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 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.”

Stagnation and paralysis are at the heart of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet it’s another result that’s explored in Fawkes’s retelling, “The Tragedie of Claudius, Prince of Denmark.” Following Claudius and his brother Hamlet from childhood on, we see the series of choices and actions each undertakes through the course of his life. Late in life, Claudius is “seized by the uncanny sensation that he was following a script” (92). Introducing the idea of fate, here, destiny becomes a rote act, a mimicry of a prescribed performance. Yet in that mimicry, Fawkes forces the reader to question those ideas about fate and destiny, to examine the way the characters’ decisions – decisions frequently backed by unrealistic fantasies and an inability to truly change – trap them in that “predefined” path that leads to only one potential, or “fated,” outcome. This same exploration is found in “Penny Dreadful” when the narrator realizes she’s no longer a “supporting player,” believing herself, “[b]ereft of the hand that has been pulling your strings. Freed from fate. Discharged from destiny. As though for the first time, it’s up to you to write the next chapter of your life” (124). Yet we’re left questioning how much of that freedom is tied to a person’s ability and desire to change.

Fantasy is what also prohibits the formation of the deep and lasting connections characters desperately crave, connections that would drive away their loneliness. In fact, the first story in the collection, “Demerol, Demerol, Benzedrine, Schnaps,” beautifully and hauntingly sets up this idea of connections. Both the woman and the rumpelstilt crave connections they cannot find, replacing the hollowness with addiction. After spending time together, the rumpelstilt “sensed she suffered from a similar ailment. That she was as forsaken as he” (12). Here, we see the beginnings of the ideas about connections and their complexity that run throughout Tales, the way that people are drawn together, the strengths connections provide, and what happens when the connection isn’t enough or is one-sided. As Peter remarks of his mother’s marriage to James Hook in “Never, Never,” “My mom never seemed to notice the things that set her husband apart from other people – she saw only the man who’d rescued her from a lonely, loveless existence” (29). While the mother’s relationship is one of mutual connection, it’s quickly apparent that there are few happily ever afters. All too often, people sabotage relationships and happiness.

In fact, fantasy leads not just to the destruction of connection, but also to potential connections and even individuals. Ophelia, noting Claudius’s love for Hamlet’s wife, Gertrude, in “The Tragedie of Claudius,” wonders “if he knew that the profundity of both his love and his desolation was etched always into his face,” (91). Yet Claudius is unwilling to set aside this love, to move on with his life, to change. An idea the stories explore, moreover, is the way that the desperation for connection can lead to obsession, with characters so consumed by the longing for and fantasy of another that they can’t establish the relationship they desire. The narrator in “Dynamics” stalks and obsesses over Moriarty, following him everywhere, breaking into his office, yet believes, “Our relationship was so very clandestine that we ourselves never discussed it” (46). Her fantasy is so complete that she builds a nonexistent relationship, and in return, Moriarty uses that obses-

sion for his own advantage. In “A Moment on the Lips,” the obsessive drive for connection and companionship is literally consumptive. When the Cyclops encounters Odysseus and his crew, his actual love for humans and desire for companions only comes out as the opposite in words and actions. The Cyclops realizes too late – after picking off and eating the crew one by one – that “my feelings will never match the consumptive love I bear the tiny men” (116).

Not only do the stories raise philosophical questions about humanity and human emotions, but also about human nature. How much of who we are is based on heredity? On nature and the environment around us? On selfish motivations? “Tiny Bones,” for instance, reimagines “Hansel and Gretel” and combines it with Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Mowgli from The Jungle Book, a “civilized,” white collar businessman in “Tigers Don’t Apologize,” can’t understand human nature and law or the ways those aspects are more animalistic than the animal nature and law that he knows. When what he teaches and what he knows get twisted as they’re passed down to his son, who believes he’s a tiger, Mowgli ends up spending the night hidden in a closet, “hugging his knees, wondering how he’d ever imagined that he’d successfully made the transition from animal to man” (137).

Within Mowgli’s story also is the exploration of the way humanity encompasses the beliefs about violence that they project onto animals. Even in war, violence frequently is not about protection or self-preservation, but instead transforms into the love of violence itself. In “The Story Within,” the wartime narrator is known as “The Butcher” and as the conquered Sultan tells him, “A soldier kills with honor. There is no honor in eating a man’s still-beating heart” (166). Hamlet admits to Claudius in their “Tragedie” that while he was at war, “My lust for blood overtook me, and I became a true berserker. Exterminating without cease, without heed” (83). Thus, the stories raise philosophical questions about what it means to be human, what differentiates us from animals, and whether violence is embedded in human nature itself.

Equally fascinating is the exploration of beauty found in several of the stories. The objectification and idealization of women and women’s beauty is central to “The Story Within,” the rewrite of “Snow White” from the mirror’s perspective. Both issues are central to the rape that results in the narrator’s conception, for his mother’s “loveliness marked her more surely than a harelip or a clubfoot, setting her apart as an aberration, pushing her outside the realm of the natural” (156). In fact, stories such as this one highlight the ways that women become objects that must be possessed as well as the way women internalize the male construction and definition of beauty. The story’s narrator obsesses over a sleeping woman, falling in love with her beauty and a fantasy before