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wordsmithreads's review against another edition
4.0
She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived.
I have now read a few different collections of short stories, though I still consider myself a reader who is novel-focused. I say this because I think if I had come to Laura van den Berg first, I would have become a voracious short story reader. They're like miniature horror stories.
There are 11 stories in this collection, and the titular story, which closes the collection, was actually my least favorite, along with Lizards, though I found myself relating to the woman in it a tad too much.
The stories are unsettling, something always seeming just a little bit off, but I found them endlessly compelling.
My favorites: Slumberland, Volcano House, Your Second Wife. (notably, these are all in first person, while some of the other stories are not.)
I can't say much more about these other than they feel dream-like and interesting enough that I would read a whole volume more of any of my three favorite ones, though some of the others are equally suitable to be long, drawn-out campfire stories to set your teeth on edge.
A collection of my favorite lines:
-... this is the problem with translating experience into fiction, the way certain truths read like lies.
- The lodgers, mostly women.... tended to look either like they had just arrived on earth or like they had been stuck in this motel for all eternity.
- That was how things went in these big apartment complexes; they were a kind of purgatory where we docks until our souls were called elsewhere.
- I have learned that one must be very carful about the desperate wishes cast out into the ether because perhaps someone is listening, someone all too willing to grant us exactly what we have asked for and maybe even what we deserve."
- I thought about how few things were more ancient than the bartering of souls."
- If nature loves symmetry then why is symmetry so cruel?
- ... she feels so angry she's surprised surfaces don't ignite when she touches them.
- I didn't understand yet that refusing one kind of narrative could activate another.
- I've always thought of her as the anchor: predictable, stationary. A point on the map I could return to.
- A wind shakes the branches. I find myself listening for the crack of a gun.
- ... but what about the things that can't be quantified, like the difference between kindness and cowardice, or the meaning of life?
I have now read a few different collections of short stories, though I still consider myself a reader who is novel-focused. I say this because I think if I had come to Laura van den Berg first, I would have become a voracious short story reader. They're like miniature horror stories.
There are 11 stories in this collection, and the titular story, which closes the collection, was actually my least favorite, along with Lizards, though I found myself relating to the woman in it a tad too much.
The stories are unsettling, something always seeming just a little bit off, but I found them endlessly compelling.
My favorites: Slumberland, Volcano House, Your Second Wife. (notably, these are all in first person, while some of the other stories are not.)
I can't say much more about these other than they feel dream-like and interesting enough that I would read a whole volume more of any of my three favorite ones, though some of the others are equally suitable to be long, drawn-out campfire stories to set your teeth on edge.
A collection of my favorite lines:
-... this is the problem with translating experience into fiction, the way certain truths read like lies.
- The lodgers, mostly women.... tended to look either like they had just arrived on earth or like they had been stuck in this motel for all eternity.
- That was how things went in these big apartment complexes; they were a kind of purgatory where we docks until our souls were called elsewhere.
- I have learned that one must be very carful about the desperate wishes cast out into the ether because perhaps someone is listening, someone all too willing to grant us exactly what we have asked for and maybe even what we deserve."
- I thought about how few things were more ancient than the bartering of souls."
- If nature loves symmetry then why is symmetry so cruel?
- ... she feels so angry she's surprised surfaces don't ignite when she touches them.
- I didn't understand yet that refusing one kind of narrative could activate another.
- I've always thought of her as the anchor: predictable, stationary. A point on the map I could return to.
- A wind shakes the branches. I find myself listening for the crack of a gun.
- ... but what about the things that can't be quantified, like the difference between kindness and cowardice, or the meaning of life?
opldxblqo's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Eerie, and phantasmic, full of subtle misogyny, and violence. These stories capture the sound of womens' voices dissipating into the aether.
