The Too-Long, Too-Rude Review of The Best American Mystery & Suspense 2021 Anthology
I read and review a lot of crime fiction, and I fully intended this to be a review along the lines of my other reviews. But the more I read — and re-read — this debut anthology, the more I found I had Ponderous Thoughts about not just the stories and the collection as a whole, but about how they relate to my lived experience and my personal prejudices, about the state of the genre at a time when its fissures have widened into fractures and perhaps even gaps too wide to build a bridge across, and I started making notes along those lines, and the following vomit of more than 8,200 words is the result.
Those thoughts start with the three-step fissure that became a fracture that became — perhaps — too big a gap to bridge in the genre:
The removal of Otto Penzler, the founding editor of The Best American Mystery Stories series, by its publisher.
The appointment of Steph Cha as the new series editor, under the new name The Best American Mystery and Suspense.
The creation by Penzler of a rival anthology, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, to reflect his tastes and tribal affiliations.
What emerged from this, in the fall of 2021, was something akin to the political divide in America: a “woke” collection of mostly transgressive tales from a rainbow coalition of new and established voices, vs. a “MAGA” collection of twenty tales by twenty white authors that doubles down on the mostly male-centric traditions of the past (its tales include a Gilded Age mystery, a Golden Age mystery, a 1950s hardboiled-detective tale, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and other sepia-tinted crime-fiction subgenres.). I reviewed that anthology a few months ago, and now as much as I did then, I find its lineup unforgivably hostile to the year it purports to represent, with an all-but-declared wish-casting for a better and simpler time in which, perhaps, people of color weren’t pushing for proportional inclusion and representation in their beloved (mostly) boys’ clubhouse.
I think it wouldn’t be unfair to say that these collections — despite sharing one author, Alison Gaylin — embodied a polarity that was causing increasing discomfort for many authors who felt pushed to pick a side at a time when they just wanted to get along with everybody, focus on their work, and keep on moving units. And that the fact of these two collections made adhering to those priorities a lot less easy, especially in the fire-engulfed hothouses of social media.
Without taking explicit shots at Penzler & Co., Steph Cha makes clear that there’s a new sheriff in town, with a new mandate: “You might see more stories by women and writers of color (both categories I happen to belong to) in this series going forward, but not because of some secret agenda to sacrifice quality for diversity. I gravitate toward some stories over others because I have opinions, a worldview, and a pulse. When it comes to mystery and suspense, I tend to like stories that use crime—acts of transgression and violence that both occur under and create extreme circumstances—to highlight character as well as social and, yes, political realities. I understand that some people prefer to keep their reading segregated from politics, but storytelling is inherently political, even when fiction is methodically scrubbed of real-world context. Crime reveals the cracks in our characters, our relationships, our communities, our countries, and it is this quality that drew me to the genre in the first place. Of course, I also read for entertainment, and I enjoy juicy plots and pulsing thrills and rich, interesting writing. The stories in this book were chosen for a multitude of reasons—the bottom line is that they moved and excited me.”
I’m on board with most of that, but the last sentence bothers me. I’m sure Steph Cha and guest editor Alafair Burke applied a good deal of rigor to their selection process, and it can be honestly said that quality was never sacrificed for diversity. But the fact that the final lineup includes a good number of members in what I think of as the Twitter Cool Kids Clubhouse of progressive crime-fiction personalities is more than a little suspect in my eyes, and as such I suspect a couple of thumbs were pressed upon the scale in the service of personal friendship and tribal solidarity — a suspicion that’s only deepened with the recent announcement by selected Twitter Cool Kids authors for the 2022 edition. (And I believe thumbs were even more vigorously applied in the Ye Olde Rock Star curation of the Penzler anthology’s roster of tighty whities.) Which is fine, and their prerogative, and yes, I understand that politics are inescapable. But a little honesty about that would have been not only courageous but helpful.
That said, I like this anthology much more than I like Penzler’s. It not only necessarily does what crime fiction should do — hold up a dark mirror to the moment and turn it toward the available light — but most of these stories also meet the baseline standard for anybody’s list of the best, in that they entertain as much as they educate. I felt a handful of the stories here fell short of that standard, and while I attempt to explain why, I’ll be the first to admit that the criticisms that follow probably say at least as much if not more about the critic than the criticized, and that’s fine. Good criticism should embody less more certainty about the world beyond the critic and more spelunking of the critical self. We all come to our critical view of the world from a place unoccupied by any other cellular being, after all.
Having said, I’ll add that I come from what I think is an honest place, a place of no undeclared axes to grind, of no personal antipathy toward any author or any school of authorship. And so I hope, possibly beyond reason, that my words will be taken in that spirit.
