Shoebox Train Wreck by John Mantooth
My rating: 4/5 cats
years ago, connor told me about this idea he had for a game show. it would be called: guess what i’m doing to your dog!! and you can pretty much figure out the rules: contestants would be brought onstage, and based on the types of noises their dogs were making behind a curtain, they would have to guess what was being done to their beloved pet.
and that’s how i have always thought of the books that czp publishes: they are usually about the insidious things lurking under the surface of the everyday; the unexpected creepiness attaching itself to your most trusted surroundings.
this book is something of a departure from that theme. there are occasional flashes of the supernatural, but for the most part, these stories focus more on the real and quiet betrayals of the promises of life. the realization that beloved uncles have character flaws, parents cannot always be counted on to protect, love is not forever, life owes you nothing…all the big and horrible truths that pierce our youthful optimism and make us into the failed adults that will go on to disappoint our own children.
plus two stories about what happens when a school bus meets a train at high speeds.
one of the big pithy reveals of this book is that The dead do not haunt the living—the living haunt the dead. i would go one step further to assert that sometimes it’s just the living that haunt the living, and that most of the problems that occur in these stories are entirely caused by human frailty. and that’s bad enough.
The Best Part is one of my favorites. it perfectly describes those hopeless downtrodden characters i always feel in my heart…that restlessness of wanting something better and the frustration of limited resources and zero opportunities that don’t come about as a result of a life of crime…but that puppy-barking yearning that won’t be silenced:
Maybe take art classes. That’s what he’s always loved, seeing something and making it come alive on paper. There are angles and shadows he sees all the time that he frames inside his head and wants to get down on paper just right, but he’s usually with Truck who scoffs at art, or if he’s not with Truck he’s laid up in the bed trying to sleep off one of Truck’s marathon benders he’d been foolish enough to participate in. Seems stupid, really. The one thing that gives him joy, the one thing he loves to do, he mostly just remembers doing a long time ago.
and oh, i feel you…
Like everybody he knows, he wants to get out of this town and start his life all over again. That was the thing he thought about more than anything else when he had been landscaping, mowing or pulling weeds or blowing leaves across somebody’s lawn. He would imagine himself in a new place away from Mom’s ratty old trailer, away from Truck and Chet and the ex-girlfriends that broke his heart, not because he’d loved them, but because he’d loved them young and now he sees them fat and lethargic, toting around toddlers with dirty faces and shit-heavy diapers, left alone by husbands who in one way or another had learned to abandon everything—including the boys they once were—as a matter of principle.
the best story in the collection is the second; The Water Tower, which is just perfect and heartbreaking. with a few of these stories, you can see what’s coming before the characters can, but it doesn’t ruin the journey one bit—it makes it more intense because you want to somehow stop it from happening, but you didn’t write this, did you, hmmmm? Slide and Saving Doll and the above The Best Part are all standouts here. i am definitely still on the czp bandwagon, and would recommend this one to anyone who wants some light supernatural but mostly just bad-enough natural stories of loss and choices and resignation.
go on.
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