Willful Creatures: Stories
This new collection has the feel of a sequel: it’s less resonant overall. But Bender does succeed with a few fanciful setups such as the one in “Dearth,” a story about a passel of potatoes that appear in a woman’s cast-iron pot one morning and return daily, despite her attempts to get rid of them. After they develop toes and fingers, she accepts them as her brood. Then, in a moment of doubt, she buries them alive. “End of the Line” similarly engages and disturbs: a lonely man buys a tiny human buddy; for dinner he offers his pet “a drop of whiskey inside the indented crosshatch of a screw.” Bender is adept with such details, but this story really takes off when the little man grows irritating and the big one responds with brazen cruelty. In “Ironhead” a pair of pumpkinheaded parents mourn the death of their son–who was born with the titular household appliance up top, rather than a pumpkin. What’s surprising is how Bender can make you care for these creatures, even if their real-world analogs are almost too obvious. “The pumpkinhead family sat together at the cemetery,” she writes, “and the mother kept uncovering dishes of warm food so she could release steam on his grave, because she wanted to give him voice, to give him breath again.”
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(Little, Brown)
In the face of such horrific parenting, the daughters come off as heroic. Belly is a drunk prick, yet he’s their father and they love him for that. They repeatedly forgive his bad behavior because they hope for at least a glimmer of love in return.
(St. Martins)