And if your own words are “who the fuck are you, and why the fuck should I care what the fuck you think,” well, that’s in keeping with that spirit as well. I get it; I know I’m seen as something of a dick in the crime-fiction community, and that’s fair. I am kind of a dick, first; off and second, I came to realize some years ago that the writing ultimately matters more to me than the writer. I’m here for the words, not to find friends or a tribe, and as such I hope you keep that in mind if you feel moved to be offended on behalf of someone whose story I found to be subpar, and I hope you’ll also keep in mind that a) I bought the book; b) I read it with great care; c) by having a conversation with it, I hope to continue the conversation about it among you; and d) that’s the goal of everyone who puts out a book, isn’t it? To not only be purchased but thought and talked about? I hope if nothing else we can agree on that. If you can’t get there, or won’t, and that consternation on behalf of those whose work I’ve criticized here comes at a cost to my own writing endeavors, so be it. I’ll always be happiest reading a good story, which ultimately must be done alone by definition, and as such I’ll ultimately receive any rejection with more than a little relief.
So, without further ado, here is perhaps the longest and probably least interesting book review ever written.
*****
“Return To India,” Jenny Bhatt.
An absolute winner. Reads like the best Joyce Carol Oates short story that Joyce Carol Oates never wrote and that, as a white woman, she may not have been able to write with quite this degree of acuity and authority.
A series of co-workers tell a police detective about Dhanesh “Dan” Patel, an Indian-American colleague found shot to death. There’s no real mystery about who killed him; the real suspense comes in each character’s slow, unwitting, almost guileless revealing of the prejudices, couched in pleading and defiant reasonableness, that color how they viewed their colleague.
Some skirt the edges: “You can always tell about people from their chins and jaws, I say,” says one witness, guilelessly confident in his closed-off worldview. Others just spew out their acid splatter in spite of themselves: “I wouldn’t be surprised, the look he had on him that night, if he did not have some kind of history. All ’em Middle Eastern men are always killin’ each other at the slightest thing. Say what? Yah, I heard he’s from India. Same part of the world, ain’t it? They’re all the same anyhow. Comin’ here, takin’ our jobs, as our president says. They come out of nowhere, anywhere, and they show no respect to patriots like me. My family been here for generations—laid down lives for our great country. I says to Irene the other day, I says, Irene, if they try to make me out to be the bad guy here, I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court.”
But even as you cringe, you can’t look away, and I hope if nothing else, we can agree that on the page and off, looking away is the greatest crime of all these days.
*****
“SWAJ,” Christopher Bollen.
The author is talented (I’m an especially big admirer of Bollen’s amazingly ambitious and technically difficult novel, ORIENT; though I’m a more complicated observer of his novel THE DESTROYERS, whose many tortured similes earned it a richly deserved Bad Sex In Fiction award). Here Bollen rolls out his talent in the service of a goof, a Saturday Night Live-styled comedy sketch stretched out well past its puerile possibilities to feature length. Here, a gay young man in the beach town of Amity starts an affair with shark specialist Matt Hooper — yes, the Richard Dreyfuss character in JAWS — just as the events of that story are starting to heat up.
There are a few chuckles here, and some deft bon mots there, but overall this is a drunken “wouldn’t it be funny if” whim of the sort often born in a bong-loaded dorm room, not a story worthy of being counted among the genre’s “best” even by the most tortured and transgressive definition of camp appeal. (Especially given that the ending flat-out misses with its punch; does the narrator truly think that Hooper wouldn’t double-check?)
This story, in quality and tone, is more in line with the reams of pop-culture fan fiction that plague sites like Radish and Wattpad.
*****
“Neighbors,” Nikki Dolson.
A nasty-nice window into the resentments between affluent blacks and ones with fewer advantages, between blacks who racially intermarry and those that don’t. It leads, as we see here, to a corrupted sense of entitlement, i.e., “you aren’t entitled to what you have, based on my askew worldview, so I’m entitled to take it away from you.” As Anika, a pivotal character in this story, says to the protagonist: “You make yourself beige for them. You want to be this suburban doll. An average Jane when you could be more. You don’t have to fit in, but you press your hair straight. With your white husband and your little girl who will always be able to pass.”
The brutally abrupt ending drives this point home with the force of a blow from a baseball bat. This, like Jenny Bhatt’s story, illustrates what is to be gained by blending edification with entertainment: educating clueless white people like me about things they almost couldn’t possibly know from lived experience.
*****
“Mala Suerte,” E. Gabriel Flores.
This one was just plain fun, though it also offers a thoughtful window into how people from some cultures — Cuban, in this case — can get caught in the trap of thinking of bad luck as cosmic or karmic destiny as way of surrendering any responsibility for managing their own life’s narrative, and so what’s the use of fighting the hand the fates have dealt.
Carmelita, one-third of a profitable but illegal cannabis business in the not-too-distant past, finds she has nothing but time to ponder this when she tries to kill one of her partners but finds her foolproof plan has gone awry.
It takes the surviving partner to set Carmelita straight on her “bulls**t”: “You make your own luck in this world. Life is ninety percent chance and ten percent genetics. And that ten percent genetics? That’s chance too. Nobody gets to choose the hand they get dealt at birth. But everyone gets to play that hand out.” Which is true, until, in a dark twist ending, they both learn how that logic can turn on them like the wrong end of a gun.
