These stories could be read in an hour, but to understand them, the reader should stop after each one, for the express purpose of thinking. Or rather, dreaming, for they are rather like dreams, these curiously tilted, somewhat wacky, often startling small stories.
I met the principal at a bar called the Eternal Cellar. I bet you can already picture how it looked: “dank” would be the best word to describe it. They kept the Jim Beam on the top rail. If you were foolish enough to put your hand on the bar, it stuck.
This is a collection about sexuality, belonging, the unexplainable compulsion and magnetism toward chosen lovers. It’s also about pleasure, agency, consent, and the marginalized female body.
A well-tended, predictable life, upended in seconds, seems altered forever.
…Habash trades in whales for altogether more mesmerizing imagery like cannibalistic octopi and an absolutely terrifying “frogman” right out of a Lynchian universe. These latter images contribute to a book that is a vivid, visceral experience, filled with all the sweat, blood, and excretions of a postadolescent dream state.
When they are not deciphering multilingual codes, interviewing suspects, competing with Inspector Scummington, and stumbling over corpses, they are surviving catastrophe aboard an “elegant cigar” shaped airship, braving rough passages in rowboats, steamships and schooners, and dodging bullets, tumbling animals, and an infamous killer known as the Noh Straddler as they ride the Trans-Siberian Railway.
The girls mimicked his voice when he spoke, squeaking at him in high-pitched, nasal tones. They flicked things at him: not only chalk, but bits of spit-sodden paper, corn kernels, bobby pins, and flaky, greenish balls made of snot. Once, after he’d handed back a set of exercises, Roda Kudondo sauntered up to his desk and shoved her notebook in his face, mumbling in a slurred mishmash she intended as an imitation of his Texas drawl. The class exploded in laughter, and Aaron, not understanding, ordered her back to her seat.
For Sarah, the past, present and future bond into a formidable wall of fear and dread. Her present physical security can’t dispel her inner exile.
My mother’s house was built into the side of the volcano, where it was green and too thick to take anything but the machete-cut paths. We were field-workers. That is, until the men in uniform came.
The “peace” to which Helen constantly refers is a condition of isolation, complacency, and self-satisfaction. And it takes the violent “disruption” of her brother’s suicide for her to recognize her own solipsism.