meghan rose allen

(I haven’t even managed to read my O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 and already 2015 has come out. I’m never going to catch up.)

I like short stories. They’re my potato chips or candy, snacking for my brain (even the serious short stories that should be more like a lump in my stomach). I pick up short story books or request them as ARCs because I like reading them. That’s why I asked for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, okay Introduction? I don’t need twenty pages of an English professor rah-rah-brigading me about short stories, then summarizing each story, then explaining to me why each story merits inclusion in the collection. Just let me at the stories! I hate introductions.

So let’s get to the stories. Hooray! Stories! But they are American. I always struggle to articulate my feelings towards American fiction. The best I’ve ever come up with is insular. There’s a self-importance too, but no one that is mean-spirited. It’s not bragging or even humble-bragging. But it’s whatever comes with the knowledge that due to population and money and global positioning and power: that being American can mean forcing an influence on the rest of the English speaking world that say me, as a Canadian, cannot force. The stories here vary between US-born to those who have chosen (or are in the process of choosing, as in Manuel Muñoz’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA”) to locate themselves in the States, and this tone of American-ness washes the stories out. Even the ones that are stylistically different (the first person plural of Naira Kuzmich’s “The Kingsley Drive Chorus”, the fairy tale world of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”, the East Africa of Lionel Shriver’s “Kilifi Creek”) are still similar. One might believe that these were all written by the same author, each story investigating the subtle. It’s like there was a memo in 2015: Forget what they told you in high school about short stories. No changes, epiphanies, or surprises. I can’t say there are a lot of surprises here. There are a lot of abrupt endings in surprise’s place. Many of these stories simply stop in another shared stylistic quirk. I can’t be satisfied with a story that simply stops. I feel ripped off.

I should also crown my favourite, simply because the three person jury each wrote a little paragraph at the end regarding their favourite and I guess that’s the thing one is supposed to do in collections like this. I’ll pick the fairy tale monstrousness of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”. That one didn’t need to be an American story, in the way some of the other stories needed to be set in the States or inhabited by US-ians. It chose to be an American story. That made me like it best.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 edited by Laura Furman went on sale September 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Let’s be honest: I don’t really understand how publishers choose reviewers on Netgalley. When I signed up, I figured I’d mainly get books from small-time, Canadian, publishers, but no, they reject me more often than not. Penguin Canada rejects me a lot too. But Random House seems to like me, and so gives me a new David Mitchell book to read, in August, asking nicely for me to wait to review until the week of the release. I put off reading it for as long as I could, even though the book sat there on my kobo, mocking me while I read books I didn’t really like.

You can read me Slade House whispered. But you can’t talk about me yet.

You can read me Slade House whispered. But I’m a secret.

But now, in two days, release date! I can talk talk talk about Slade House all I want!

So we have the new David Mitchell novel. After the dumb-bell weight of The Bone Clocks, Slade House is a much slighter commitment. My epub has 151 pages, 6 of which are copyright and publishing info and TK‘s. So it’s a quick read and now this is what I’ll say:

It’s a David Mitchell novel. We have the chummy, lad-like style, not too approachable, and not too posh. Like every David Mitchell novel, characters from other David Mitchell novels pop-up, mainly from The Bone Clocks. Our characters are soul vampires that appear every nine years, with a shifting narrative told three-quarters by the people they will feed upon, somewhat like Under The Skin from the victims’ standpoint. Slade House could be read as a companion, or a prequel/sequel to sections of The Bone Clocks. If you haven’t read The Bone Clocks though, it likely stands-alone. Everything is more-or-less self-contained, and the ties to The Bone Clocks (Horologists and schisms and Atemporals) don’t really need more explanation than what Mitchell gives here. The fact that this is less daunting that The Bone Clocks works in its favour: one doesn’t have to remember loads and loads and loads of stuff to enjoy the creepiness.

