How Could She Say That? She Looks Like Someone's Mom!

I feel a little sad when someone purchases my work and is unhappy with it. Fortunately, I usually only hear from folks who have nice things to say. But I'm open to criticism, as long as it's, well, reasonable.

Recently, I received this (unedited) email from R.S.:

__I WILL NEVER EVER PURCHASE ANOTHER ONE OF YOUR BOOKS...THE LANGUAGE IN IT WAS FILTHY..I CERTAINLY WILL NOT PASS IT ON TO ANOTHER IT IS GOING IN THE TRASH CAN AS OF NOW__

Okay.

Here's what I have to say about language my work:

When I write, the world I create is populated by those twitchy things called characters. I don't want to get all goofy and mystical--I don't think of my writing as particularly mystical--but I don't actually have all that much control over what my characters say. Sure, I can pull back the language (or violence, or sex) if I think it's starting to feel gratuitous. But I don't need to do that very often. My characters are a pretty disciplined bunch. They hardly ever--to offer a useful phrase--break character.

Many of my characters are young. Or they live at the edge of society. Or they have bad manners. Or they're violent and angry. Or they like to show off. Others wouldn't let butter melt in their mouths. They have careful boundaries and their speech habits demonstrate those boundaries. They live by the maxim "pretty is as pretty does." Or it just doesn't occur to them to curse any more than it would occur to them to belch out loud. As a human being, I'm more often in the second category than the first, and most of my characters are similarly moderate in their speech and behavior.

I know that there are elegant practitioners of language who excise their books of highly flavored dialogue. I admire them. But they don't write my books. My characters tell their own stories, and if I fret too much about how they're told, those stories will suffer and I'll run the risk of boring us all to death.

My friend Charlie Huston has since changed his website, but it used to open with a statement about how his site was for grownups, and that readers who were offended by the language used there needed to go elsewhere. I feel much the same way about my work. I do not write for children. My fiction may be more surreal than realist--but I try to keep it at least realistic at its heart. Some folks will enjoy. Others may not.

Thank goodness there are plenty of books out there for people to choose from!

("Hate Mail" logo cribbed from pendragon343.com/. No, I'm not a pagan. But it's a darned fine logo and oh-so-appropriate, don't you think?)

May I Suggest....

In another part of my life, I review books. I don’t get to choose the books I review and occasionally don’t like them very much. But since The Handbasket is my personal playground, I feel free to say whatever the heck I want—particularly about books I do like!

Months ago, my friend the U. K. publisher Jen Hamilton-Emery sent me a book of stories, BROKEN THINGS, by Padrika Tarrant, one of Jen’s Salt Books authors. From the first sentence of the first story, Darling, I was swept into Tarrant’s bizarre, surreal world:

“Until today, I always pushed a pram, just in case I find a baby.”

The reader knows immediately that something is not quite usual, here. This is no tidy domestic drama. In fact, it’s a story about a woman who adopts a dead dog out of the gutter.

These are small stories, miniatures of feeling and experience like the short, animated films by Tarrant’s hero, Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Faust). They are portraits: of the woman who believes a weeping seagull is taunting her, of the exasperated man from the housing council who is about to evict another woman from her home and is blown up at the end, of Lorna, “the last of the wise women: a mid wife to feral cats, and neck-wringer of injured things.” So many of the stories are written in first-person and speak with a single, vibrant, disturbed voice.

Tarrant’s stories are images trapped and corralled, temporarily, and put on brief display before they slip off of the page and back into the wilds from which they came. Technically, though, they are not so much stories as vignettes—the aforementioned portraits. Seldom do they strive for transformation, and at times I felt cheated when the words ended. I felt like the stories were ended before they were fully told. But, brief as they are, they are unique in the world. Each one is a like a baroque pearl--never perfect (what would perfect be, and would we want it?) but having a rough, glowing beauty that deserves to be noticed.

Another Jen, Jen Jordan, is the brains behind EXPLETIVE DELETED. If your mom is the coolest, least shockable, saltiest mom on the planet, this is the book for her!


As I read this star-studded anthology, I found myself smirking at least once, laughing out loud a number of times and, yes, skipping the occasional paragraph because I’m kind of a chicken.

The expletive in question is the F-word, of course. The stories are unflinching tributes to all that is murderously vulgar and defy the simple “crime” label. Standouts include the freaky-brilliant Oleg Steinhauer’s story Hungarian Lessons, and Anthony Neil Smith’s Find Me, which reads like Robert Olen Butler and Harry Crews got together to write the most sensitive porno film ever, and Ruth Jordan’s Little Blue Pill, which makes me proud to be a girl. Then there’s Laura Lippman and Charlie Huston who just can’t write a bad sentence. (If you haven’t read WHAT THE DEAD KNOW and THE SHOTGUN RULE, go and order them right now!) Ken Bruen and Delphine Lecompte both use voice to advantage to tell two very brutal tales. And Sarah Weinman shows that she owns creepy in Lookout, which puts a child in the picture in a most disturbing way. Really, the overall quality of all of the stories is consistently high. Also nasty—but in a good way.

F*%$ is such a versatile word. It can be expressed physically or emotionally, with affection or anger or viciousness. How interesting that Jordan has found commonality in all these stories. I think it’s the brutal nature of the word that expresses itself most vocally here. One would think that the sheer collecting of the word all in one place would do one of two things: either take the teeth out of it or overwhelm the reader with its presence.

I do find EXPLETIVE DELETED a smidge overwhelming. There’s an intensity of experience here that makes it a book to be read in small doses—to be savored as it were. (Then again, you might be ready to go all night! I'm sorry, I just couldn't leave that line alone.) But what I find most appealing, aside from the stories themselves, is the sheer audacity of the collection, the unbridled, uninhibited joy of it. Very in one’s (slightly reddened, smirking) face.