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melanie_page's review
5.0
Casey Hannan’s blog, should you visit it, suggests the style of writing you will see in his collection Mother Ghost. He recently wrote, “Josh told me to do something about the brown recluse. I did something.” Hannan is a writer who implies violence. This same type of implication is the title and theme of Mother Ghost. It’s unclear what the ghosts want or do in some stories (I was often fascinated by their unique forms and occasionally failed to sympathize with the haunted as a result), but they do appear in various manifestations: people living whom we fail to see, the long- or newly-dead, a memory or voice, or the living who are terror-stricken.
If you’ve read the description of Hannan’s collection, you’ll know it focuses mainly on a gay male (the oft repeated character Pith) coming out to his parents. A collection that speaks to current social concerns, Hanna writes protagonists who can be difficult to get a read on--again, the art of the implied--but I almost never worried for those boys/men. They were brazen and, at times, seemingly unaffected. In a rare twist in which the mother is the narrator, she remembers, “Pith told me he was gay when he was in high school. I told him he was lucky. My parents would’ve hung me up in the barn with the tobacco. Pith said, ‘I’m sorry, Mom, but these aren’t the good old days.’”
Many of these stories express the concerns of the gay community but still contain unexpected plot found in less traditional fiction, something more gothic, perhaps. In the most gothic of the stories, “Lake Mouth,” the characters are mothers and aunts with children in tow who are affected by the ghosts of the nearby lake. Those ghosts enter their stomachs and change their communication. An aunt explains that the boom of a fighter jet overhead is “what ghosts sound like when they’re not sitting in your stomach. If you put your head down in the lake, you can hear the ghosts screaming like a really big shell put to your ear.”
Hannan crafts his stories so well, always implying, that when he does write what’s happening you almost can’t believe it. Two young men step out of a house full of people having an orgy. When they spot a deer on the road, they laugh at the awkward way the deer walks. The first-person narrator ends the story in a slow, dream-like haze:
Truly, Hannan’s collection is one you will speed through, as his style has a peculiar balance--of NOT always showing, in addition to not telling--that makes the characters unknowable but deep, creatures yet humans, grounded in reality but cold to the touch. There wasn’t a single story I didn’t love and feel moved by, a superhuman feat in a short story collection.
If you’ve read the description of Hannan’s collection, you’ll know it focuses mainly on a gay male (the oft repeated character Pith) coming out to his parents. A collection that speaks to current social concerns, Hanna writes protagonists who can be difficult to get a read on--again, the art of the implied--but I almost never worried for those boys/men. They were brazen and, at times, seemingly unaffected. In a rare twist in which the mother is the narrator, she remembers, “Pith told me he was gay when he was in high school. I told him he was lucky. My parents would’ve hung me up in the barn with the tobacco. Pith said, ‘I’m sorry, Mom, but these aren’t the good old days.’”
Many of these stories express the concerns of the gay community but still contain unexpected plot found in less traditional fiction, something more gothic, perhaps. In the most gothic of the stories, “Lake Mouth,” the characters are mothers and aunts with children in tow who are affected by the ghosts of the nearby lake. Those ghosts enter their stomachs and change their communication. An aunt explains that the boom of a fighter jet overhead is “what ghosts sound like when they’re not sitting in your stomach. If you put your head down in the lake, you can hear the ghosts screaming like a really big shell put to your ear.”
Hannan crafts his stories so well, always implying, that when he does write what’s happening you almost can’t believe it. Two young men step out of a house full of people having an orgy. When they spot a deer on the road, they laugh at the awkward way the deer walks. The first-person narrator ends the story in a slow, dream-like haze:
“You startle the deer, though, and it leaps into the intersection, hitting a car full of orgygoers just back from a beer run. Some of them are already naked because they can’t wait to taste a stranger, but the only thing they taste now is the blood and the glass and the shame that comes from being naked during a travesty. The deer is dying too, so it keeps kicking someone in the face through the windshield. Teeth crack like vibrating dishes. I keep on the front porch. You never know what you’ll do when don’t know what the fuck to do. Someone says, “Help. Me.” So I pull out my phone like I’m easing a gun, like maybe someone else will make the call first, but I realize, between puffs, there’s no one else around who isn’t slowly dying.”Even if this moment from “Trigger Shy,” which is just over two pages, seems ludicrous, there is a true, beating moment there when someone knows what he’s supposed to do--it’s logical, he’s seen it on television and in the movies--and when it’s his turn to make the call, his logic is reversed: call friends first and then paramedics. The boundaries of what a reader will believe are pushed, but the authentic voice leads the reader into that cold, numb space in which the narrator has entered.
Truly, Hannan’s collection is one you will speed through, as his style has a peculiar balance--of NOT always showing, in addition to not telling--that makes the characters unknowable but deep, creatures yet humans, grounded in reality but cold to the touch. There wasn’t a single story I didn’t love and feel moved by, a superhuman feat in a short story collection.
bashbashbashbash's review
4.0
Four of these stories knocked me flat. The others were good, but these, to me, were the kickers. The first and last were previously published elsewhere, the two others were unpublished before this. These are all packed so full I can't really describe them well so please excuse me for making marginal sense at best:
Soft Monsters: My first ever Casey Hannan story, and still one of my favourites – I've reread it many times and I never get tired of the suit like grocery bags, that paintings "celebrating, in some way, the freshness of fish" (this always makes me laugh), the soft monsters of the title, the curator's hands inspecting the narrator's mouth.
Egg Child: One from Pith's mother. Not a kind woman but someone with a kind of clarity about her own brand of unpleasantness. The slapping fight on the beach. The horrible friend for whom she drowns the cat over the phone. "All the while, those other boys put my son in boxes and carry him away."
In the Work: Starts with, "Three bodies are in bags lined up largest to smallest on metal autopsy tables." I wish I could type up the middle, it's the best part. "Knives and the goddamn people who use them," scars that are chewed on, stuff that goes deeper than that but I don't want to blow the story for you. It's too good. Finishes, "My headlights hit a horse fence and the field beyond. A herd of horses runs at the fence. I hold my breath. At the last second, the herd turns."
Horse Street: This story has too much to hold. Including, the concluding line: "I put some sticks in the grass and pretend you can catch a horse before a horse catches you."
Looking forward to more, for sure.
Soft Monsters: My first ever Casey Hannan story, and still one of my favourites – I've reread it many times and I never get tired of the suit like grocery bags, that paintings "celebrating, in some way, the freshness of fish" (this always makes me laugh), the soft monsters of the title, the curator's hands inspecting the narrator's mouth.
Egg Child: One from Pith's mother. Not a kind woman but someone with a kind of clarity about her own brand of unpleasantness. The slapping fight on the beach. The horrible friend for whom she drowns the cat over the phone. "All the while, those other boys put my son in boxes and carry him away."
In the Work: Starts with, "Three bodies are in bags lined up largest to smallest on metal autopsy tables." I wish I could type up the middle, it's the best part. "Knives and the goddamn people who use them," scars that are chewed on, stuff that goes deeper than that but I don't want to blow the story for you. It's too good. Finishes, "My headlights hit a horse fence and the field beyond. A herd of horses runs at the fence. I hold my breath. At the last second, the herd turns."
Horse Street: This story has too much to hold. Including, the concluding line: "I put some sticks in the grass and pretend you can catch a horse before a horse catches you."
Looking forward to more, for sure.
helenmcclory's review
5.0
Salty symbolic flashes. See my full review here: http://schietree.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/endless-reads-review-mother-ghost-by-casey-hannan/
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