*****
“Where I Belong,” Alison Gaylin.
In her introductory essay to this volume, guest editor Alafair Burke cites the twistiness of this story as its primary appeal. Twisty it is, but the problem nobody ever talks about with twistiness is that by its overeager-to-please nature, twistiness almost always breaks character to plot, and as a result, characterizations are usually shallow and schematic.
Kurt Campbell, the homeless man at the center of this tale, is less convincing as an avatar of that class of people than as a malleable creature of this overbusy plot, and as a result the reader — at least this one — is left with a disappointing sense of a lost opportunity to explore a segment of humanity that’s often overlooked not just in society but in crime fiction (where’s they’re often background color at best and, more commonly in my reading experience, as darkly comic punching bags at worst). I can appreciate that the story fits the editors’ subjective ideas of fun storytelling, but in my opinion it misses the mark when it comes to their stated goals to thoughtfully spotlight the traditionally overlooked segments of humanity.
That said, Gaylin is a stone pro (she’s the one author to be published in both of the year’s big best-of crime-fiction anthologies). And the story is an appealing if lightweight diversion. And lines like “I want to help him with his problem of being alive” and “Everything’s such a blur since she kicked me out. The nights under the overpass by the side of the FDR, Larry shooting up beside me. The hot sun and the cheap beers and bags of fast-food scraps, slipped through the windows of cars. Like a dream you never wake up from, the kind caterpillars must have when they’re in the chrysalis, their body parts rearranging” not only stick the landing but offer a bittersweet suggestion at what might have been had true transgression and not mere twistiness been the author’s primary aspiration.
*****
“With Footnotes and References,” Gar Anthony Haywood.
When I finished this story, I found myself thinking about a couple of passages from Stephen King’s end notes in his short-story collection NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES. The first: “The horror story is supposed to be a kind of evil-tempered junkyard dog that will bite you if you get too close. This one bites, I think. Am I going to apologize for that? Do you think I should? Isn’t that — the risk of being bitten — one of the reasons you picked this book up in the first place? I think so.”
This story? It bites. Another thing I did when I finished it: I stared at my feet, took a long breath, and said “Wow.” Not just because it’s a great story, though it is, but because it does a great job of making you think it’s going to steer you to safe ground just before it whipsaws you like the shark in JAWS into dangerous, dark, deep water. And even though I survived it, I had to stop and take stock of my extremities to be sure.
“With Footnotes and References” is about two people trying to get the best of one another: one with all the advantages, and one who’s trying to grind by on will and smarts. She’s the one we root for, but we have to ask ourselves the question: she’s smart, but is she smarter? A lesser author, one more committed to fan service than true storytelling, would recognize who has the audience’s emotions and manipulate the outcome accordingly. But wait: Doesn’t the other character also have the audience’s emotions as well? If only the ones they’re afraid of?
I think of Gar Anthony Haywood here as confronting the Stephen King conundrum: Am I gonna bark, or am I going to bite? What’s my truer impulse? And he went Full Metal Steve here, and the story is better off for it because its shocks, and not in a cheap and clever way, but because he brushed up against a dark human reality we struggle to acknowledge: that some people want to kill but don’t have the stomach to do it for themselves; that sometimes they can get the black satisfaction they crave by manipulating someone else to do it for them.
Most genre authors won’t go there; they’re too afraid that the reader won’t come back they were if there’s a risk they’ll get bitten again. Haywood goes there, and the story is better off for it, and I think in his darkest heart he shares the other King passage from that end note: “I want you to be a little bit afraid every time you step into my parlor. I want you unsure about how far I’ll go, or what I may do next.” That’s true of horror, but shouldn’t it be just as true of the best crime fiction? Well, I think so, but that’s just me. Ultimately, I find it more satisfying. And I suspect many others would if they were willing to step out of their literary-Cheesecake Factory comfort zones.
But I’m weird like that: I find being spooked out of my skin to be my safe place. Especially when the horror monster has a human face, perhaps not so distinct from my own.
*****
”The Good Thief,” Ravi Howard.
This story more than makes up for its deceptive brevity with its depthless gravity, and its quiet voice is a shattering howl through American Golgotha. In its simplicity — almost all of it takes place in an Alabama prison kitchen, between a warden and the woman preparing a convicted murderer’s last meal — it says multitudes about the capacity for a thread of justice to be fed into the fabric of greater injustice. Or lack thereof, thinks its narrator: “She saw in the warden a decent man, but maybe that was part of the problem. What decent folks were willing to go along with.”
Equality may be out of this humble restaurant owner’s grasp, but equanimity and dignity — given a little determination — is not. A tale of quiet thrumming grace.
*****
“Everything Is Going to Be Okay,” Gabino Iglesias.
