I am delighted with the review of Hellkite in this month's Midwest Books Review by Lisa C. Taylor
Geraldine Mills' new collection of short stories,
Hellkite, is
brave and uncompromising. Breaking stance with the common theme of
exploitation of women by men, the female characters that inhabit the
world of her stories reveal themselves through infidelity, mental
illness, abandonment, and on occasion, sheer evil. From an angel who
appears in the body of a man jumping on a trampoline, to the hellkite of
an ex-wife, her characters dwell in a place without ordinary
boundaries, where a life of predictability and comfort may be an
elaborate deception. The collection is unsettling in the best possible
way as it challenges the status quo, the basis of institutions and
relationships that the characters (and ourselves) come to trust. As
metaphor for the present turbulent times of upended financial
institutions, corrupt politicians, houses in foreclosure, and
individuals who disappoint and sometimes devastate each other, the
collection reminds us both of our vulnerability and the necessity to
look beyond the obvious for answers, or perhaps the true questions.
When the young man in 'The Street with Looking-Glass Eyes' becomes
responsible for his suddenly agoraphobic sister after a terrible
accident claims their parents, he brings the world to her each day
through stories:
...he searches out everything that might have a story
hidden in it. Something he can bring back home in the evening. A moment
in time swallows this character, his sister, and outside, the life that
might have been his but instead is slowly ebbing away.
The rich language of Geraldine Mills' stories is otherworldly. In
'Foraging', a adulterer named Lazarus is thrown out by his wife after her
gift of a class in avoiding adultery fails to dissuade him from the
practice. When his heart fails, and he has a heart transplant, he
becomes an entirely different man, a man who craved the green of
chlorophyll, Little Gems, Cos, Romaine, in their gloriously-wilted
existence. Like all of the stories in this tightly woven collection,
this story dips and turns into an alternate universe of canaries who
perch on broomsticks and a transplant patient who develops unusual
proclivities. Nothing is literal in the world of
Hellkite; the stories
existing instead in a universe of tropes, a world built on sand and
flood plains.
Here is a writer in control of her character's paces, from the first
moment shading his eyes from the sun that was already half way to its
own death to the conclusion when his coat flapped against the bruised
sky and brazier of moon. Like these hapless characters, the reader
travels unpredictably at a place in time that reinforces the notion that
every action has a reaction, and life, in all its complexity or horror
will doggedly push forward.
In the end, the stories in
Hellkite are testimonies to both naivete and a
human willingness to endure in the worst of times, in spite of
deception or bad fortune, as if around the corner, a light might
illuminate the reason for the pain, the only sign out there to show he
wasn't on his own on this side of the world. Tenacity and misplaced
trust wrestle with each other, proving at last that it is the story that
endures, the process of giving a voice to that unspeakable, intangible
part of being human, not to heal but to uncover.
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