Review: Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana
Jacob M. Appel
181 pages
Black Lawrence Press (2016)
Read this if you like: Robert Olen Butler, Matthew Cheney, Juan Villoro
tl;dr summary: A study in the craft of writing short stories, with 10 stories that each have a different lesson to teach.
I’ve been on a short story collection reading kick lately, less for the sake of entertainment—even though I do enjoy reading short stories, on the whole—but more as a craft study since I’ve been writing a lot of short stories of late. And, from this kind of craft standpoint, I’m not sure I’ve read a more productive collection in recent memory than Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana, because every story in this collection has some kind of a craft lesson to teach to readers.
The first story, “The Butcher’s Music”, is a masterclass in how to set up and execute a surprise twist in literary fiction. At the start, it seems a fairly typical family drama kind of story—Rita, a butcher, has her ordinary life interrupted when her sister Tammy, a renowned classical cellist, comes to town for a surprise visit. It’s only after Tammy’s arrival that the story twists onto its real trajectory, in a moment that is as surprising for Rita as it is for the reader and heightens the stakes dramatically.
Something else Appel has a knack for is finding the exact right image, even in grotesque descriptions. This is demonstrated in “The Butcher’s Music”, too, with the description of the dead baby that’s the “color of uncooked crab”, and comes up again at the start of “The Punishment”, when the reader hears about the narrator’s childhood slaughter of most of a flock of peacocks. The major lesson in this second story for me, though, was how to effectively put the screws to your characters and generate tension by making their lives as difficult as possible. Throughout it, Patzi is trying desperately to do the right thing as a surrogate parent for her grandson—and, every time, her best efforts only serve to make things worse.
The opening of the third story, “Pollen”, is an on-page lesson in how to start with background information but not have it feel like an info dump. It accomplishes this by keeping the passage in voice and dropping the info in an off-handed way that doesn’t try to hammer in the emotional impact. It helps that the voice reads very accurately as a teenage girl—she has that vaguely psychopathic mean-girl vibe, in both her actions and how she describes and justifies them, and this adds an extra layer of tension and interest to the story that is very productive.
Every story that follows offers a similar kind of valuable craft nugget. In quick summary, in my reading, these are:
- “Boundaries” – How to use setting complications to make a “will they won’t they” love story actually fresh and interesting
- “Coulrophobia” – How to effectively write a precocious child’s perspective without it feeling too cutesy or too adult
- “Saluting the Magpie” – How to smoothly integrate character and relationship history into a story without needing to go into full flashback
- “Fata Morgana” – How to stack and nest conflicts and imagery to build layers of meaning and history into a short story
- “Hearth and Home” – How to make a character’s lack of action feel like a conscious choice that gives a story energy
- “Counting” – How to create a sense of dread and danger predominantly through description and ambiance, without any on-page violence
- “Silent Theology” – How to hint at the possibility of an unreliable narrator without drawing too much attention to it, in a way that feels natural to the story
In a more over-arching sense, one thing I appreciated about this collection was the variety of the voices. There’s a good mix of first and third person POVs, and the story narrators range in age from teenagers to grandmothers, both men and women, from a varied array of backgrounds and life circumstances. Most impressively, all of these voices feel like real, fully realized individuals who have lives before and after what’s shown on the page. That’s another lesson to be learned from this book, in my mind: how to craft a distinctive character predominantly through the voice in a very small amount of on-page space.
This strikes me as a “writer’s collection”—not that the stories aren’t interesting, because they are. But the elements feel intentionally crafted in a way that feels like it was written for an audience of fellow wordsmiths. Just one more reason I’d recommend this collection to any short fiction writers who want to study the craft done well.
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