Last Night: 3/5
Slumberland: 5/5
Hill of Hell: 5/5
Cult of Mary: 2/5
Lizards: 4/5
The Pitch: 2/5
Volcano House: 5/5 (a standout)
Friends: 3/5
Karolina: 5/5
Your Second Wife: 4/5
I Hold a Wolf By the Ears: 3/5
= 74.5, so 3.7 stars rounded up to 4
Last Night: 3/5
Slumberland: 5/5
Hill of Hell: 5/5
Cult of Mary: 2/5
Lizards: 4/5
The Pitch: 2/5
Volcano House: 5/5 (a standout)
Friends: 3/5
Karolina: 5/5
Your Second Wife: 4/5
I Hold a Wolf By the Ears: 3/5
= 74.5, so 3.7 stars rounded up to 4
kxiong5's review against another edition
4.0
really, really interesting stories w/such cool relationships with social/economic 'place,' confusion of identity, this blase way in which they confront the way trauma and violence don't happen in clean and categorizable ways, and the way they embody and subvert horror stories as writing techniques. Most of them hit me like a freight train (especially the stories "Last Night," "The Pitch" (personal favorite, if you can call something that flipped you inside out a "favorite"), "Lizards," and "I Hold A Wolf by the Ears.") Sort of lost it a little bit in some of the stories in the middle -- the three stories after "Volcano House" didn't feel consistently seamless as the others did / were a little bit more entrenched in set realities + lost the spookiness a bit? But that could also be the ambiance of when I was reading -- I read the first half of the book in one sitting at 11 PM on a Saturday night, and the second half mid-afternoon. Either way, what a way to start the year.
I Hold A Wolf by the Ears (discussion 1.4.21)
Themes to hit on:
horror/suspense tropes in the the framing of the story (writing technique), postmodernism/neoliberal world/sense of crisis, grounding in time and place and history and economic conditions, compromised selves/how should a person be (compromised reality/“I” perspective)
- Replacement /// wearing someone else’s skin (replacability? Mutability of self?)
- Straightness lol
- Doing nothing (women in men’s lives)
- Masking — Second Wife —> selfhood as imposition (Volcano House, Wolf by the Ears) — someone mutable in relation to someone solid & recognized
Questions:
- Karolina — queer subtext? (Just women…in parasocial relationships) —> not quite nameable parasocial relationships
- You can want something from someone really badly and they are incapable of providing it
Stories:
Karolina:
- Ending not satisfying (the relationship with the other professor)
- Can’t recognize abuse (?) —> (142, 154) only time where she talks about his relationship with her in physical terms >> codependence, possessive over each other, power dynamics never questioned (and we never get the subjectivity of him towards her)
- If all you have is each other, they can’t really be healthy
- The sense of possession she has over him
- The reductiveness of trying to be like, this is ____ complex —> but it’s not supposed to be nameable
- Classism of being “nice”
- The ex-husband
- The narrator’s pity as power dynamic, her compulsion towards niceness, towards that aspirational nice logic — similar to how her brother’s like, I want a simple life (136, 138, 143)
- What’s MISSING from this story? What’s the stuff she’s leaving out that changes the operative logic of the story?
- The missing pieces of their childhood >> the brother’s violence — where?
- The brother’s violence itself —> is that loss of memory? Is that just how memory works? Is that just how stuff is, reductive?
- Defensiveness of the main character — and why? Why do we feel this?
- The chance meetings as a horror trope? A spookiness/surrealness to it? — the suspension of disbelief in the first story intentionally? (The world is powerful and mysterious)
The Pitch
- Husband and wife — gaslighting each other? Two worlds built to be irreconcilable BECAUSE they are angry with each other or don’t trust each other
- marriage: in this book, no real room for compromise at all? Is marriage always bound to be this way? (See notebook notes) —> these CHOICES not to trust each other (but is it really a choice)?
- Choosing to trust her reality — she thinks: my husband did something to this kid —> so she chose to question him and dig into the wound (but she married him, she chose to trust him then — why then, did she not choose it now?) — feels like this belief/trust in her husband has to be IN OPPOSITION to “rightness” or the right/just thing to do (but in this case — would it be compromising morals?)
- >> but what would the outcome of pursuing that justice be? does it come out of a place of anger or a place of righteousness? Are they divorce able?
- Similar to Karolina: who to trust? Who to believe? (Related concern) —> in Karolina, though, choosing NOT to believe her brother would have been the right thing to do
- Marriage as a risk of choosing to believe
- Belief and choosing to believe — and who you believe —> the lie is to believe
- Can you make yourself believe anything? As the READER, either?