Just as he is on social media, Gabino Iglesias as a fiction writer is a provocateur and an unapologetically progressive presence who demands that the unseen be seen, and this story is a prime example of how we’re better off for his far-reaching megaphone. But he’s too artful to be polemical; he’s much more show than tell, and his genius is in engaging us through engaging characters and urgent situations to let the reader arrive at an enlightened and empathetically enhanced place, a place where he’s already standing patiently, waiting for us to get there in our own time.
Here Iglesias expertly weaves a tapestry of poverty and pandemic illness into a darkly pulsing tale of high-stakes desperation. Pablo’s wife has COVID-19, and as much as he wants to be with her, his only chance to make enough money to get her into a hospital and onto a ventilator is to go fishing on a commercial boat for four days off the Texas Gulf Coast.
Of course, it’s not as a simple as that, nor should it be, but within the ensuring twists lies my one quibble with this otherwise masterly piece of timeliness and tone: I just couldn’t believe — warning, spoiler alert — that Pablo’s fellow crew member would be so indiscreet about his own cash stash. Nobody talks about where they hide their money, however much they may brag about having some. The story depends on that development, however, and the implausibility of it diminished the story a bit in my eyes.
That said, “Everything Is Going to Be Okay” is a hell of a lot more than okay. You can’t read a line like this and not feel the ka-chunk of emotional engagement kicking into high gear no matter your color or economic caste: “Pablo sees the worry in the captain’s eyes. Fishing in the Gulf of Mexico is a billion-dollar industry, but not much of that lands in their pockets. Folks like them catch shrimp, oysters, blue crab, and several species of finfish, but the big money happens elsewhere and ends up in hands that have never held a net or a fishing hook.”
That’s an unseen world that Gabino Iglesias makes us see, through his engaging form of literary journalism, and I for one am better for it.
*****
“Green Eyed Monster,” Charis Jones.
A master class in thriller craft, in that it lays out the factual basics of a conflict and lets the characters and their runaway resentments drive the action from there. It’s a thrilling story with twists that never seems “twisty,” that term that authors seem to think is a feature and not a bug, with its implication of a tale that breaks characters to schematic plotting out of fear that the audience can’t handle characters that assert their own agency — out of fear that failing to be “twisty” for more than a millisecond might send readers off to binge TV, often less than convincingly.
None of those contrived histrionics here. The author, in deft short strokes, lays out a multilayered conspiracy of malignant co-dependency between high-functioning but highly brittle scientists whose runaway egos have conveniently let them forget that they can’t control their own universes. Let alone the power dynamics in their corrosive marriage.
We already know who kills who; this is no whodunit. The pleasure comes in learning the how and the why, and the most delicious part is how deadly disaster could have — maybe — been averted had either been willing to step out of the stew of their own bubbling resentments for even a millisecond and see a better way through the Gordian knot that binds their fates together.
But of course they can’t, and all the surviving partner is left with is their own chortling delusions: “By the time I see a lawyer I’ll probably wish I’d kept quiet, but right now I just want you to understand. Tonight, for the first time, I didn’t envy Martina. I finally saw her as she was, the most helpless prisoner in the Rybek house. But I managed to free both of us. Even standing here in handcuffs, I feel liberated.”
All of this is done in darkly smooth prose with a darkly satisfying sense of an author in complete and confident command.
*****
“Potato Sandwich Days,” Preston Lang.
The other “homeless-guy story” in this anthology is, perhaps paradoxically, the funnier one and also the more empathetic one. Lines like the following feel liked the product of street-level experience and close observation: “Some guys would rather be in prison than live on the streets. Dan was not one of them. What he really wanted was to be a clock-puncher with a room and a TV, but that had all fallen apart quickly. By April, he was homeless and in violation of parole. The summer days were long and hot, and he had a few spots where he could sleep outside at night. He could feel himself losing touch with the world, becoming less and less useful or capable of accomplishing anything beyond surviving the day.”
It’s clear that Lang doesn’t see his character as a punchline, so he doesn’t use him as one in this standout story.
Lang (a pseudonym I’d love to crack someday) has a good deft touch with his novellas, and this story scales down perfectly to the short form. The setup is seamless, the plot is plausible, the pacing impeccable, and the dismissals faced by the homeless main character feel cruelly accurate. He gets his revenge, and in his mouth, I’m sure revenge never tasted so addictively nasty.
*****
“Frederick Douglass Elementary,” Aya De Leon.
More a piece of journalism than a fully dimensional story of mystery or suspense, this work nonetheless grabs the heart as much as the brain as a single Black mother does what she has to do to get her child into a Berkeley school where he’ll be safe, even if that means breaking a few laws to cheat a system stacked up against people like her. And even though she gets what she wants, that doesn’t mean that nasty surprises are not in store.
*****
“Infinity Sky,” Kristen Lepionka.
More enjoyable as an assemblage of passages than as a story; it’s far too busy and full of characters and flapping plot threads to follow without tiresome backtracking, and the ending is a flat tire without a spare in a blinding rainstorm.
