A while back, I read, and loved, Gennarose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot, about a brother and sister who inherit the chicken-footed house of Baba Yaga lore. It isn’t often I’ve liked one book enough to immediately add the author’s next work to my list, but that was the case with her new release, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, a collection of short stories.
From pre-teens navigating adolescence with obscure magic to a boy whose sister has drowned thirty-seven times to a trans-Atlantic love so strong that a ghost is accidentally born from the longing, the fourteen stories in this slim volume run the gamut. Nethercott’s miniature worlds are strange, sometimes eerie things, and many are wrapped in a kind of haze like you just woke up and can’t quite remember what’s real and what was a dream. The familiar and the fantastic are knotted so tightly it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins, but this doesn’t feel like urban fantasy or your typical magical realism; somehow, these stories feel organic, like they were already growing in the odd cracks in everyday life and were simply scraped out for the purpose of this collection.
Story collections are fascinating tours of a writer’s toolbox. In two stories, Nethercott uses encyclopedia entry-like forms to tell a story; in another, a calendar is repurposed as a narrative tool. Tenses and points of view are played with, skewed. Though many of the stories verge on the dark or twisty side of things, there really is a strong sense of playfulness throughout. It’s like watching shadow children frolic, or sprites dance, things that are having fun but can also devour you whole. At turns, Nethercott’s stories reminded me of one of my favorite story collections, Rafael Bob-Waksberg’s Someone Who Will Love You In All Of Your Damaged Glory. I was reminded, too, of Brian Evenson’s also-excellent Song For the Unraveling of the World. I think this collection, like those other two, will be one I return to time and time again.
In her acknowledgements, Nethercott writes that she wrote the stories in this collection while on tour for her first book, The Lumberjack’s Dove. Over those eight months, she traveled the country, met loads of new people, crashed on couches, and slept in her car next to dive bars. I’d imagine the experience was thrilling yet displacing at the same time, and it does seem like a lot of the stories in Fifty Beasts do feel untethered. But they also feel thoughtful and open, arms open in an embrace that carries with it as many roses as thorns.
Ring Reads 