- Belief and trauma — choosing to believe what you believe (the millionaire: “I’m starting to believe I’ve made a terrible mistake” (79) >> “What cannot be forgotten must be confronted” (81) >> all the dropped hints about regretting // not knowing about two realities // the ending: believing is the lie
- CHOOSING to trust the father-in-law
- Shared delusion as validation —
- Children’s literature as belief and fucked up shit (romantic stories but fucked up ones)
- FOCUSED MORE ON THE MARRIAGE FALLING APART
- The animals on the walls
- The conceit: I WANT you to believe this, belief is woven into it
- Felt a little campy?
- Monkey’s Paw
- The Yellow Wallpaper
Lizards
- The answer here to the “can you trust your husband” thing is very clearly NO here
- This one’s in third person!!!
- NOT relatable
- Not about individual marriage, but more about the culture of these mentalities —> her confrontation with the situation she’s in and the parasocial world around that
- And her only way to function in the relationship she’s stuck in and hates is to make her “quiet” with the drugs
- The metaphor of sleep + dreams
- Lizards: nuisance you can deal with ==> claustrophobia: “I’m stuck in something”
- “This is the society one” -Kate Cobey
- Marriage as risk: is this a risk she should have to take? —> we can’t blame her here…the asshole husband HAS betrayed her trust — we can’t blame her for that at all
- So then the stories that precede this, in which agency of the narrator is more of a question/they might have more moral ambiguity — does that change things by juxtaposition?
- Not naming people: social commentary?
- Giving people descriptions: pigeonholing someone as just one person —> but also…as a helpful anchor for a reader? (Specificity as sympathizing with another character)
- “Her husband, his wife” (the way that these characters are named as possessions by the other)
- Lack of a common couple vernacular (“not only is that a relationship that fucking sucks, it’s a boring relationship that fucking sucks” - Kate Cobey) —> intentional featurelessness to relationship that feels isolating
- In this book: any time a character does something to establish themselves, it’s as a THREAT (e.g. establish independence as drawing animals on the walls and pretending they were always there <— The Pitch)
- And the not giving any of the crimes a name — not mentioning what Brett Kavanaugh actually DID, the word rape is not even used once
Volcano House
- This sense: Pat + MC’s sister really did care about each other?
- But how much can you know on the outside?
- To learn to act like sisters — or to slip into her sister’s life?
- Trying on the clothes in the bed (107) —> transference
- A more ruminatory story — a state of being more than a series of events
- Natural disaster + American problems as a more global malaise
- The spontaneity & shock of the accident —> but then it’s stuck in suspended animation
- Wanting a life changing event on these trips (“I could at least see a volcano” (96)) — is it sad, or does SHE see it as sad
- The obsession with permanence/rootedness (but also its impossibility)
- Marriage
- Juxtaposition w/the other bad marriage stories: there are marriages that could be happy, and here’s an example of WHY people do want these things and the stability they provide, but they’re intentionally a pipe dream/broken up/kept out of reach (by the accident/interruption to it)
- OR nostalgia: looking back is always rose-tinted glasses, Pat’s inability to SAY anything to his wife
- Thank god she and Pat didn’t fuck (but she’s also sort of inhabiting her sister there)
- Her relationship with her sister: a proxy for her figuring out her relationship with herself/life (story starts as learning: how to be sisters (but how should sisters BE) —> then about how to learn how to live with sister as proxy (how to live as MY SISTER DOES) (100) to the point that she loses sight of her sister (and her sister is actively annoyed with her) ==> and THEN she’s a good sister to her sister when her sister’s in her coma
- So then: her sister exists only as a proxy onto which this narrator projects
- This story as the better, more ambiguous relationship version of “I Hold A Wolf by the Ears”
Hill of Hell
- The friend: sudden deaths — this story’s movement THROUGH deaths
- When someone’s purpose is to die…
- “Lost the ability to think critically” (40) -- can you think critically about death? (e.g. the “brutal symmetry” (40), the death doula)
- “Why can’t she just leave us be?” (38)
- The breaking of relationships with this mother’s children JUST as she’s beginning to be ready for them
- Fated deaths? As if they have to be taken from her at this moment — presented as inevitability through the mother’s eyes? Through the mother putting in meaning?
