GennaRose Nethercott‘s new collection of prose fiction arrives riding a wave of fanfare for her previous work. The Lumberjack’s Dove (2018) is a book-length poetic parable chosen by Louise Glück for the National Poetry Series, and Thistlefoot (2022) is a propulsive magical-realist novel about a pursuit across centuries, set partly in Vermont. Nethercott, who lives near Brattleboro, also wrote the lyrics for an enthralling album called Modern Ballads, which features her neo-folkloric episodes of love and anguish performed by New England-based musicians such as Lula Wiles, Arc Iris and Rose Polenzani. Nethercott is herself a performer who often accompanies readings from her books with puppetry and projections.
In Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories, she has found shrewd ways of kneading together the weird capriciousness of folk myths, monster fables and ghost tales. This collection adventures down the foggy, torchlit paths made by precursors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Italo Calvino and Angela Carter. Yet most of its 14 pieces aren’t shaped like “stories” in the usual sense of the term. Rather, many of them are montage-like assemblages with minimal narrative, more akin to prose poetry.
The marketing copy for Fifty Beasts is torrid, perhaps meant as a parody of publicity-speak. This book, we’re told, is “about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, ravenous yearning: the hunger to be held, and seen, and known. And the terror, too: to be loved too well, or not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be recognized as the monstrous thing you are.”
Nethercott has found shrewd ways of kneading together the weird capriciousness of folk myths, monster fables and ghost tales.
That pumped-up verbiage notwithstanding, Nethercott’s writing is for the most part more witty and playful than terrifying.
For instance, the title sequence, “Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart,” is a bestiary, a form of allegory with medieval origins. Nethercott’s version is a whimsical field guide with, yes, 50 descriptions of imaginary creatures, ranging from a few sentences to several paragraphs, each accompanied by a phantasmagorical drawing by Bobby DiTrani. A sliver of a frame story links these entries, involving a trio of “florists” identified only by botanical pseudonyms (Larkspur, Ghost Pipe and Phlox). Here is a typical segment:
The Wrip-Wender is a two-headed snake, each side wet-toothed with fatal venom. When the Wrip-Wender reaches mating age, one head will fall in love with the other. It will spend a fortnight writhing against the earth as that head thrashes toward its twin. Eventually they will meet. Fang will meet throat. Desire will meet body. One head will poison the other. Both sides will die.
In many of these pieces, a Beast or its victim has a mortal escapade due to hunger or yearning, often resulting in one body devouring another. Metaphorically, these are about the allures and perils of love.
One of the reasons we turn to literary fiction and poetry is to have our hearts broken wide open, which readers know as a genuine physical and mental sensation — being sundered, emotionally, by the cumulative power of a story in which we can see ourselves.
But, despite their author’s claim that these creature portraits will “break your heart,” heartbreak is scarce here. The “Fifty Beasts” are clever contrivances, made by a talented wordsmith fooling around with imagistic puzzle pieces. Since it doesn’t unfold like a sequential story, “Fifty Beasts” might be more effectively delivered as playing cards, like a newfangled sort of tarot.
“A Haunted Calendar” is an almanac with cryptic annotations, where again the trickiness of the entries’ devised format supersedes a cohesive story:
Day 9 A corn-husk doll. A familiar song you whistle without noticing. A pile of peaches rotting, uneaten, on the table. A journal with the pages blacked out. The same song, again. A name that sounds like yours. A name that doesn’t.
Day 10 Ghost (verb)
When you think someone is smiling & waving at you so you wave back but they are actually waving at someone behind you wait no they are not smiling, they are yelling, they are pointing desperately behind you, they are crying now, you turn around &
“A Diviner’s Abecedarian” proceeds like an alphabetical compendium of spells. This piece has a more developed narrative through line, implicating a group of preadolescents who conspire to torment the “New Girl” at their school.
VIDEOMANCY
(divination by films)
On the night before we kill the New Girl, the six of us go out to the movies. We buy small popcorns and boxes of Junior Mints. The movie has something to do with a bus driver who stumbles on a Masonic treasure, but we aren’t watching for plot. We are watching for the subliminal stills that flicker between the frames. So quick, no one else sees. Halfway through, Xavier Martins leans over to kiss the one of us with the weird mole, and we all feel his lips graze her chin. We barely pause, the hidden movie stills flick, flick, flicking past.
A few of Nethercott’s new stories do summon a heartrending response. These go beyond being displays of linguistic cunning to offer engrossing narratives that probe the depths and risks of human relationships. “Dear Henrietta” uses the form of a letter from a betrayed woman to her betrayer and replacer, gradually disclosing how secrecy creates a stench, “a stain on the clean air.” In “Possession,” three companions and a rooster search for a dear friend who has vanished, and the supernatural aspects of the tale heighten the intra-human connections and their consequences. “A Lily Is a Lily” offers a ghostly encounter as tender and plausibly truthful as an intimate revelation between lovers.
But on many pages of Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, the author’s adroit writing dispenses not penetrating connections but confections, like a meal composed mostly of desserts.
This reader was reminded of a passage in Nethercott’s “Fox Jaw,” where the narrator laments:
The story has no purpose. At least, not one I can identify … Purposeless stories don’t remind me of you, and more importantly, don’t remind me of myself. They just leave me alone with words slapped end to end in constant vibration, like those perpetual motion toys made of stainless-steel balls on strings. Back and forth and back and forth, without destination.
Nethercott will appear at Booktopia 2024, running Friday through Sunday, April 26 through 28, at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center. northshire.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “Cryptic Compendium | Book review: Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories, GennaRose Nethercott”
This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2024.
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