More than a decade ago I read Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. I was repulsed and mesmerized, and I have been searching for that perfect mix of perversity and passion ever since. Mary Gaitskill would do a pinch but was often too dry, intellectual; Chuck Palahuik seemed too boy's club. Flannery O'Connor worked in desperation, but even her brand of high lonesome seemed to lack the disturbing world of carnival creepy I was craving.
But then came Suzanne Burns' Misfits and Other Heroes (Dzanc 2009). In this debut story collection from Burns, a poet, the reader feels like she has stepped into a sideshow of little men, big men, extra-handed men, women who eat nothing, women who eat glass and dirt, and women who cook—a lot. What sets Burns apart from her pulp contemporaries is her lyrical, sensual use of language and the fact that, although her freakish, desperate characters live on the verge, their situations are full of the dark, familiar problems of the human condition. The mirror may be in the funhouse, but that's us in it.
The appropriately nameless narrator in "Tiny Ron," the opening story, tells the reader that "[T]he women who admire Tiny Ron have no idea how hard it is to be married to the world's smallest man." Aside from practical considerations ("I had never slept with a man who knew how to turn a finger cot into a contraceptive"), the narrator must deal with mental and physical abuse that come with the smallest man's huge, fragile ego. Sound familiar? The narrator, unfortunately, is in a prison of her own making; although she hates the abuse, the attention she receives as the wife of the small man is worth the trouble. What makes the story so special, however, is the narrator's and Tiny Ron's understanding of their "littleness" inside, and their use of marriage to massage their self-esteem: "The way I figure," Ron says toward the end of the story, "the more we focus on each other, the more we forget to hate ourselves." Modern love, indeed.
Many of the women in Misfits search for their self-worth in the eyes of others, even if the eyes are wax, or prosthetic, or otherwise. In "Tourists," a forty-something volunteer at a wax museum develops an unnatural attraction to the status of giant Robert Wadlow, the eight-foot cinema star of early Dracula films. In "Optical Illusion," a woman convinced she's becoming invisible falls in love with a man's prosthetic eye, even having a relationship with him to be closer to his unwavering, nonjudgmental glass orb. Others rely on the traditional avenues of female strength. In "Flambe," women living in an apartment building leave elaborate desserts outside their doors in the hopes of capturing a suitor's eye.
Sometimes the familiar formula is tweaked, as in "The Interest of Marcia," my personal favorite. Claire moves to a small town to escape the nihilism of her big-city friends only to be repulsed by the Stepford charm of her new neighbors. That is, until she meets Marcia, an overbearing, square peg who seems to be the only thing genuine in the town, including Claire. When their friendship is suddenly terminated, Claire, desperate for the validation of someone, pulls out all the stops to win back the only woman she loved to avoid.
Burns sets most of the stories in Misfits on the coast of her hometown of Oregon, in the black hole of towns where the smell of "fried clams and beach tar" permeate in one's nostrils and possibly one's pysche. The stories are also woven together by Burns' lyrical, sugary language, where people's minds "glisten like a maraschino cherry." Stories here are not a straightforward affair; they are spun together like cotton candy. But however sweet, bright, and bubbly Burns' confections may appear, there is a hidden, rotten center, a vortex where the repulsive entices and the enticing repulses. I, for one, couldn't be happier.—Jen Michalski