But, those passages? Pretty tasty snacks, those. I can’t decide which I like best. Maybe “Now the Speed Dragons were heading her way. Jeramey didn’t need to meet them in order to distill this band down into their essence: there would be a Brad among them, and a Wesley or a Corbin, a weekday-afternoon radio DJ, and an ad agency project manager. The quiet-looking one in the fedora would be the only real musician of the group but he would avoid any kind of direct attention, terrified that someone would discover his terrible secret — bald at age twenty-eight.”
Or maybe “No way a guy with that much cash would ride on a shuttle bus, with its stained gray-brown seats and sticky floor and vague chemical blueberry deodorizer in the air, which gave the impression that someone had, recently, peed inside the vehicle.”
Or maybe “’Ohio fucking sucks,’ she announced as she exited the bar, to a few mutters of agreement and one whooping cheer.”
Or maybe: “The room was beige and claustrophobic. It had an anonymous quality to it, like a shared cubicle at the phone company. ‘I think time is messed up in Ohio. It’s stuck or something.’”
Or maybe …
*****
“Slow Burner,” Laura Lippman.
One of the best in this collection, or in any collection. It’s not just a story to be admired, but to be studied, perhaps even brooded over, over and over. Maybe it’s because, as of this writing, I’m a middle-aged man about to get married for the first time, and loving someone in a forever way yet feeling a little loose about this formal manifestation of it, but I’ve read this story about six times. And I find myself obsessing over whether I’m a Phil, the male half at the center of its secrets-and-lies marriage. (The title refers, on one level, to the husband’s secret burner phone, though perhaps there’s more than one in play in “Slow Burner.”) I have female friends. I text with them. Before I met my fiancée, I flirted with some of them, sometimes missing the part where they were responding but not flirting back because I couldn’t always see the difference. I don’t do that now, but neither do I expect credit for it; for part of the reason for that is that I just don’t want to, that my needs for affirmation or validation are already fulfilled at home.
But I sometimes wonder: Do I ever feel the need to feel new to somebody, and if so, could I confuse that with romantic feelings? (Do you?) I can intellectually empathize with that need, especially for men for accomplishment like Phil who have well-developed egos with good reason, even as I feel clean about it on a gut level (perhaps because I am a man of comparatively little accomplishment).
So why then does “Slow Burner” unsettle me so? Perhaps because it so frighteningly shows the start of the slippery slope that might lay in secret in every coupling. And because it shows how we pretend we’re not on that slippery slope even as we’re sliding down it. Because neither Phil nor Liz are bad people, just unwitting slaves to baser impulses, and not wholly able to check those impulses with their more rational selves. Because I could be a Phil or even a Liz, and because anybody else could be too, and because anybody who thinks otherwise is really kidding themselves, and probably a lot of us are kidding themselves. Because the murder in this story is probably the least disturbing thing about the story, and it’s plenty disturbing. Because it’s so well-written, with such depth of insight, that it appeals to me as well on a purely vicarious, voyeuristic level. Because it makes deft use of Greek tragedy in what is its own Greek tragedy. And because lines like these are such a depth charge in the dark basement of the heart:
“Liz loves Phil. She loves him so much that it hurts, watching him make a fool of himself in front of a young woman who clearly has no interest in him. How can someone not love you when you love him this much?”
“Phil needs to be new, and that’s the one thing he can never be with Liz.”
“Oh, Phil. You’re being played. Can’t you see? But Liz knows he cannot, that men have no understanding of the subtle ways in which women keep them on hold forever.”
“What they didn’t make was a child. By the time they got serious about it, Liz was almost forty, shades of Lichtenstein. Her body wouldn’t make a baby and Phil started the new company and adoption was hard and he met HW and who needs a baby when a twenty-seven-year-old wunderkind is batting her baby blues at you, explaining to you that a person’s ‘tech type’ wasn’t just a random collection of tics and social inadequacies, but a particular kind of emotional intelligence that can be harnessed to make companies more competitive and more compassionate.”
“This is what happens when a relationship is stuck in the second gear of ‘friendship.’ Chug, chug, chug. Charm, charm, charm. Has he not noticed that HW never responds in kind? Her texts are short and to the point.”
“They had been together ten years when Liz realized that the whole point of Solicitous Phil’s surprise quests was that he determined the agenda. They went where he chose to go, ate what he preferred to eat. By casting his plans as surprises, he was always in control.”
Small wonder Laura Lippman came to fame as a journalist first; this is literary journalism from the front lines, and as such it contains a fierce moral urgency for this moment. Or any moment. Or any person who doesn’t want their partner to see their text messages and struggles to articulate why.
*****
“Mr. Forble,” Joanna Pearson.
Like “Infinity Sky,” I found myself unsatisfied with this on a story level, with what seems like an overly ambitious and fussy structure of several points-of-view and a shifty back-and-forth-and-back timeline that feels like a writer using too many tools from a bag of tricks just because they can. I read “Mr. Forble” three times and I never felt that crisp snap of “Aaaaah, nailed it.” I got the plot, sort of, or maybe I just I think I did, but I definitely felt that the author was trying to outsmart me with subtle fishhooks of sly reveals trolling around in the muddy water of narrative.
