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Reviewed
by David Erlewine
Spencer Dew’s Songs of
Insurgency is hysterical and heartbreaking, often brutally
dark, rife with unhealthy sex, failures to connect, fetishes, injuries,
and death. The first story Blow involves a
male narrator listening to a phone sex girl explain seeing, on her way
to work, trees knocked down all along the Pacific Coast Highway. The
image of those downed trees, “plus the way she relays it, her sense of
wonder, her weary voice,” make the narrator “sad in a way [he] can’t
put into words.” So, he tells her to describe what sucking his cock
would look like. Blow ends
with this: “But then I decided I’d spent enough, hung up, and just sat
there alone thinking about the way that storm must have looked, coming
through, the big trees bending, their shallow roots pulling up from the
sand, trunks toppling, whole, then stacking up on top of each other
where they fell.” The final story –
Likewise,
Rise Up, All You Angels of Disquiet – involves a phone sex
operator and a narrator with an unresponsive penis and no idea where he
is calling from.
Songs
of Insurgency is filled with 21 other stories, spreading
out over approximately 100 pages. Though just averaging four pages a
story, do not expect a quick read. Dew hits hard and often, making the
reader go back to appreciate the sneaky brilliance. Getting a haircut,
a wounded man in The
Heart of It All, is called a “war hero”. The man’s friend,
“checking her new hair in a hand mirror, with some suspicion, says,
‘He’s just a civilian casualty.’” In The Sea Beneath, an
airplane engine “gives out above what were once the oceans of Kansas”,
and the passengers “groan and weep, pray, vomit into waxed paper bags”.
The descending plane is described from the point of view of those below
as “what must be an angel, streaking, white-hot and radiant, across the
sky, to arrow into the earth.” The narrator in Voodoo Pastoral hangs
out at a park with his girlfriend who obsesses about her father, “that
maybe the taste of his cock affected her adolescence”. She’s eating
licorice, ignoring the narrator, when he says, “Spring is insistent
with thoughts of suicide.” When she starts to cry he tells her “it’s a
quote from a poem, just to shut her up.”
Many of Dew’s characters and
stories relate to 9/11, its continuing reverberations. In one of the
collection’s most unsettling stories, Dogs of Goya, Velasquez, and
Cervantes, two yahoos cause a blackout in Ohio, which gets
blamed on “some vast, shadowy organization”. As a result, a Sikh store
clerk in Mansfield is beaten to death while an Akron ophthalmologist
awakens “to find his daughter’s terrier smeared across the kitchen
window and a note in his mailbox that said ‘America will not be
afraid.’” After
Constantina takes place during a season when “everyone
wanted to cut themselves” and “[e]veryone approximated depths of
suffering.” Something horrific has befallen the country: “People felt
bad about Los Angeles, but no one from our circle was in any shape to
give blood.” The narrator in The
Disaster Addict remains vigilant, waiting for “that voice
of panic going live under the sirens and screams.” He longs “for the
monstrous”, for “an anchor’s professionally practiced, transparently
false calm.” When he finally gets his wish – a porch collapses during a
college party half a block away – he is underwhelmed: “Such a letdown.
So small in scope. A miniature tragedy. A horror hors
d’oeuvre.”
Other stories pit men against the
women they date, fuck. In Cervical
Days, a man breaks down while being considered for jury
duty, so screwed up is he about his wife’s cervical cancer and her
affair with the daytime bartender “at what had been our neighborhood
bar.” The man agonizes of being “too terrified to eat your pussy, as if
you had gone contagious.” In The
Body Museum, a couple’s relationship falls apart while
vacationing in Mexico City. Their vacation turns into a series of trips
to a mummy museum, “led by a backward-walking docent down into the
claustrophobic vaults, snaking along halls of the well-lit dead, only
the most fragile of them behind glass.” The couple reaches “the point
where we could no longer speak, except during sex, when she told me
things to say, and that just can’t count.” She loses weight and becomes
“so sickly pale”. Instead of her eyes, he sees only the outline of her
sockets. He can’t touch her without thinking of all of the corpses. He
realizes “this was the only fantasy she and I ever shared: touching the
dead.”
Spencer Dew touches on suicide in a
number of stories, most prominently in The Exit Colony.
People flock to the colony to kill themselves, to “graduate” from life.
The narrator spends his afternoons wrestling corpses from the water,
complaining about a new kind of patient “with a competitive mindset,
approaching the situation like a contest, inventing new and creative
ways.”
The stories are not just death,
disconnect, and despair. Dew expertly delivers funny, memorable lines.
In Pay for Soup, Build
a Fort, Burn that Down, the female narrator knows her
weary and elderly mailman “would do anything” to eat her pussy. “He has
hemorrhoids, and his home life is not a good one.” The Heart of It All
features a Halloween-themed wedding where a Wolfman insists he’s
actually “‘an ironic reconsideration of Teen Wolf’”, Richard Nixon
makes out with a “purple-haired chick in leather”, and the bride comes
dressed as Sylvia Plath.
Read a story by this author on SpencerDew.com.
David Erlewine's stories appear in The Pedestal
Magazine, Keyhole Magazine, elimae, Word Riot, In Posse Review, and a
number of other print and literary journals. He is a fiction editor for
Dogzplot. He lives near Annapolis with his wife and children. He is a
lawyer, but honestly not that kind.
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Publisher: Vagabond Press
Publication
Date:
2007
Paperback/Hardback?
Paperback
First
collection?: Yes
Author
bio: Spencer
Dew lives in Chicago, where he is completing a PhD at the
University of Chicago Divinity School. He is a member of the Chicago Review
fiction staff. His stories have appeared in numerous journals,
including 3:AM
Magazine, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, Pindeldyboz, and Wandering Army.
Read
an interview
with Spencer Dew
Buy this book (used or
new) from:
Author's
recommendation: Small Press Distribution (SPD)
AbeBooks
Amazon
Book
Depository
Powell's
BetterWorldBooks.Com
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forget your local booksellers and independent book shops! Visit IndieBound.org to find an independent bookstore near
you in the US
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