- The narrative of grief at the center of the story — but it’s really unfair (one lived for decades, one never lived at all), in all of our opinions —> the narrator attributing the SAME meaning to both daughters…
- To some extent, it’s a natural narrativization —> because she couldn’t relate or do anything for her daughter —> BUT IT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO HER DAUGHTER (but can we call it selfish with the connotation of blame?)
- We did it for us, but can it have hurt her daughter? (Is it appropriative? Is this just how it is?)
- Righting a wrong of being removed by remembering…totems —> guilt? Grief? The complications of grief? (The inseparability of grief from other emotions)
- Loss: leaving but not dying, but then thinking of death as separate from just leaving…even if you never see the person who’s left again
- They spend so much time trying to keep her alive (via rehab) and then she finds purpose and comfort IN DYING — feels like something you shouldn’t SAY
- The sense that now that she’s dying, it’s OK
- You’re really bad at living, but you’re really great at dying —> NO MORE PRESSURE TO BECOME PERMANENT / DO THE HARD WORK OF LIVING — and via that, she finds meaning via death // walking away from that
- A visceral thing that most writers won’t touch
- Why does this story hit us so hard? So few of us have experienced death… — the viscera of these deaths (via closeness) + the zoomed in details of it
- The deaths in loose proximity to each other — eg. Mourning someone through the lens of something she didn’t care about
- Bojack Horseman: the View from Halfway Down; the Adventure Zone; etc.
*general note: these stories are in the PRESENT, but the lack of presence of social media or internet or any of the digital ghosts that exist (in this question of permanence/existence/reality — what of digital footprints?) —> ghosts (the presence of these issues of presence/absence is here, but it’s never explicitly addressed — it hovers AROUND the book rather than in it)
- You don’t want to be involved with people, but you want them to be there peripherally (or the option of not having to think of them)
The failed marriages: the characters want people to be in these roles/set positions of something they wanted to have, instead of thinking of their partners as humans
- And the lack of choice the women feel in the story where they’re like they HAVE to be in that role (why do so many people feel that?)
I Hold A Wolf by the Ears (discussion 1.4.21)
Themes to hit on:
horror/suspense tropes in the the framing of the story (writing technique), postmodernism/neoliberal world/sense of crisis, grounding in time and place and history and economic conditions, compromised selves/how should a person be (compromised reality/“I” perspective)
- Replacement /// wearing someone else’s skin (replacability? Mutability of self?)
- Straightness lol
- Doing nothing (women in men’s lives)
- Masking — Second Wife —> selfhood as imposition (Volcano House, Wolf by the Ears) — someone mutable in relation to someone solid & recognized
Questions:
- Karolina — queer subtext? (Just women…in parasocial relationships) —> not quite nameable parasocial relationships
- You can want something from someone really badly and they are incapable of providing it
Stories:
Karolina:
- Ending not satisfying (the relationship with the other professor)
- Can’t recognize abuse (?) —> (142, 154) only time where she talks about his relationship with her in physical terms >> codependence, possessive over each other, power dynamics never questioned (and we never get the subjectivity of him towards her)
- If all you have is each other, they can’t really be healthy
- The sense of possession she has over him
- The reductiveness of trying to be like, this is ____ complex —> but it’s not supposed to be nameable
- Classism of being “nice”
- The ex-husband
- The narrator’s pity as power dynamic, her compulsion towards niceness, towards that aspirational nice logic — similar to how her brother’s like, I want a simple life (136, 138, 143)
- What’s MISSING from this story? What’s the stuff she’s leaving out that changes the operative logic of the story?
- The missing pieces of their childhood >> the brother’s violence — where?
- The brother’s violence itself —> is that loss of memory? Is that just how memory works? Is that just how stuff is, reductive?
- Defensiveness of the main character — and why? Why do we feel this?
- The chance meetings as a horror trope? A spookiness/surrealness to it? — the suspension of disbelief in the first story intentionally? (The world is powerful and mysterious)
The Pitch
- Husband and wife — gaslighting each other? Two worlds built to be irreconcilable BECAUSE they are angry with each other or don’t trust each other
- marriage: in this book, no real room for compromise at all? Is marriage always bound to be this way? (See notebook notes) —> these CHOICES not to trust each other (but is it really a choice)?
