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Hotter Than Hot
BOOK REVIEW by Shannon M. Stairhime
I’m not going to start stalking her. I’m not going to show up unexpectedly at
her doorstep, or pace back and forth in front of her building, wondering which
window is hers.
I’m not going to find out where she usually goes for coffee in the evenings
and position myself there, waitng, watching the door, hoping she’ll come. I
won’t pay the $19.95 for a background check on
the internet, just so that I can know. I’m not going to call her up,
pretending to be a telemarketer just so that I can see what she sounds like,
what inflection her voice takes on at 3:00AM. I won’t do any of that. But I’m
tempted.
There is something in Elizabeth Crane’s collection of short stories, When the
Messenger is Hot, that makes me want to know her. Makes me want to understand
the kind of mind that could take such cunning risks, perform such daring acts
of writing, and, all the while, maintain a kind of bald honesty. She isn’t
being tricky, or at least I don’t feel tricked. And that matters.
There is an energy to the stories—which range in effect from the magically
real, to the horribly real, to the humorously real, to the deliriously
unreal—that takes off from the first page. An intensity that strings them all
together, and it is built on the freshness and originality of the stories
themselves. After 100 pages of surprises—a story with only a fluid sense of
character, a non-existent and elusive “type,” but no real form, another story
about a woman who slowly, and literally, begins to vanish as she is taken over
by the actress who is playing her in the movie of her life, and a story based
entirely on a character’s, admittedly faulty fantasy, a persistent playfulness
with language that exists throughout the collection—you begin to expect the
unexpected. You are ready for her, and anxious to see what she’s going to come
up with next, and are delighted when she doesn’t let you down.
The stories themselves possess a kind of synthesis, a fusion of heartbreak and
humor. They are sad stories. So why am I laughing? That Crane can be both
heartbreaking and funny in the
same turn is a testament to her skills. She doesn’t allow the stories to be
bogged down by either.
It’s like eating five pounds of chocolate and then finding out it’s fat free.
Delicious and rewarding.
Entertaining, but not without the requisite “punch” that a lot of writers of
humor cannot manage.
Crane balances both aspects with a kind of skilled perfection that, yes, makes
me want to stalk her.
But, like I said, I’m not going to. |