But if “Mr. Forble” didn’t satisfy me as a story, it more than satisfied me as a collection of pithy psychological and character insights, all rendered in sharp, evocative prose that made superior use of figurative imagery. Among other things, it perfectly captures the impotent rage of a thirteen-year-old misfit boy who feels misaligned with every aspect of his world, from his peer relationships to his mother’s relationship with a man he doesn’t like in the wake of his father’s death. Or, really, any thirteen-year-old boy:
“He’d hit her hard, his fist landing on her face with a sickening smack. It had felt exhilarating, just for a moment, like a release of some pent-up bodily need—finally taking a p*ss after holding it so long, your whole gut ached. Something like that. Even after the guy hadn’t shown up, even with his disappointment that the whole thing hadn’t gone off as he’d envisioned. Hitting his mother hadn’t been part of the plan. But afterward he’d felt a physical high for a split second. She’d flinched, turning away and pressing a hand to her nose. When she’d turned to look up at him afterward, though, he’d seen the worst thing of all: she wasn’t surprised. She’d been expecting this from him his whole life. There was a resignation on her face that he recognized. Resignation, and dumb, bovine, unimpeachable love.”
“He was uncertain what he wanted now. For his mom to come and wrap her arms around him, murmuring words of comfort? Oh, my sweet Teddy, my special one. Even though he’d hit her. Hard. She loved him stupidly and could not help herself. Teddy attributed this to some fixed rule of evolutionary biology, the cell’s love for its cellular line: bulls**t. He hated her for it, hated himself for craving solace from her. It felt pitiful, the way he lapped up his mother’s soothing — something written into his genes, a dumb biochemical inheritance over which he also had no choice. Maybe she would understand implicitly, not even expecting him to apologize.”
“Doug of the graying hippie ponytail and all-season Tevas, with his kabbalah bracelet and therapy-talk. Everything with Doug was about appreciating dialectics or wise mind. It was all enough to make you want to punch him in the face, an urge which Teddy had always resisted.”
“He’d watched Doug tighten his arms around smug little Emmeline. Emmeline with her straight A’s and summer musical camps and too-cheery voice. Emmeline, who sang to animals and said hello to every passerby, like a nauseating cartoon princess.”
“Michael was an avid and jealous student of the signs of puberty in others. His own underarms were still perfectly hairless and smooth, like nectarines, but he’d learned to laugh and deflect.”
Sorry if I’m giving away too much of the store here, but I love these observations so much. So smart, so insightful. I remember at thirteen being sad, seething with anger that seemed to have no foundation and yet every foundation, feeling unseen and unseeable. Joanna Pearson, somehow, sees, and we’re all smarter for it.
*****
“The Killer,” Delia C. Pitts.
Though the sly subversive nods to Ernest Hemingway’s classic short story “The Killers” — and its cringey racism — are pretty obvious, at least to me, this story carves out its own path, as much as in its plot as in its more enlightened take on racial identity. (In the end notes, the author expands more on her intention to turn “The Killers” inside-out for her own purposes.) But savor the Easter eggs — George, in this story, is a Black man, while Burt, the counterman, feels like a pretty clear nod to Burt Lancaster, star of the 1946 film based on the Hemingway story — before feasting on the features that give this story its own identity.
Lines like these tell one story on the surface and another in the subtext: “Our noisy arrival altered the racial balance for everyone in the diner: three Black adult strangers and a brown-skinned baby girl tipped the scales. No way to predict how the locals would feel about us.” Because, as we come to learn, the fates of that foursome are entirely dependent on the decency of a stranger to them — and, as we know, today’s that something you can’t ever count on, especially in a “battleground” state like Virginia, where “The Killer” takes place.
*****
“Wings Beating,” Eliot Schrefer.
Have you ever gone on a vacation that’s been paid for or at least heavily discounted, only to find that everything about it is icky and tacky and ugly around its edges, from drive to get to the hotel to the hotel itself to the people who populate it? Have you ever never truly understood how you felt about something culturally polarizing until you were forced to confront it in the form of someone you love? The appeal of this wonderful stories like in the bet its placed on the universal empathy of its experiences, and in my eyes at least, it’s a smart and successful bet.
In “Wings Beating,” a father and his (presumably) gay thirteen-year-old son score the aforementioned tacky Florida beach vacation via a prize on a game show, and almost everything about it is a minor-key disappointment, from the valet who wishes him a good afternoon “like his mom just made him say it” to the room, which leads to this observation that should have any seasoned road warrior nodding along: “The room is perfectly clean. It’s also perfectly stale, like a mock-up that was never meant to be lived in. While we slot our clothes into drawers the window air-conditioning unit rattles and chugs, goes quiet, rattles and chugs, goes quiet. I open the blinds, see the license plates of the cars parked right in front, the gas station on the far side, and close the blinds again. It’s a third-place-winner sort of joint, I guess.”