And, of course, I love creepiness. I also love solid, literary writing. Slade House gave me a solid, literary, creepy story, so I was happy. A+, thumbs up. Of course, nothing’s perfect — there was some weird, dream, logic and after The Unconsoled, I’ve had enough of weird, British, dream logic to last a reading lifetime. But, come on, there’s an info dump that feels natural. I could never write an info dump so beautifully. I was halfway through the dump before I realised I was in an info dump. David Mitchell is my writing G-d.

Good writing. Spooky story. It’s almost Hallowe’en. A book to read on a rainy, October evening, curled up in bed, with my USB slippers on my feet (they warm your toes!).

Slade House by David Mitchell goes on sale October 27, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So look out boy you’re heading for the mainland

In 1985, Jack and Angela take their family from The Rock out to northern Alberta to work in the gold mines. Of course, nothing good comes of it because this is a morose melodrama, like a bad CBC tele-movie from the eighties. If one enjoys melodrama, then Saltwater Cowboys is almost a textbook example of it: exaggerated characters, caricatured villains, sensationalist plans for wealth, sex (although off-page), punishment for said sex (a very graphic detailing of a miscarriage in very stark contrast to the complete non-description of the extra-marital coitus almost immediately preceding it), poverty, despair, the pounding of chests and the falling to the knees surrounded by shouts of Why God why?

Okay, that last bit is somewhat of an exaggeration. No one bemoans God directly. But had they, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I am not the audience for melodrama. I almost always choose characters over plot, and the characters here exist only as tools of the plot. Plus the plot is nothing special. The writing is too flowery (is there a page that doesn’t have either a metaphor or a simile on it? I can’t tell). Almost from the get go, the writing has all those tics that annoy me. Let’s take an example: we start off by learning Jack has arctic-blue eyes; for some readers, knowledge like that helps them build the character. For me, I’m like Unless the colour of his eyes becomes a significant plot point later on, I do not need to know about it. And I’m not a fan of the point-of-view used here. It’s third-person veers in and out of focus, going down into one person’s world, then zooming back out to focus in on another. I would have done a tighter, sole-focused narrative, but that’s just me. And as I said, I don’t think I am the audience for this book.

The acknowledgements section says she did the Humber School for Writer’s Program. I did too, and didn’t have a helpful experience, and definitely didn’t get a novel out of it. I’m glad Dayle Furlong got a book out of it though. That warmed me up to her and made me want her to succeed. But Saltwater Cowboys read like a first draft that needs serious, and difficult, edits. Or it needs to be made into a bad CBC tele-movie staring Paul Gross. It’s that type of thing.

Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong went on sale February 28, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Man, I wish I could just be wandering about and a wood sprite would give me golden thread and then I owned a castle and also a magic sword that could chop the heads off any of my enemies. Plus a frog that talked and some rubies. And be able to fly. Or change into a donkey. Really, anything from The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, except being one of the ones ones getting my head cut off and or drowned in a barrel. Fairy tales are weird. The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales publishes a whole stack of them that were collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth from Eastern Bavaria in the 1850s. A puppeteer (amongst other things) found them in the files of a municipal archives in 2009. That alone seems like it could be made into a fairy tale, or at least a National Treasure. The movie could have really cartoony Nazis, like in that Indiana Jones movie I never saw (which would be all of them), and then the magic from the stories could come to life, and maybe Gorbachev could be there, and I’m focusing more on this because I don’t really have much to say about this book. They are traditional, oral, German, fairy tales. People get tricked and turned into animals and then curses are lifted and things happen for really no reason whatsoever. Characters act sort of like random particles, bumping into each other, and causing odd chaotic effects to ripple through. And no one has any real internal psychological thought; people just live and do. They don’t think.

In the car this summer, we listened to The Collected Works of The Brothers Grimm; The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales was a nice comparison piece to go along with that. You could see the tropes that linked these stories to those. It’s definitely not Disney-fied stuff, but it isn’t R-rated either. Kind of a fun diversion from the regular stream of depressing, internal-monologue, novels I read.

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth went on sale February 24, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.