Yazoo Clay
by Schuyler Dickson
Livingston Press ($17.95)
For as much freedom the format affords, writers rarely experiment as much as they should in short story collections. Short stories are miniatures to the novel’s mural; something as long as The Brothers Karamazov has enough space to include all manner of asides and diversions, so shouldn’t more sub-two-hundred-page story collections try to compete? It’s too often that I read a book of short stories that comes out to minor variations on the same theme, and in the worst cases, the same character with different names.
If you’re looking to read a real mold-breaker of a book, a rogues’ gallery of innovative, eclectic, and unnaturally good short stories, you have just such a rare flower grown in native soil. Schuyler Dickson’s book Yazoo Clay goes through quite the technical palette available from two hundred years of the formalized genre, and then goes on to mix entirely new and strange colors.
There’s a story that reads like an Absurdist dialogue drama. There’s a story about the terror of raising a teenage girl that features an AI inside the narrator’s mind. There’s a story about the familial pressure to procreate that devolves into horror. There’s a humoristic country tall tale about a man named “Perv Priester.” There’s a story about a woman who fixed her teeth and then blew herself up in a factory, and her husband who misses her. There’s a story that formats paragraphs in a way I could only attempt to describe as “cross-channeling.” There’s a grit lit story about estranged brothers that blow up a beaver dam. There’s a beautiful coming-of-age story about a love triangle between a professional magician, his wife, and his apprentice. There’s a story about a schizophrenic who tries to connect with a mute paraplegic. There’s a prose poem about the act of writing, filtered through a broken phone screen. The title story is about a sinkhole.
Laying out the general contents like this should be enticing enough but know that Dickson has strewn several dozen lines throughout these stories that hit you like a bundle of dynamite, for example: “I tried to invent the trick that would make her love me. She wanted to. I knew she did, but I couldn’t.” And there’s a certain punished but bighearted sentiment that runs through Yazoo Clay; maybe it’s what they put in the water around here, but I’m reminded of Larry Brown the way these stories drum every human emotion possible while hooking you along. Much like Larry Brown, Schuyler Dickson writes stories that are as fresh and enervating as they are heartbreaking, and I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t want to read a story like that.