It's all an external echo of the internal discomfort the narrator-dad feels, being alone with his sexually ambiguous teenager at a time when he and his mother — divorced from the dad — are a tight and impermeable unit: “He and his mother have always had plenty of melancholy in them, and I’ve never been able to do much about it for either one. They’re just not sturdy, but my own dad made me be sturdy above all else and I’ve come to realize that sturdy isn’t an especially healthy thing for a person to be.” The narrator may not fully know how he feels about homosexuality, but he’s more sure about how he feels about his son, and soon he comes to see how the latter can be a vehicle to enlightenment about the former.
The micro-aggressions are just a warm-up act for the story’s macro-aggression: A couple of tech bros in a restaurant who mock the effete mannerisms of the narrator’s son. That’s bad enough, but worse is that the narrator sees something of himself in them: “Not that I think they’re going to start an actual fight—they just want to make us feel sh**ty for a while so they can feel un-sh**ty together. I get it. I’ve done it before.” And you get the feeling that what he does later in the story he does as much out of disgust for that version of himself as he does for the version of himself in the form of a thirteen-year-old boy.
The story at the point turns into a delicious revenge fantasia, but perhaps not exactly the one you’d expect, and I won’t spoil the delicious surprise. Suffice to say that “Wings Beating” delivers on dual levels: as a satisfying story, and as a satisfying series of sharp-eyed, sympathetic observations about the passive-aggressive painfulness of a world not within our control.
*****
“90 Miles,” Alex Segura.
This tale, to me, illustrates the difference between an important story and a great story. It’s important that we understand the humans, and human desperation, behind the desperate floating journey through shark-infested waters between the Cuban coast and the Florida coast. We’ve heard about it in news reports but sometimes we need the sheer horror of the ordeal to be driven home to us in a more emotionally urgent way. Alex Segura’s story does just that in a way that feels authentically lived.
That said, that’s all the story does. It’s something close to a polemic, with one-note character schematics (in lieu of characters) and a squarely-on-the-nose moral pushiness to it that makes it feel like the literary equivalent of eating uncooked kale, something to keep chewing on and chewing on without ever being able to swallow it in a way that satisfies the taste buds or the belly. As such, it feels a little like a missed opportunity, one that makes me wonder what could have been had it been shaded with more character complexity, or something that lent emotional engagement to the cast beyond the extremity of their circumstances — something I know Segura, from previous work, is more than capable of.
(And lines like “He saw Rigoberto’s eyes bulge open, a look of surprise and hate steaming off his eyes, like the exhaust from an old Ford” needlessly clunk on the reader’s ear.)
I realize some may see it as poor form, or impolite, to take a competent story with such a correct heart to task for its perceived literary failings. But the best tales of moral urgency manage to enlighten as well as entertain, and the “entertain” part? In my opinion, it just isn’t there.
*****
“Land Of Promise,” Brian Silverman.
Brilliantly conceived and confidently executed, this story offers a today’s-news-cycle-fresh spin on the semi-classic tale of the hero who is also a heel.
In this tale, Len, who owns bars around New York, may be about to pull the trigger on leaving his marriage for his mistress when a bomb blows up a subway station, killing the mistress and turning Len info a hero when he pulls the bodies of several survivors to safety — in his frantic search for the mistress. Cell-phone video of his heroism is everywhere, but the context of the heroism reveals the deception to Len’s wife even as the city insists on celebrating Len as something like a saint.
Brian Silverman does an expert job of making us agonize with Len as he decides what he can live with, and what he can’t, and how that choice, once made — if ever made — will manifest itself. Nowhere is his dilemma more agonizingly unavoidable when the wife begs Len, whatever he decides, to promise her and their children this much: “Don’t humiliate us by telling them the truth.” If that doesn’t rattle your emotions with the force of a bomb in a crowded subway ….
*****
“One Bullet One Vote,” Faye Snowden.
A perfect example of an important story that is also a great story because it gives us fully dimensional characters whose nuances deepen the emotional engagement for readers while fully awakening their brains. These characters aren’t “types” ginned up to plug and play into systemically oppressive circumstances for a cheap contact-outrage high; these are people of pride and bravery and foolishness and wisdom trying to thread a needle through the nonexistent eye of a stacked deck, to mangle a metaphor (something Faye Snowden is too good a writer to ever do).
Willie Mae thinks she has a few cards to play in her small Louisiana hometown when, in the summer of 1964, her northern-raised son-in-law proposes she be the first Black person in her parish to register to vote — and then actually cast a vote against the will of virtually every white person. Once she manages to track down the registrar, who tries to hide from her in comic fashion, and then pass an equally comical series of qualifying tests designed to trip her up, the real danger is made apparent. The sheriff— who Willie Mae delivered against his mother’s will, who has secrets Willie Mae keeps — makes clear that her son-in-law will die if she sets foot in the courthouse to cast her historic vote. What’s more important: principle or preservation?
