Totems as Dreams

When I was a kid, some of my favorite books were those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. You know, the ones with the creepy, stringy, splattered-looking illustrations. They looked like the characters had been cut up the back and skin stuffed full of blood and pus and big lumps of lard, with stringy wet pieces of meat caught in some of the seams. They seemed like monsters, but never in a less-than way—they were always more-than. More-than monsters. More-than stories. They were nightmares with people sewn inside.

I hope Lindsay Hunter will not be too offended if I say that when I read her debut short story collection, Daddy's, I had vivid flashbacks to those illustrations. Her characters, you see, remind me so much of those terrible pictures—dreadful, monstrous skin-sacks with the sorriest people you ever met inside. Hunter's stories, though, are not meant to simply scare you—though they'll do that, some of them. They're much, much more than campfire tales or monster stories. They're ghoulish people in domestic nightmares, and you feel as sorry for them as you do repelled by them, sorrier maybe than you could ever feel for ordinary people. Their strange bodies and minds seemed ill equipped to deal with the stresses and strains of modern life. And the result is something bizarrely touching and grotesquely sad, as in Hunter's surreal story "That Baby" about an infant that attains the size and needs of a grown man: and me more proud of Levis than I'd ever been and so getting up and walking to the car, Levis saying Honey? Levis standing up to see me better, saying Honey, stepping over the boy and out of the sandbox, me getting into the car and locking the doors, key in the ignition, Levis just standing there, the late afternoon sun giving him a glow, just standing there with his fists at his sides, looking like a fat little man more than anybody's baby, a little fat man beating his chest now, me pulling out onto the road, Levis wailing Honey, wailing Pickles, getting smaller and smaller in the rearview until I took a turn and he was gone, my heart like a fist to a door and my breasts empty and my nipples like lit matchheads.

There is a noble beauty in these wild stories about a wild breed. Hunter's stories read as if People of Walmart had a baby with the Oedipus cycle. As if Jerry Springer's guests threw a party and invited Samuel Beckett's protagonists. There's a sad inner sort of knowledge in the often stream-of-conscious musings of Hunter's main characters. For example, in the story "Note," we get a letter from one sister to another, a list of the things she hates, soaked with all the frustrations and anger and jealousy and also the young wisdom she is full of:

Cats, but not kittens. Arm hair. Cutting the grass on Sundays 'cause Daddy didn't have no sons. Thigh chafe. Sun-In. Hair that has Sun-In in it. Hair from my sister's head and finding clumps of it in the drain or in a tangle breezing around the bathroom floor. Anything orange-flavored. I hate, I said, and then I corrected myself by crossed out hate and writing despise above it, but not crossing it out so much she couldn't see the word hate, I despise shit in other people's teeth. Namely pepper corns and chewed-up bread products.

This is the language of longing, of leaving something behind, of a new kind of praying. Totems as dreams. And this is, ultimately, what makes these characters and their stories so real, so vivid and deserving of empathy. It is the language Hunter writes in. It is never low, never merely crude, never thrown away. It floats, it shines, it sings, whether a giant baby is smearing his poop in his mother's bed...