggests — it’s a wild, unpredictable ride, and like Moore’s characters, you dive deep, looking for something to break your fall.

The Infernal Republic isn’t available on Indigo, but can be purchased on Kindle and Amazon.ca.

Review | The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, Chris Van Allsburg et al

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“The story of Harris Burdick is a story everybody knows,” Lemony Snicket writes in his introduction to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, “though there is hardly anything to be known about him.” Over fifty years ago, a man named Harris Burdick appeared at the office of children’s book publisher Peter Wenders. Burdick brought with him fourteen illustrations with captions and left, promising to return with the full stories the next day. No one ever saw Burdick again.

Truth be told, I wasn’t familiar with the legend of Harris Burdick, and immediately Googled him — surely, there must have been some clue about what happened to him? Turns out, he is a creation from the mind of children’s book author and illustrator Chris van Allsburg (also the genius behind the classic The Polar Express). I was somewhat disappointed at this discovery, but I was also in awe of van Allsburg’s imagination. What a marvellous idea! To learn more about Harris Burdick and see some fantastic stories inspired by him, go to www.whoisharrisburdick.com. There’s also a teacher’s guide at www.mysteriesofharrisburdick.com.

What is real is the amazing rush of imagination Burdick’s captioned illustrations inspire. In his 1984 introduction to the original Mysteries of Harris Burdick, van Allsburg writes, “I told Peter Wenders how difficult it was to look at the drawings and their captions without imagining a story.” Indeed, an idyllic image of children by a lake comes with the intriguing, horrific caption “He threw with all his might, but the third stone came skipping back.” An image of a harp in the woods has the caption “So it’s true, he thought, it’s really true,” which holds the promise of wonder and magic. The seemingly ordinary thriller-type caption “His heart was pounding. He was sure he had seen the doorknob turn” raises all sorts of questions with the accompanying illustration of a room with a door barely two steps high. I would love to take these illustrations to a third grade class and see the kind of stories eight year olds can come up with. I can imagine readers and writers of all ages delighting in the imaginative experience of creating the lost stories of Harris Burdick.

In Chronicles, that task falls to several of the best, most imaginative authors of our time. Included are stories by Stephen King, Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Sherman Alexie, Kate DiCamillo, Cory Doctorow, and the creative genius who began all this in the first place, Chris van Allsburg. Seriously, this line-up alone was enough to make me want this book, even before learning the legend of Harris Burdick.

The book lives up to its promise. Put such talented writers together, provide them such inspiration and let their imaginations fly, and you end up with a wide range of really good stories. I enjoyed reading these stories, and I love how I enjoyed each story for a very different reason. Stories range from sweet to spooky and the subject matter from mundane to extraordinary.

Some stories in the collection did stand out for me, and for very different reasons. Sherman Alexie’s “A Strange Day in July” is one of my favourites. Alexie took the Enid Blyton-esque image of children by a lake and went the Neil Gaiman/Stephen King route, crafting a remarkably chilling tale about a pair of strange (to my mind, almost psychotic) children. As a major bookworm, I really enjoyed Walter Dean Myers’ “Mr. Linden’s Library,” about a book that kept writing itself as you read. It’s more sinister than you would imagine. Jon Scieszka’s “Under the Rug” is an amusing horror story that for some reason reminds me of Roald Dahl, about a grandmother who spouts cliche’d wisdom and a grandchild whose laziness creates a Dust Monster. Scieszka’s ending was unexpected, yet it totally fit, and I love how he poked fun at the grandmother’s bite-sized pieces of advice. Linda Sue Park’s “The Harp” is a traditional fairy tale, but its ending is very touching. I love the scientific angle to Chris van Allsburg’s “Oscar and Alphonse” and the Twilight Zone feel of M.T. Anderson’s “Just Desert.”

Chronicles ends with a blast, literally, with another of my favourites, Stephen King’s “The House of Maple Street.” I love how King weaves unexplained supernatural elements into a story about domestic abuse and child empowerment. The stepfather in this story is a total jerk, I felt for the mother, and I was cheering on the kids the entire time. Though it’s the supernatural elements that resolve the conflict in this story, it’s the true-to-life elements that stuck with me.

Chronicles of Harris Burdick is an absolute treat. It’s a wonderful storybook, and I love reading all the stories these authors came up with. But it’s also a marvellous nudge on the imagination. Van Allsburg is right — it is difficult to see these images, especially with their captions, and not have the imagination spark with all the possibility of storytelling. Personally, I’d be fascinated to see the stories other authors would make from these images, particularly J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins and Arthur Slade. In the meantime, I think Lemony Snicket’s introduction sums up the experience of Harris Burdick perfectly: “As you reread the stories, stare at the images, and ponder the mysteries of Harris Burdick, you will find yourself in a mystery that joins so many authors and readers together in breathless wonder.” Breathless wonder, indeed.