- Choosing to trust her reality — she thinks: my husband did something to this kid —> so she chose to question him and dig into the wound (but she married him, she chose to trust him then — why then, did she not choose it now?) — feels like this belief/trust in her husband has to be IN OPPOSITION to “rightness” or the right/just thing to do (but in this case — would it be compromising morals?)
- >> but what would the outcome of pursuing that justice be? does it come out of a place of anger or a place of righteousness? Are they divorce able?
- Similar to Karolina: who to trust? Who to believe? (Related concern) —> in Karolina, though, choosing NOT to believe her brother would have been the right thing to do
- Marriage as a risk of choosing to believe
- Belief and choosing to believe — and who you believe —> the lie is to believe
- Can you make yourself believe anything? As the READER, either?
- Belief and trauma — choosing to believe what you believe (the millionaire: “I’m starting to believe I’ve made a terrible mistake” (79) >> “What cannot be forgotten must be confronted” (81) >> all the dropped hints about regretting // not knowing about two realities // the ending: believing is the lie
- CHOOSING to trust the father-in-law
- Shared delusion as validation —
- Children’s literature as belief and fucked up shit (romantic stories but fucked up ones)
- FOCUSED MORE ON THE MARRIAGE FALLING APART
- The animals on the walls
- The conceit: I WANT you to believe this, belief is woven into it
- Felt a little campy?
- Monkey’s Paw
- The Yellow Wallpaper
Lizards
- The answer here to the “can you trust your husband” thing is very clearly NO here
- This one’s in third person!!!
- NOT relatable
- Not about individual marriage, but more about the culture of these mentalities —> her confrontation with the situation she’s in and the parasocial world around that
- And her only way to function in the relationship she’s stuck in and hates is to make her “quiet” with the drugs
- The metaphor of sleep + dreams
- Lizards: nuisance you can deal with ==> claustrophobia: “I’m stuck in something”
- “This is the society one” -Kate Cobey
- Marriage as risk: is this a risk she should have to take? —> we can’t blame her here…the asshole husband HAS betrayed her trust — we can’t blame her for that at all
- So then the stories that precede this, in which agency of the narrator is more of a question/they might have more moral ambiguity — does that change things by juxtaposition?
- Not naming people: social commentary?
- Giving people descriptions: pigeonholing someone as just one person —> but also…as a helpful anchor for a reader? (Specificity as sympathizing with another character)
- “Her husband, his wife” (the way that these characters are named as possessions by the other)
- Lack of a common couple vernacular (“not only is that a relationship that fucking sucks, it’s a boring relationship that fucking sucks” - Kate Cobey) —> intentional featurelessness to relationship that feels isolating
- In this book: any time a character does something to establish themselves, it’s as a THREAT (e.g. establish independence as drawing animals on the walls and pretending they were always there <— The Pitch)
- And the not giving any of the crimes a name — not mentioning what Brett Kavanaugh actually DID, the word rape is not even used once
Volcano House
- This sense: Pat + MC’s sister really did care about each other?
- But how much can you know on the outside?
- To learn to act like sisters — or to slip into her sister’s life?
