Winnipeg-born Susie Moloney first came to national prominence when Tom Cruise’s movie production company bought the film rights to her novel A Dry Spell in 1997, for a reported seven figure deal. Her other novels include Bastion Falls (1995), The Dwelling (2003), and The Thirteen (2011),and Things Withered marks her first collection of short stories. Each of the thirteen stories (and one screenplay) that make up the collection reads like an episode in a Twilight-Zone-esque series built on the premise of watching ‘normal’ people as they succumb or are subjected to darker and exceptional realities. Though the marketing bumpf on the book cover implies sensational drama and gore (“washing blood off the walls and making sure the children don’t tell”), these stories are more devoted to suspenseful twists than freewheeling horror.
One of the most interesting things about Moloney’s stories is the way that she deals with middle-class anxieties. In stories like “The Audit” and “Wife,” the demands of correct behaviour and paperwork drive the characters beyond their limits. Similarly, stories like “Petty Zoo” and “I heart dogs” touch on social anxiety and a parodic collapse of natural order in suburbia. Though the treatment of these issues perhaps gets a bit heavy handed (for example, the petting zoo rebellion that culminates in bloodshed in the Disney Store), Moloney’s understanding of middle class anxiety drives the most compelling tension in the book.
The first story, “The Windermere,” emphasizes the ordinariness of protagonist Anita, who struggles with job security in the patriarchal world of real estate as a result of her age. Moloney gradually reveals how Anita’s dissatisfaction with her lot in life leads her in the direction of a murderous coven that is conveniently taking over her building. Though the emphasis on Anita’s ordinariness is meant to be endearing, she also embodies stereotypical pettiness, and both positive and negative traits begin to feel a bit typical. Anita’s attributes become more obviously offset by the presence of violence and rage, but the horror elements feel disproportionately strong in comparison to Anita’s character, making the image of her a bit thin.
Throughout the book Moloney walks the line between producing the tropes of genre fiction and the attention to detail that makes a character individualized in literary fiction. It sometimes feels that, in an effort to get to the horror of the stories more quickly, things are spelled out a bit too precisely. For example, the way that Anita describes herself: “I am fifty-six years old and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to compete with prettier girls, slimmer girls, girls who sparkled.” A description like this is evocative and informative, but drifts in the direction of a type rather than an individual.
While Moloney is attentive to the everyday attributes in her characters, the contexts in which they are placed often threaten to narrow our view of them. With the exception of a few of the stories, almost every character is placed in a situation they are not strong enough to withstand (“The Human Society” is particularly harsh in its treatment of an alcoholic giving up his partner’s dogs in order to get a drink). One moment in “I heart dogs” is indicative of how characters in this book are constrained:
“Boys!” Terry called through the window all the way across. “How about quit with the banging? Would ya?” At that distance, her voice strained, sounded pressured, hard, unpleasant. She smiled broadly, benignly, in case they could see through the window, and they would see she meant no harm. But they weren’t looking. Had they heard her?
As a result of the structure of the stories and the genre conventions, there is a risk that the people in the book come across as “strained” and “pressured” in the same way that Terry does. It becomes difficult to keep hold of them as they are one after another reduced to the pressures of their context as well as their eventual succumbing actions. Like the boys in the quote above, it is often easy to feel that we know what we’re encountering, and we stop looking at the details as our source for evaluation.
The fact that Moloney puts this kind of hard pressure on her characters does not necessarily disqualify the merit of her approach, but it does make a balanced presentation a little more difficult to achieve. The final story “The Neighborhood, or, To the Devil with You,” narrated by a senior citizen who expounds on the arc of her hatred for her neighbour, stands out in comparison to the rest of the book in both scope and prose style. Here Moloney’s writing breathes a bit more and (just about) gets out from under the thumb of a genre twist. The slow but sure appearance of evil and deep-seeded hatred allows Moloney to introduce tension and complexity on a level that the other stories never seem to reach. Here Moloney deftly realizes a truly nasty and corrupt individual, and manages to use her cruel authorial scrutiny to her advantage by finding a way to let her character in on it. The result is like a collaborative effort, where the character’s victimization is blurred with complicity in a way that makes them satisfyingly (or horrifyingly) difficult to distinguish.
The title Things Withered alludes to decline, while the odious sepia-toned flower on the cover implies some tampering with withering as a natural process. Similarly, there is a systematic cruelty in the way that each character is pressurized and, while this does not completely overshadow the effectiveness of the stories, it implies that the ‘withering’ does not happen on its own. At its best moments the book draws attention to unappreciated and endemic issues of middle-class anxiety, and at its worst it is comparable to watching someone fry an ant with a magnifying glass.
