This isn't GennaRose Nethercott's first book, because she has a novel out, “Thistlefoot”, and a book length poem, “The Lumberjack's Dove”, neither of which I've read yet. However, this feels like she's been writing for a couple of hundred years and found the magic formula long ago. I think it's due to her being a folklorist, which means she's interested in everything, and she lives on the road as a performing storyteller. Her presentation is magnificent. I should add that, if I didn't know what an author called GennaRose Nethercott did, I would probably assume folklorist travelling storyteller. It's the most perfect name she could have for that job.
This is a short story collection, though there are only fourteen such pieces inside its covers, rather than the suggested fifty. The title is sourced from one of them, 'Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, which isn't one of my favourites but is the most substantial piece here and the one with the most obvious unusual structure, because each of the fifty beasts in its bestiary are accompanied by the suitably whimsical illustrations of Bobby DiTrani. Structure is clearly one of Nethercott's favourite things, because few of these stories follow what might be considered a traditional structure. She would frustrate high school English teachers marking her creations. That's a good thing.
The first hint at an unusual structure arrives in the first story, 'Sundown at the Eternal Staircase', because Nethercott keeps interrupting what June and Harebell, two workers at a weird roadside attraction, are doing to remind us of the many rules in place for visitors and employees alike. The Eternal Staircase is a character all of its own, made of mosaic steps that descend in a spiral down a football field-sized well, a character without a known history but enough documented issues that those rules are greatly needed. Don't stay more than three hours (you might not leave). Don't try to reach the bottom (nobody has). Don't engage with staff members who don't have pins (they are no longer staff members but they keep coming back). It's hard to tell which way is up and which is down in the Eternal Staircase and that's why it's hard for us to tell which is the start of this story and which the end. Structure again.
A more conventional unconventional structure comes next in 'A Diviner's Abecederian', which is exactly that, a list of twenty-six ways to divine things, one for each letter of the alphabet and each of which a group of seven sixth-grade girls use as they build up to murder, killing the New Girl from Sacramento. This is a delightfully matter-of-fact whimsy, with the girls distanced from us because they have no names, except descriptions like 'Friends' episodes: the one of us with braces, the one of us with the roller-skate shoes, etc.
What Nethercott is doing here is throwing us off. We understand reality, or at least our particular reality and we understand the rules that we have to follow to live in it, whether we happen to like them or not. So she breaks those rules. She recounts things not in one flowing story but through a connected set of whatevers that follow a structure she decides: the ABC, the bestiary, the days of a month in 'A Haunted Calendar' that each tell their own story, even though some are short as only a single line. That one doesn't have a flow, or at least if it does I didn't recognise it, but it does have a theme.
One of the rules we have to follow is the passage of time, so Nethercott subverts that. It's there in 'Sundown at the Eternal Staircase', because the story is as much a spiral as the attraction it talks about, ending when it begins and continuing to unfold in cycles. It's there in 'The War of Fog', as a fourteen-year-old girl chronicles history in what appears to be a land without time. The war of the title ends after nine days but it's both happened and hasn't happened yet. Is she in a time loop or does time simply have a different meaning there?
Some of these stories follow fairy tale logic, like 'The Thread Boy', a delightful tale about the boy created by a witch entirely out of thread, who travels the country and snags one of his threads on every character with whom he makes an abiding connection, eventually finding himself physically stuck because those threads are pulling him every which way at once. To me, it's about the power of love and memory and everything that isn't us in who we are and that's the theme of quite a few of the other stories too, like 'Fox Jaw' and 'Possessions'.
It also drives one of my favourite pieces here, the almost unbearably sad 'A Lily is a Lily'. Tristan is a young man from Connecticut who studies at the Sorbonne and falls in love with Lily. However, he has to come home when his visa runs out, so he manifests his memory of Lily into ghostly form and spends all his time with her instead. Things come to a head when the real Lily flies out to visit him as a surprise and he introduces them. This story carries a huge burden of emotion and it's likely to haunt me for a long, long time.
It would have been my favourite story here, regardless of how delightful the poetic prose in 'The Autumn Kill' happens to be. This one works in print but simply aches to be given a human voice, so if you can't conjure up GennaRose Nethercott to read it aloud to you, you should do so yourself. It loses out in the end to the final story in the book, 'The Plums at the End of the World', perhaps the truest fairy tale here. It stars a goat girl and a vampire and it speaks to what "monstrous" means. It's a glorious surprise to be delighted so many times over so many stories and yet for the last one in the book to be the best of them all.
I've missed out 'Drowning Lessons', about a young man who finds himself dedicating his life to the quest to keep his sister Sophia alive, given that water is drawn to her and she's already drowned thirty-seven times; 'Homebody', about a young lady who turns into a house; and 'Dear Henrietta', which is a folk horror story told through a deceptively benign letter, written to a supposed friend who stole a husband. It's blisteringly vicious and anyone with a brazier of revenge powering their hearts will absolutely adore it. There are stories I liked less than others, but there isn't a piece in this collection that drops below excellent.
I'm no professional folklorist, but I love fairy tales and the meanings they convey through whimsy. I'm also a huge fan of authors who write things that nobody else can and, as much as we can see a lot of where Nethercott's inspirations were sourced, she has a singular voice that doesn't seem to understand how not to delight. I'm sure these stories were carefully crafted over many draughts, but they make us think that we could meet a thousand authors in person but never remember any but her. I've met authors who are natural storytellers before, Joe R. Lansdale leaping out quickly as an example. I not only want to read Nethercott's earlier work and I'm thinking the better half may have a copy of 'Thistlefoot' on the shelf, but I want to hear her speak too. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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