The Girl In The Flammable Skirt and Other Short Stories

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I originally read the short story The Girl in The Flammable Skirt in my first creative writing class. It was a strange story, but after we unpacked the symbolism it became something beautiful. Years later, I've gotten around to reading the other stories, and unfortunately I didn't find any of them as poignant as the title piece. Like Drunken Mimi and Legacy, some of them where just a little too odd to make sense of.
I enjoyed Fugue and the way Bender wove the stories together, along with the symbolism in that piece. The Girl In The Flammable Skirt holds up after all these years.

View all my reviews Besides this anthology, I'm currently also reading Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, and I'm finding it delightful. As the name implies, the purpose of this collection is to showcase stories where the author takes a well-known trope, and flips it around. Some of these are obvious, and some of them are not. For example, The Refridgerator in the Girlfriend by Adam-Troy Castro seems to be a nod to a comic book trope that involves violence against women to further the male protagonist journey. It's not uncommon for fans to refer to their favorite female characters as being 'fridged' when they are depowered, unjustly killed off, or put in ridiculous scenarios (ex. Powergirl is depowered, magically impregnated, made vulnerable to unprocessed natural materials... like sharp sticks). Despite the long history of dead women shoved in fridges, this made me think more of the Sexy Lamp Test. To quote the immortal words of Kelly Sue DeConnick, "If you can take out a female character and replace her with a sexy lamp, you're a fucking hack." When the protagonist girlfriend in The Refridgerator in the Girlfriend has a refridgerator installed in her body (apparently a normal and safe thing in this story's universe), she does come close to being more of a thing than a person to her lover. Delilah S. Dawson seemed to pick menstruation as her trope, and my Goodreads comment on the story reads something like, "Loving The First Blood of Poppy Dupree. A wonderful mix of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and 'Are you there God? It's me, Margaret.'" I'm definitely going to come back and read that again. There's enough to unpack there for a whole blog post.

A Head Full of Ghost

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was upset that I had picked up another book where either everything was a result of mental illness or supernatural interference. Lately, I've been running into quite a few of those, and they just aren't my thing. While demonic possession and mental illness both have the same root fear of not being in control of one's self, I'm not looking for metaphors about inner demons. I want actual demons.
While I don't feel that Tremblay picked a side, there are a lot of other things that I think he did right. I liked how he approached the story from different perspectives (Merry's retelling vs. Merry's blog post), because that was very interesting. I loved that there was a reality TV show about Marjorie's possession, and that was such a great way to flesh out and further explore the Barrett family. By the end of the novel, you do feel like you know them, and your head is full of ghost.

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99 Brief Scenes From The End Of The World

99 Brief Scenes From The End Of The World by T.W. Grim
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

After hearing about this on the nosleep podcast, I really wanted to like this story and at first I did. For some readers the changing perspectives kept everything fresh and interesting. For me it made things a bit confusing, especially because I didn't read this in one sitting. I like to think I can balance multiple storylines, but Grim was overambitious with everything that he wanted to do and trying to fit it all into one story. I feel that it fell through in many places.

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Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

Dumplin' by Julie Murphy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dumplin' focuses on sixteen year old Willowdean Dixon. Willowdean lives with her mother (a former Miss Teen Blue Bonnet), she has a job at the local fast food joint where she works with her crush, Bo. For whatever reason, Will can't bring herself to tell her best friend, Ellen, about the growing relationship between her and Bo, even as the two begin a sort of summer romance.

Thankfully, the novel isn't completely focused on Will and Bo. The protagonist deals with the loss of her aunt, her mom's repeated involvement (and the town's fixation) on The Miss Blue Bonnet pageant, her changing relationship with her best friend, and body image. A combination of these pushes Will to enter the local pageant, and surprisingly, that's a small percent of the book. Considering how much of the marketing is 'fat girl enters a beauty pageant!', I really assumed Will would be getting into it much earlier in the book and that it would play a bigger part. I'm grateful that this wasn't a book about a social reject showing everyone that she was beautiful on the inside, or winning the love of a conventionally attractive boy. I really think that Julie Murphy made Will a believable teenage girl. Sometimes it frustrated me, but that's a good thing. I think more often than not stories about fat girls make us into people who have the singular fault of not being conventionally attractive. Julie Murphy told it like it is, making this a wonderful and refreshing read.

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