Review: Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis

I don’t read short stories very often, but the back cover of Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis promised secrets, missing loved ones and dark humour, so how could I resist? And now I find myself feeling somehow not qualified to review this book—what do I know about short stories after all? (And what other gems might I be missing?) The 14 stories in this book all feature some kind of absence, from dead or missing wives to disappearing fathers and lost innocence.

My favourite story is probably the title story, “Vanishing,” which is about the disappearance of a local writer. What I loved the most about this story is how circular it feels, as if the writer’s disappearance somehow creates ripples both before and after the fact, as if not only does the past change the present, but the present also somehow alters the past. I don’t mean to make this sound messy or confusing when in fact it’s subtle and elegant and intriguing.

But it’s hard to pick a favourite when Willis manages to write not one but three stories in the second person that I actually enjoyed (when this is a device I generally loathe). Of the three, “Traces” is my favourite, which is about a wife addressing her husband’s mistress. (It didn’t hurt that the story was set on Salt Spring Island, which I’ve visited many times.) Although I saw the twist coming, that didn’t stop me from marvelling at how perfectly second-person narration fit this story.

The story that felt most true, that made me imagine it was autobiographical, was “Sky Theatre,” about an ordinary kid who is briefly pulled into the orbit of the most beautiful girl in her school. In fact it was two of the stories about kids, this one and “The Separation,” that seemed most real to me—as if Willis had inhabited those girls’ lives from the inside.

The only story I didn’t like was “This Other Us” about a trio of college students who live together until one of them suddenly moves out. What happens next is disturbing and I disliked being left hanging at the end, unsure of what was going to happen to the narrator. It felt
important that I know, because I hated one of the possibilities—the ending actually left me feeling betrayed.

Willis writes with a deft hand, often weaving back and forth in time, and sometimes, as in the title story, folding the story back onto itself in such a way that you rethink the whole notion of time as a linear concept.

In the end, I’m not sure I’m doing these stories justice. Let’s just say I highly recommend that you read them and see for yourself, even if, like me, you think you don’t like short stories!

Vanishing and Other Stories was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2009.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this book to review.
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Vanishing and Other Stories is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in August and September. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Booksie’s Blog • Eleanor’s Trousers • The Lost Entwife • Raging Bibliomania • All about {n} • In the Next Room • Cozy Little House • Rundpinne • Confessions of a Bookaholic • Life in the Thumb • Library Queue

Other reviews:

Cozy Little House • Kevin from Canada • Leafing Through Life • Mrs. Q: Book Addict • PANK • Rayment’s Readings, Rants and Ramblings • Sasha & the Silverfish • The Brown Tweed Society
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Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers edited by Judy Blume (a review)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of short stories; however, they can make great “palate cleansers” between courses of full-length books and I enjoy anthologies as they are a good way to discover new writers. This particular anthology, Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers edited and with an introduction by Judy Blume, also supports a good cause: sales of the book benefit the National Coalition Against Censorship and the collection was obviously put together to raise awareness of this issue. Judy Blume’s introductory essay was a bit of an eye-opener for me: in it she details her battle with the censors (which was going on when I first read her in my teens in the 80s), including the fact that she caved in to editorial pressure and changed a passage in her novel Tiger Eyes. She also pays tribute to a few of the folks in the trenches, including several teachers who fought against the censors at great personal cost.

As might be expected, all 12 contributors to this book are YA authors, only 3 of which were already familiar to me (Norma Klein, Norma Fox Mazer and Paul Zindel). Three of the stories stood out, although I did enjoy the other nine (they just weren’t as memorable). My favourite was “The Beast Is in the Labyrinth” by Walter Dean Myers, a moving story about a brother and sister from Harlem who escape where they come from in very different ways. The other two were notable only because I disliked them so much: “Love and Centipedes” by Paul Zindel and “Lie, No Lie” by Chris Lynch. Zindel has never appealed to me: I didn’t like his writing when I first encountered it as a teen and 20+ years later I still don’t. This offering is a grim story of cruelty to animals and revenge that lacks subtlety or humour. Lynch’s story about two very different boys starts off promisingly enough (I love this quote: “He provides me with the whoosh that makes the drag-ass parts of living more worth it; and I provide him with the vacuum of experience that allows him to still feel any whoosh at all”) but soon devolves into a disturbing tale of manipulation and nonconsensual gay sex. (And it somehow feels wrong to dislike these two stories so much when they’ve been published in an anthology against censorship—as if by doing so I’m colluding with the censors, even though that’s obviously not my intention!)

Despite my reservations, overall this book is a good read made all the more interesting because each story is followed by a brief one- or two-page commentary on censorship by the author.

For other reviews, visit these sites:
Children’s BookPage • Open Mind, Insert Book • Reading Rants! • Teenreads.com

You can also read Judy Blume’s introduction to this book on her website.

Finally, head over to this site for an interview with Blume:
Children’s Literature

Thank you to Aerin at In Search for Giants for sending me this book.

The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson (a review)

I don’t read short stories very often, mostly because I feel like just as I’m getting to know the characters, the story ends. As a result, I tend to only read short stories in anthologies (a great way to try out new authors without committing to a whole book) or in collections written by authors I particularly enjoy. The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson falls into the second category: I was first introduced to Wilson via his fantastic Hugo-nominated novel Darwinia, which won an Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association in 1999. As I had been feeling a certain “reading restlessness” recently (which meant I was having trouble concentrating long enough to commit to reading a full-length book), this seemed like the perfect time to try out this collection of nine short stories.

Although most of the stories in this book are set in Toronto (and the same bookshop is featured in several of them), they are not linked in a traditional sense. That is to say, they may all begin in a recognizable Toronto, but the deeper you venture into each story, the stranger things get—and each story is unique in its strangeness. Wilson slips easily from metaphor (such as mental illness as a separate city) to science fiction (in which it is literally possible to get lost in a parallel city) as well as from accepted scientific knowledge to plausible extrapolation. Many of his stories are grounded in science, but elements of mysticism and horror are also present in these stories.

It’s hard to pick favourites in this collection: all of these stories are dark, deliciously creepy and deeply satisfying. The only one I liked less, in fact, was the first one, “The Fields of Abraham,” the only story not set in contemporary Toronto (it takes place in 1911) and the only one to feature a plot that felt somewhat familiar (it is also the harshest story). I highly recommend this collection, which turned out to be the perfect cure for my reading restlessness!

For other takes on this book, check out these reviews:
From a Sci-Fi Standpoint • January Magazine • Steven Silver’s Reviews • The Groovy Age of Horror • The Horror!?

Storming Heaven’s Gate: An Anthology of Spiritual Writings by Women (a review)

Storming Heaven’s Gate: An Anthology of Spiritual Writings by Women edited by Patricia Vecchione and Amber Coverdale Sumrall is a great collection of spiritual writings by American women of all stripes, persuasions and colours. I mostly enjoyed every single piece, with only a couple of exceptions, and was introduced to quite a few new writers. My favourite pieces were those by Mary Karr, Sarah Rabkin, Joanna Macy, Lisa Vice, Sally Miller Gearhart, Agate Nesaule and Martha Gies. My only reservation about this collection is that I found the mix of fictional stories and personal essays a bit jarring at times (I wanted them all to be personal essays); however, some of my favourite pieces turned out to be stories. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in women’s spiritual experiences.

This was one of my favourite books in 2008.

(First posted on LibraryThing on February 13, 2008)