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meade1111's review
4.0
Veneration of Monsters is Burns’ attempt to outdo her dazzling 2012 collection Misfits & Other Heroes, with stories boasting premises meant to shock; middle-aged couples daring each other to murder a man who cut them off in traffic, the sad lives of serial killers, and stories that begin with the death of a child and get more bleak from there. With these eleven stories, she describes the messy realities of the rule breakers, psychopaths, and monsters that she tends to venerate.
Why venerate monsters? Because they are maybe the only ones to live the kind of life they think they deserve. They are the only ones willing to live outside the strictures of 21st century “civilization.” So, when a homemaker sets out to murder several children, filling the role of the witch archetype that so many of these stories include, while we may be horrified, we respect her for doing what we can’t, what we are incapable of attempting. When a wife takes a game of spice-up-your-marriage role-play too far in “Happy Anniversary,” we don’t empathize with the terrified husband, we long to say the things she does. In the story “Selfie,” a vampire who is the sort of one-dimensional walking fantasy character women typically play in male writers’ Updikian mid-life crisis stories, the male love interest fades away in an unexpected way; “Before disappearing behind a tree, Tobias waved the way a lover waves when he assumes, incorrectly, that someday he will be invited back.” These tales are clever, funny in their premise and blood thirsty. Burns cares little for how deeply she might wound her characters, her readers, or her critics.
With these inside-out fairy tales and her psychologically twisted stories, Burns has done something insistent and defiant. Something that refuses to conform, something that insists upon ruffling feathers and breaking rules, something that may even pay the price for being different. The best thing I can say about Burns’ writing is that it’s not for everyone. Is it for you?
Why venerate monsters? Because they are maybe the only ones to live the kind of life they think they deserve. They are the only ones willing to live outside the strictures of 21st century “civilization.” So, when a homemaker sets out to murder several children, filling the role of the witch archetype that so many of these stories include, while we may be horrified, we respect her for doing what we can’t, what we are incapable of attempting. When a wife takes a game of spice-up-your-marriage role-play too far in “Happy Anniversary,” we don’t empathize with the terrified husband, we long to say the things she does. In the story “Selfie,” a vampire who is the sort of one-dimensional walking fantasy character women typically play in male writers’ Updikian mid-life crisis stories, the male love interest fades away in an unexpected way; “Before disappearing behind a tree, Tobias waved the way a lover waves when he assumes, incorrectly, that someday he will be invited back.” These tales are clever, funny in their premise and blood thirsty. Burns cares little for how deeply she might wound her characters, her readers, or her critics.
With these inside-out fairy tales and her psychologically twisted stories, Burns has done something insistent and defiant. Something that refuses to conform, something that insists upon ruffling feathers and breaking rules, something that may even pay the price for being different. The best thing I can say about Burns’ writing is that it’s not for everyone. Is it for you?