Book Review: Daddy’s

Lindsay Hunter's debut collection is a tackle box full of strange objects and gothic tales.

By Laura Pearson
Published: November 23rd, 2010 | 9:55am

Lindsay Hunter's debut story collection, Daddy's, is packaged as a bait box. Open the lid, and her visceral stories lure you in: slimy, translucent, like nightcrawlers wriggling on hooks. They’re southern gothic tales situated in greasy kitchens, malls, seedy motels, and pancakes houses (among other places). They deal with with sex, violence, dysfunctional families, and spray cheese (among other things). The black-and-white photos scattered throughout the book reveal the contents of daddy’s tackle box, each tray containing some weird object: chewed gum, arrowheads, a frog, a whoopee cushion, an empty can of tuna, an Old Maid playing card. Besides complementing the text, these pictures give the book a “cabinet of curiosities” feel. As you “lift” the trays (turn the pages), you wonder what else lurks beneath.

Hunter’s specialty is flash fiction (she co-founded the Chicago-based reading series Quickies!, where each participant is allowed to read up to four minutes, max), and it’s a powerful form of storytelling in our age of shortened attention spans. In Daddy’s, she condenses epic tales—rising action, climax, denouement—onto a few pages. Then there’s her detached, matter-of-fact tone juxtaposed with her often brutal and brutally awkward subject matter (car accidents, dissatisfying sex, junk food binges), which adds an extra layer of creepiness.

In a story called “Out There,” a father ditches his young daughters in the desert, “a place where people come to burn cars, a place where abandoned dogs eat sand or each other," intending for them to find their own way home. It’s a strange rite-of-passage ritual and almost instantly the sisters get separated and lost. Here, as elsewhere, Hunter shows rather than tells. She describes everything, the dull glow of the moon and how one character can only curl up and concentrate on her shoes (because they’re “a fact" and “indisputable”) as the wild dogs close in.

In addition to her knack for condensing plot structure, Hunter understands economy of language. She selects words carefully in order to maintain the quickness and ferocity of each story. Thus, almost every sentence packs a wallop (ie: “He watched the news, the free movie, the scrambled-porn-channel oil painting.”). Some of the story titles aren’t so evocative (“We,” “Us,” “Let,” “Note") but given the potency of her super-short prose, that's really not an issue.

In one of the collection’s most stirring stories, “The Fence,” a lonely married woman derives specific pleasure from the jolt of an underground electric fence. She routinely ventures to the edge of her property, clutching her dog’s shock collar. When the jolt comes, it’s “a tiny knife, a precise pinch. Like fireworks.” Similarly, you may venture through the high-voltage stories of Daddy’s expecting a shock. What you may not expect is how much you’ll enjoy the experience.

About the book:

Daddy’s

by Lindsay Hunter

featherproof books

340 pages