- Trying on the clothes in the bed (107) —> transference
- A more ruminatory story — a state of being more than a series of events
- Natural disaster + American problems as a more global malaise
- The spontaneity & shock of the accident —> but then it’s stuck in suspended animation
- Wanting a life changing event on these trips (“I could at least see a volcano” (96)) — is it sad, or does SHE see it as sad
- The obsession with permanence/rootedness (but also its impossibility)
- Marriage
- Juxtaposition w/the other bad marriage stories: there are marriages that could be happy, and here’s an example of WHY people do want these things and the stability they provide, but they’re intentionally a pipe dream/broken up/kept out of reach (by the accident/interruption to it)
- OR nostalgia: looking back is always rose-tinted glasses, Pat’s inability to SAY anything to his wife
- Thank god she and Pat didn’t fuck (but she’s also sort of inhabiting her sister there)
- Her relationship with her sister: a proxy for her figuring out her relationship with herself/life (story starts as learning: how to be sisters (but how should sisters BE) —> then about how to learn how to live with sister as proxy (how to live as MY SISTER DOES) (100) to the point that she loses sight of her sister (and her sister is actively annoyed with her) ==> and THEN she’s a good sister to her sister when her sister’s in her coma
- So then: her sister exists only as a proxy onto which this narrator projects
- This story as the better, more ambiguous relationship version of “I Hold A Wolf by the Ears”
Hill of Hell
- The friend: sudden deaths — this story’s movement THROUGH deaths
- When someone’s purpose is to die…
- “Lost the ability to think critically” (40) -- can you think critically about death? (e.g. the “brutal symmetry” (40), the death doula)
- “Why can’t she just leave us be?” (38)
- The breaking of relationships with this mother’s children JUST as she’s beginning to be ready for them
- Fated deaths? As if they have to be taken from her at this moment — presented as inevitability through the mother’s eyes? Through the mother putting in meaning?
- The narrative of grief at the center of the story — but it’s really unfair (one lived for decades, one never lived at all), in all of our opinions —> the narrator attributing the SAME meaning to both daughters…
- To some extent, it’s a natural narrativization —> because she couldn’t relate or do anything for her daughter —> BUT IT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO HER DAUGHTER (but can we call it selfish with the connotation of blame?)
- We did it for us, but can it have hurt her daughter? (Is it appropriative? Is this just how it is?)
- Righting a wrong of being removed by remembering…totems —> guilt? Grief? The complications of grief? (The inseparability of grief from other emotions)
- Loss: leaving but not dying, but then thinking of death as separate from just leaving…even if you never see the person who’s left again
- They spend so much time trying to keep her alive (via rehab) and then she finds purpose and comfort IN DYING — feels like something you shouldn’t SAY
- The sense that now that she’s dying, it’s OK
- You’re really bad at living, but you’re really great at dying —> NO MORE PRESSURE TO BECOME PERMANENT / DO THE HARD WORK OF LIVING — and via that, she finds meaning via death // walking away from that
- A visceral thing that most writers won’t touch
- Why does this story hit us so hard? So few of us have experienced death… — the viscera of these deaths (via closeness) + the zoomed in details of it
- The deaths in loose proximity to each other — eg. Mourning someone through the lens of something she didn’t care about
- Bojack Horseman: the View from Halfway Down; the Adventure Zone; etc.
*general note: these stories are in the PRESENT, but the lack of presence of social media or internet or any of the digital ghosts that exist (in this question of permanence/existence/reality — what of digital footprints?) —> ghosts (the presence of these issues of presence/absence is here, but it’s never explicitly addressed — it hovers AROUND the book rather than in it)
- You don’t want to be involved with people, but you want them to be there peripherally (or the option of not having to think of them)
The failed marriages: the characters want people to be in these roles/set positions of something they wanted to have, instead of thinking of their partners as humans
- And the lack of choice the women feel in the story where they’re like they HAVE to be in that role (why do so many people feel that?)
moirastone's review against another edition
4.0
Reading everything Laura van den Berg writes even though her stories leave me feeling distressed about the state of the world and hopeless that I'll ever be half the artist she is is my kink.
opinionhaver69's review against another edition
4.0
definitely more melancholy than eerie on the whole so this collection didn’t quite align with the expectations i had going in (based mostly on the cover & write-up tbh; i’ve not read anything else by the author), but exquisitely written all the same - these are all stories about women and their relationships with each other/themselves so honestly it’s all much of a muchness after a while but the quality of the writing prevents it from feeling stagnant or repetitive and the occasional foray into the otherworldly was fun if perhaps a little underused overall! a good time, am v eager to read some of laura van den berg’s longer fiction after this
farfromginger's review
dark
emotional
2.5
Honestly I’m not sure why this was on my TBR for so long. This was fine. Good writing but no story. I didn’t really care about anyone involved. Plenty of relatable themes but I can get that on tumblr in 2016 too.
rubyseemorebooks's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Majority left a feeling of uneasy, though didn’t feel stories were too horror…