Buba’s Book Reviews: On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Title: On Swift Horses

Author: Shannon Pufahl

Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction/LGBT lit

Publisher: Riverhead

Publication date: 11/05/19

Rating: 7/10

On Swift Horses is a haunting and beautiful historical fiction set in the late 1950s. It follows the story of Muriel, a newly married waitress from Kansas who with her new husband, Lee, has set out to San Diego to make a new life. Intertwined with it and in parallel to it, is the story of Julius, Lee’s brother, a drifter, gambler, petty thief, and a gay man. Although she doesn’t originally know what it is about Julius that draws her in, Muriel recognizes the otherness of him that is growing slowly within herself and is fascinated.

The story is a coming into self-possession for Muriel, as she uses the gossip of her jockey patrons at her work to bet on racehorses eventually winning enough for build a home in California and start a future together with Lee, at least until she discovers that perhaps perfect domesticity is not at all what she wants.  Muriel is a woman who lost her mother young and cut adrift, follows the script that was left for her. She finds a serious young man back from the war and sets about building a world of obligations to tie herself down and build walls so that her life will make sense again. It doesn’t begin to become about joy until she discovers that the otherness she admires in Julius is in her too.

Meanwhile, Julius is a man only at home on the edges. The war and the difficulties he faced in the navy due to his closeted lifestyle have made him cynical and unwilling to settle. He spends much of the book fruitlessly chasing after his gay lover in a search that is both haunting and endlessly hopeful.

The book is a beautiful read, lyrical and evocative even as it takes the post-war idealism and scratches away the gilt, looking straight into the eyes of atomic tests, the rapidly chilling cold war, gay men struggling to not be constantly at the fringes, and women striving to be seen.

I admit that I spent much of the book in pleasant confusion, drifting along on the lyricism and sweet melancholy. I also despite my best efforts began to dislike Julius, I kept wanting him to take charge of his life, instead of repeating the same mistakes, but that didn’t happen, and honestly, I don’t think it should have, that’s not what his story was about. On the other hand, I was deeply engrossed in and enchanted with Muriel’s journey of self-discovery, her bald fearlessness, and her determination.

If you like historical fiction from this era I cannot recommend it enough, it’s really a peek behind the curtain of all the huge momentous happenings of the era into the smaller happenings of little lives that are just as momentous. I’ll also say I went into the book knowing I’d rather burn money than gamble with it, so while the window into the world of gambling and betting was fascinating it really only cemented my desire to never ever gamble.

Buba’s Book Reviews: Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

Title: Salt Slow

Author:Julia Armfield

Genre: Sci-Fi, Lesbian Literature

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Publication date: May 28, 2019

Rating: 8/10

I want to preface this review with the statement that I don’t normally enjoy horror. I hate how women become objects for punishment and titillating unnecessarily graphic violence. I often find the character’s decisions stupid and lacking a blind chicken’s sense of self-preservation.

Salt Slow, a collection of eerie, horror-tilted, speculative fiction short stories by Julia Armfield has none of the shortfalls that often make me put aside stories of this theme.

The titles include

Mantis

The Great Awake

The Collectables

Formerly Feral

Stop your women’s ears with wax

Granite

Smack

Cassandra After salt slow

All of these stories explore with lyrical sensitivity and raw feeling a different facet of uniquely feminine horror. Despite this, there is an undeniable sense of empowerment. There is also a delightfully bald-faced assumption that women prefer the company of other women as friends and as lovers. In a wash of books and horror where heteronormativity is not just the norm its a staple, this was a refreshing delight.

In these stories, women are not the beautiful punching bags of loved ones or masked men or horrors unspeakable. In these stories, girls metamorphosize from struggling disjointed girlhood into beautiful monsters themselves and devour the boys pressuring them for sex. Women are allowed to embrace the grotesque and heedlessly follow an all-woman band of beings, guised as humans, whose siren songs urge their all-girl roadies to turn Maenad, like the wine and blood mad followers of Dionysus. They wreak unspeakable horrors on the men around them in paroxysms of joy. There was something almost Morrigan and threefold goddess about the band that fascinated me. I think it was the crow feathers and the whispers of murder and atrocity that follows in their wake like bloody streamers.

This is a collection of stories for every woman who’s struggled with the grotesque realities of life. They are as much about metaphor as the speculative monster being unveiled one layer at a time. The entire collection is threaded together with little callbacks to other stories, like echoes. There is a fascination with curiously clinical collective nouns, such as smack of jellyfish and an intentional lyricism and beauty of language that makes the spare descriptions of dismemberment and ruin seem all the more shocking.

I cannot recommend this read enough, I hope it leaves you feeling strange and wistful and a little bit more monstrous.