The ending will surprise you, and gut you, and you may surprise yourself by nodding along and agreeing, as I did, that it was the only ending possible.
All that makes for a great story, but what really lifts up “One Bullet, One Vote” is the cracked-leather-skinned wisdom of sadly lived experience that infuses every page and passage. From the start, you are happily parachuted into its time and place: “Hitting on womenfolk may be okay where he came from up north, but striking a Southern woman in her mama’s house in Byrd’s Landing, Louisiana, in early ’64 was liable to get you an unscheduled meeting with a pan of hot grits.”
And that’s all before the real conflict kicks in. As the sheriff, shaken but unmoved by Willie Mae’s persistent resilience, sadly notes: “I can’t say you’re welcome. You should know that if you do vote, you’d be the first Negra to vote in this town. There’ll be trouble as sure as sunshine in June.” And the menace, as heavy as the moisture in the Louisiana air, intensifies from there as Willie Mae recalls what happened to her husband when he bucked the white system long before: “They burned him first. Alive. Then they strung him up and cut pieces off him so they could remember it by.”
By this time, the reader’s heat and heart are as fully engaged with this story as their overheated adrenal system. And the horror of the ending in no way nullifies the validity of that pleasurable glide that goes to the heart of a wholly satisfying reading experience — one that expertly balances edification with entertainment.
*****
“Let Her Be,” Lisa Unger.
Lisa Unger is an author whose works seem — to me, anyway — to be designed to bypass the brain and shoot, heroin-like, to the heart of the nervous system: everything, as much as I can tell, is about churning feelings and chemical reactions. (And it works, as she’s one of the more durably popular authors in the contemporary thriller genre.)
This story is meant to roil you with rat-a-tat pulse points with lines like “It’s amazing how fast life drains, how the light around you dims, and that indefinable force that keeps you moving, striving, wanting, loving—it just slips away. A shade. A trick of light” and “That feeling—nothing to do with her or with me really. That miraculous lift of the heart, that buzzing in the brain that is wild, romantic love. If I’d lived, I thought in the waning light, if I could have just found a way to let her go, I might one day feel that feeling again.”
This approach isn’t for me, as I prefer my head to be invited into my reading, but it’s legitimate for those lucrative legion readers who prefer emotional engagement to all else. I just think bypassing the brain along the way makes this a lesser kind of engagement, a cheaper, more transitory and less reliable one, one that loses most of its potency with subsequent reads. (I mean, I can’t help it that I have a head, and that lines like this irritate it: “But thoughts have a life of their own, don’t they? They’re not always ships on a river. Sometimes they’re gremlins.”)
But enough of that. The story is this: A young man, a standard-issue Performative New Yorker writer-type, is distraught at apparently driving his girlfriend into the arms of another man. He attempts to kill himself, and has to deal with the messy aftermath of yet another failure, and winds up doing so with a friend of the former couple.
This is not only important but universally relatable subject matter, as — if we’re all being honest here — we’ve all felt the twinge of suicidal ideation at our biochemically bottom-est — and I appreciate Unger doing her level best to render it with equal parts empathy and sympathy. (Though I’m less convinced by her attempt to penetrate the darkest heart of a dark young man’s mind; this particular example seems to be performing even unto himself in a way that just didn’t have the crisp snap of lived male authenticity to me.. Though I’ll concede that New Yorkers are about as relatable to me, a native of semi-rural Washington state, as space aliens.) That gives rise to a few good sharp reflections, however, such as “Anisa and I—we were happy. Not just Instagram happy. We were Sunday-walks-to-the-market, inside-jokes, turkey-chili-Tuesday, soul-baring happy. We were fight-and-make-up, rub-each-other’s-feet-while-we-watch-TV, go-out-at-ten-to-buy-her-tampons-without-a-second-thought happy. We were the real deal. True love.”
That leads, however, to a part of the story in which even the overheated emotional nature of the story is overtaken by an absurdly “twisty” plot that bends and eventually breaks the characters to its wheel beyond all plausibility or pleasurability. And I found myself flipping quickly through this absurdly overlong part, interested only in the outcome and barely at that, because I was tired of being trapped in the heads of these preening, pathos-soaked narcissists, still performing, still refusing to be real to themselves or each other even after very real things happen. And still refusing to engage with my head in hopes of grabbing every other part of me, and not succeeding.
I didn’t believe a bit of the last half of “Let Her Be,” nor did I think these characters could be so clever and yet so stupid by sudden turns, and still maintain a necessary suspension of disbelief. Your mileage may vary, of course; you may be better able to slide into the slipstream of Unger’s fictive dream on a surge of emotions. But I can’t imagine anybody capable of having a head and a heart and every other body part will find satisfaction in this story, which is not aimed at either the head or the heart with lines like “Hope leaves me, a lantern floating into the sky” and “Sometimes regret is a bitter meal you have no choice but to eat.”
And I submit that if you’re being included in a collection that presumes to collect the best of the best, you need to hit all available targets as a prerequisite.