ChiZine | 300 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1771481618
‘Things Withered’ by Susie Moloney
Book Reviews
Winnipeg-born Susie Moloney first came to national prominence when Tom Cruise’s movie production company bought the film rights to her novel A Dry Spell in 1997, for a reported seven figure deal. Her other novels include Bastion Falls (1995), The Dwelling (2003), and The Thirteen (2011), and Things Withered marks her first collection of short stories. Each of the thirteen stories (and one screenplay) that make up the collection reads like an episode in a Twilight-Zone-esque series built on the premise of watching ‘normal’ people as they succumb or are subjected to darker and exceptional realities. Though the marketing bumpf on the book cover implies sensational drama and gore (“washing blood off the walls and making sure the children don’t tell”), these stories are more devoted to suspenseful twists than freewheeling horror.
One of the most interesting things about Moloney’s stories is the way that she deals with middle-class anxieties. In stories like “The Audit” and “Wife,” the demands of correct behaviour and paperwork drive the characters beyond their limits. Similarly, stories like “Petty Zoo” and “I heart dogs” touch on social anxiety and a parodic collapse of natural order in suburbia. Though the treatment of these issues perhaps gets a bit heavy handed (for example, the petting zoo rebellion that culminates in bloodshed in the Disney Store), Moloney’s understanding of middle class anxiety drives the most compelling tension in the book.
The first story, “The Windermere,” emphasizes the ordinariness of protagonist Anita, who struggles with job security in the patriarchal world of real estate as a result of her age. Moloney gradually reveals how Anita’s dissatisfaction with her lot in life leads her in the direction of a murderous coven that is conveniently taking over her building. Though the emphasis on Anita’s ordinariness is meant to be endearing, she also embodies stereotypical pettiness, and both positive and negative traits begin to feel a bit typical. Anita’s attributes become more obviously offset by the presence of violence and rage, but the horror elements feel disproportionately strong in comparison to Anita’s character, making the image of her a bit thin.
Throughout the book Moloney walks the line between producing the tropes of genre fiction and the attention to detail that makes a character individualized in literary fiction. It sometimes feels that, in an effort to get to the horror of the stories more quickly, things are spelled out a bit too precisely. For example, the way that Anita describes herself: “I am fifty-six years old and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to compete with prettier girls, slimmer girls, girls who sparkled.” A description like this is evocative and informative, but drifts in the direction of a type rather than an individual.
While Moloney is attentive to the everyday attributes in her characters, the contexts in which they are placed often threaten to narrow our view of them. With the exception of a few of the stories, almost every character is placed in a situation they are not strong enough to withstand (“The Human Society” is particularly harsh in its treatment of an alcoholic giving up his partner’s dogs in order to get a drink). One moment in “I heart dogs” is indicative of how characters in this book are constrained:
“Boys!” Terry called through the window all the way across. “How about quit with the banging? Would ya?” At that distance, her voice strained, sounded pressured, hard, unpleasant. She smiled broadly, benignly, in case they could see through the window, and they would see she meant no harm. But they weren’t looking. Had they heard her?
As a result of the structure of the stories and the genre conventions, there is a risk that the people in the book come across as “strained” and “pressured” in the same way that Terry does. It becomes difficult to keep hold of them as they are one after another reduced to the pressures of their context as well as their eventual succumbing actions. Like the boys in the quote above, it is often easy to feel that we know what we’re encountering, and we stop looking at the details as our source for evaluation.
The fact that Moloney puts this kind of hard pressure on her characters does not necessarily disqualify the merit of her approach, but it does make a balanced presentation a little more difficult to achieve. The final story “The Neighborhood, or, To the Devil with You,” narrated by a senior citizen who expounds on the arc of her hatred for her neighbour, stands out in comparison to the rest of the book in both scope and prose style. Here Moloney’s writing breathes a bit more and (just about) gets out from under the thumb of a genre twist. The slow but sure appearance of evil and deep-seeded hatred allows Moloney to introduce tension and complexity on a level that the other stories never seem to reach. Here Moloney deftly realizes a truly nasty and corrupt individual, and manages to use her cruel authorial scrutiny to her advantage by finding a way to let her character in on it. The result is like a collaborative effort, where the character’s victimization is blurred with complicity in a way that makes them satisfyingly (or horrifyingly) difficult to distinguish.
The title Things Withered alludes to decline, while the odious sepia-toned flower on the cover implies some tampering with withering as a natural process. Similarly, there is a systematic cruelty in the way that each character is pressurized and, while this does not completely overshadow the effectiveness of the stories, it implies that the ‘withering’ does not happen on its own. At its best moments the book draws attention to unappreciated and endemic issues of middle-class anxiety, and at its worst it is comparable to watching someone fry an ant with a magnifying glass.
ChiZine | 300 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1771481618