Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Book Reviews
lesbian confused by her romantic feelings for Leo, share not only a
friendship, but also “a long history of beating the shit out of people.”
In one of the collection’s strongest stories, “Not People, Not This,”
two more main characters share a proclivity for hitting. Trooper, a barowner
in Opelika, Alabama, and Ames, a high school drop-out who had
been Trooper’s neighbor when they were children, “both dealt with fear
the same way: they hit,” although Trooper had learned to control this
reaction after marrying and having a child, while Ames “couldn’t keep
his hands out of trouble.” In the story, an omniscient plural narrator,
perhaps the collective consciousness of the town itself, describes the
events on the day a tornado touched down and a woman disappeared—
an event in which Ames may or may not have been involved. The story
is told as a set of converging narratives, with seemingly unrelated
characters introduced in separated sections only to come together later.
In this particular story, that structure is effective, as the speculative
look at the ways in which the narratives may have converged allows for
an exploration of the possibilities of human behavior and the idea that
people are “more willing to believe the impossible than the tragic.”
Magee uses a converging narrative structure in two other stories,
but with less success. “Vertical Mile” begins with great promise as three
narratives are introduced. First is the story of Marcus, an obese gay
man who despairs that he can never be loved as anything other than
a fetish and who consequently embarks on a mission to kill himself via
an arduous trek down the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Path, without
any gear and with a body in no shape to make the climb. Next we meet
Ella, a fit, seventy-two-year-old widow who is hiking the same path
as Marcus in a kind of homage to her recently deceased friend, for
whom she harbors romantic feelings, although both women have lived
as heterosexuals all their lives. And finally we meet the AZK crew, a
gang of teenagers that hikes into the canyon at night in order to paint
elaborate graffiti on its walls.
And while each of these narratives is introduced with great care and
well-paced exposition, their convergence and the subsequent events feel
rushed and the ending abortive, a disappointment given the richness of
the story’s beginning components. Similarly, “Straitjacket” introduces
multiple potentially interesting characters, but their convergence feels
jumbled and relies on too many convenient coincidences to make for an
effectively convincing story.
Magee is most successful in the linear stories in which she portrays
empathetically a variety of inner struggles that people go through in
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 219