Friday, March 25, 2011

Rest Area/Clay McLeod Chapman/178 pp.

It's difficult for me to describe the feeling I get from this collection of short stories by Chapman; "disturbing" would be a good start. In some ways, they have a sort of Edgar Allen Poe quality to them. All the stories are written as sort of stream-of-conscious monologues by their narrators; looking back, I see very little dialogue in them. In fact, the author's biography says that he performs some of his stories onstage.
In the title story, a father strikes up conversations with travelers stopping at a highway rest area, telling them that he's waiting for his daughter, who just stepped into the ladies' room - months earlier. In "Fox Trot", an elderly woman is caught in a life-or-death struggle with a fox that has found its way into her house. "Rodeo Inferno" explains where rodeo clowns really come from, and what happens to them after the rodeo leaves town. In "Second Helping" a troop of boy scouts, lost in the woods, finds a new use for their worthless scoutmaster when food supplies run low. The thing-under-the-bed has some advice for the young boy above him in "Bladder Companion". "Chatterbox" relates the feelings of a ventriloquist's puppet when he discovers his owner has gotten married.
Amid all the gruesome tales, there are several really good, basic stories: In "Spoonfed", a younger brother takes care of his severely handicapped sister; in "The Pool Witch", three adolescent boys decide to finally face the lifeguard at the top of the water slide; and in "And the mothers stepped over their sons", a woman searches a battlefield for her son's body.

No comments:

Post a Comment