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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
LINKING THE COMMON AND THE UNCANNY a review by Lisa Wenger Bro Jen Fawkes. Tales the Devil Told Me. Press 53, 2021.
LISA WENGER BRO is a Professor of English at Middle Georgia University where she specializes in Postmodern American Literature with a focus on magical realism and science fiction. She is co-editor of Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links between the Human and Inhuman (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018). JEN FAWKES is a former resident of Asheville, NC, and now lives in Little Rock, AR. She has a PhD from University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Hollins University. She taught during graduate school and afterwards at West Liberty University. Her first short story collection, Mannequin and Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2020), was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee and won two Foreword INDIES. Tales the Devil Told Me won the 2020 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in One Story, Crazyhorse, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere.
Jen Fawkes’s The Tales the Devil Told Me is a collection of short stories that reimagines classic myths, fairy tales, and literature in a way that touches on common, yet deeply personal experiences. These experiences, however ordinary, are far from simple, and the complexity reveals itself in the way that days or even weeks later, readers will still be digesting the stories. Much like the author’s own tactic for reimagining the stories, readers will keep finding new angles to approach each. Also contributing to this complexity are the words that connect the stories and their ideas: unsettling and unheimlich, Sigmund Freud’s German for the uncanny where something old and long forgotten is now reinserted and seems both out of place/strange, yet also familiar. What distinguishes these stories is the way they encapsulate common experiences that we are often unable to adequately vocalize or that are so much a part of everyday life that words frequently don’t capture the deeply personal aspects of those experiences. In taking these well-known stories and coupling them with everyday life experiences, Fawkes’s rewritings defamiliarize both, leading readers to new insights about both the original works and the ideas these new stories explore. One of the threads that runs through many of the stories is the opposition of reality and fantasy. As the female narrator relates in “Dynamics,” if she just ignores her dead father’s manuscript, “I wouldn’t be forced to reevaluate my position on the man around whom I planned to build my life. My illusions would remain unshattered, my
Winter 2022
foundations unshaken” (49–50). Time and again, characters come up against an uncomfortable or unpleasant reality, and even when confronted with the truth, they retreat to the comfort of fantasy. In this way, one of the dominant ideas Tales explores is the repercussions of clinging to ideals and fantasies, as with the plastic surgeon in “As You Can Imagine, This Makes Dating Difficult,” who can’t help but mentally alter the faces and bodies of all women he sees so that they conform to his ideal of beauty. The focus on fantasy vs. reality also lends itself to ideas about change that emerge across the works. The inability to face reality often leads to characters’ stagnation – they desperately want to change, but because they’re unable to face or deal with reality, they end up trapped. The unnamed female narrator in “Demerol, Demerol, Benzedrine, Schnaps” believes her son’s birth “would be a catalyst, transforming her into the woman she should have been all along. Tractable. Decent. Normal. Her son was an undeniable gift, but when he turned three, the girl was struck by the unbearable certainty that she was the same person she’d always been” (4–5). Stories such as “Demerol” indicate the way that, despite the fact people desperately want to change, change does not come easily. Even further inhibiting change is when that change is based on a fantasy, such as the narrator’s (and the rumpelstilt’s) belief that having a child will change everything, or when fantasy becomes all-consuming, trapping characters and prohibiting any sort of growth, as with Peter in “Never, Never” and the narrator of “Dynamics.”
