EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED - Wells Tower - Fiction

Wells Tower's stories have that McSweeney's, fiction-workshop feel to them. And that isn't a bad feel. Two of the stories are the same tale, told from the different points of view of two of the main characters. One is the story of a raid, narrated by a Viking who doesn't want to vike anymore. There are the usual suspects--adultery, a young girl being seduced by an older man, an older man preying on a young boy. In one of the most disturbing but surprisingly unexplored passages, a father driving his daughter and his ex-wife's new husband home from camp is told that his daughter's disturbing habit of falling asleep on car rides with the gearshift in her mouth is just something she does to calm down. Try to get a mental image of your daughter's new stepfather telling you that her fellating part of a car is no big deal. There's something a little exploitative in these stories, as there is in the conversation between a stepmother and son, in "Executors of Important Energies," in which she complains to the young man that she wishes she could go back and have sex with everyone who ever offered. The story "Door in Your Eye" is built around the interactions of a father and daughter, each determined to make the other uncomfortable--the daughter through her fearlessness, and the father, inexplicably, by bringing up his sex life again and again. One gets the sense that these are not quite real people.

But that's okay! For all the concern and hand-wringing over the departmentalization of the short story, the workshop effect and the over-edited, purposely quirky feel of the story-writer's story, these are great. These are the real thing. These are rude, petty, self-absorbed people who throw away money, and kill their pets by accident, and are just a little pissed off that their date with a new man ends abruptly when the man's son is molested in an outhouse. In a way, these are updated fairytales, with evil stepparents, where the prize to be won is a new, more confident and popular self. You can think of them as exercises for a budding writer.

If you like the types of stories that make it to the BEST AMERICAN NON-REQUIRED READING anthologies, or ST LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS WHO WERE RAISED BY WOLVES or a more masculine, gruff Miranda July, give Wells a try.