The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead by Chanelle Benz
My rating: 4/5 cats
3.5 rounded up
i was a little suspicious of this book at first, since one of the first things i read about it online after being intrigued by that title was not focusing on the stories themselves, but on how gorgeous the author is. and while that is completely accurate:
it’s always a red flag when the selling point is the comeliness of the author and not, you know, the work. there are plenty of attractive authors, but The Secret History isn’t one of my favorite books because donna tartt is so lovely.
and at first, i wasn’t feeling this collection. it’s a debut, and it definitely feels like one – the stories are all over the place in terms of theme, tone, and genre, which seems like a new author just finding her voice and style, trying on different hats along the way. it’s mostly well-written, but the experimental dissonance took some getting used to. it’s also a little ballsy – short story debuts are already tricky enough to find an audience for, and a collection like this one risks alienating an audience who is trying to determine if an author’s style works for them, and not finding a consistent enough voice to know that for certain can be frustrating. not all of the stories are successful, but i ended up liking the collection enough overall to round it up to a four, and i’d be interested in seeing what she does next; if she settles into a storytelling groove or keeps playing around with styles all scattershot-like.
the stories:
West of the Known
the collection opens with this story, which won the 2014 o. henry award. it’s always smart to open a collection with a crowd-pleaser, but for some reason, this one didn’t do much for me. i’m not doubting the assessment-skills of the o. henry panel – they’ve always made smart choices, but i’ve just read too many things too similar to this story, as my tastes run towards grit lit and modern, frequently transgressive, takes on the western genre, so it’s gonna take more than this to shock me or give me something i haven’t already encountered. the writing is strong, no one’s contesting that, but the story was just ground already-tread by me in my reading history.
Adela, Primarily Known as The Black Voyage, Later Reprinted as Red Casket of the Heart by Anon. 1829
again – debut author, so i had no expectations in place for style or subject matter, but after the grittydark western of the first story had established a baseline, i thought i knew what to expect. but no. this one is completely different in every way; a fake found text, studded with footnotes, in which a unified chorus of meddling child-narrators matchmake for a woman they admire, even though she is received less-enthusiastically by the rest of the village. it’s full of gothic romance conventions, but also strays into metafiction, broad comedy, with feminist filters. even though it references byron AND Wuthering Heights, i was not a fan of this one.
Accidental
this one was much more to my liking – a straightforward story in which an emotionally damaged woman faces grief, regret, disappointing family members, and strange bedfellows on a path to healing. it also has this passage, which i particularly liked:
Near evening, I hitch a ride to a motel along the highway. But some people are not as decent as the freckled guy. Some people are encouraged by my size, since as a small woman, even at thirty-seven, from far away I could look like a child. And so some people force you to reveal as you pretend to root in your bag for a tissue with your left hand, the little pistol that you are now holding comfortably in your right. These red-thick ballcappers need to sense that, as my mother said when she gave me the gun, that you wanna use it, that you’ve been waiting to use it on any motherfucker dumb enough to be dumb. These people, you see, can only understand humanity at gunpoint. As I walk away from him down the highway, the driver calls me a cuntfaced bitch out his window, detailing my impending bodily harm, but I think he now knows that I too have fears, hopes, dreams.
The Diplomat’s Daughter
this one was intriguing, but i’m not sure i understood it fully. i mean, i understand what’s going on, but i feel like i’m missing some of the cartilage tying the various story-bits together as it goes back and forth in time. i get the small-picture episodes, but i’m somehow not getting that encapsulating BANG that makes a story pop.
The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas
this was the first story that made me stop and say “ohhhhh,” because it is great. unwieldy title aside, this is – yes – another “found text” but it is excellent. it’s an epistolary slave narrative that is both moving and unexpected. this story is a star.
James III
this is another straightforward story in a contemporary setting, about a sensitive young boy unwillingly caught up in the cycle of violence, torn between family loyalty and the ideals of his quaker-run school.
Snake Doctors
this is a ‘family-secrets’ narrative composed of MORE found documents split between the 1930’s POVs of brother-and-sister pair robert and izabel sibley, compiled by robert’s grandson, who had been told they were both long-dead, and is now learning the sordid, but sympathetic, truth of their lives and exploits. the found document gimmick is a little thin in this one – it’s meant to be “a manuscript,” but i’m unclear on why it would have been written in the first place, and it just reads like a traditional short story, so i’m not sure why the device was trotted out again for this one, but apart from that, it’s pretty engaging.
The Mourners
this is the story from which the collection’s title is taken, and i liked nearly all of it. i wasn’t wild about the ending, for reasons both logical and literary, but there was some excellent grit-lit/horrible family stuff before it.
Recognition
this one had a really great, suspenseful build, and my suspicions were incorrect, which is always nice for a reader. and it’s pretty damn brutal. also nice for a reader. a reader like me, anyway.
That We May All Be One Sheepfolde, or, O Saeculum Corruptissimum
this was my least favorite. to be fair, medieval writing has never been my thing, and i thought this was a bit indulgent. the story itself wasn’t half-bad, but the language, while authentic to the period, is just a drag. all those prithees and jerkins and “Wherefore dost thou inquirest with so stern a brow?” not my cuppa.
so, while it’s a somewhat uneven collection, there’s enough here that i liked to make me look forward to the rest of her career with interest.
