Some horror stories play on primal fears and anxieties; others work by creating monsters so unsettling the reader will have no choice but to flinch. David Simmons’s stories often pursue a third path: creating a profound sense of a world where nearly everything has gone wrong, like a trap door carved in morality that you can’t avoid.
Last year, I heard Simmons read “Gigi’s Hands” — the second story in his new collection Fetty On the Switches — at VoidCon 3. It’s a story that lends itself to being read out loud: it’s essentially an increasingly unnerved monologue by a man whose addiction has led to him doing terrible things. It’s what he’s addicted to where some of the story’s unnerving aspects come to fruition. Simmons juxtaposes eminently familiar elements, like the narrator’s job, with others that are absolutely disconcerting. Simmons provides no explanation for why the narrator has developed his particular craving, nor for the regenerative abilities of another character. They simply exist in conjunction with one another, and the level of realistic details provided in certain aspects of the story help to ground the more fantastical ones.
“Gigi’s Hands” isn’t the only profoundly unnerving story found in this collection. Another highlight, “Glock Dookie,” blends realism with bizarre specifics in a very different way. On the surface, this is the story of an incarcerated man whose life takes a turn when a new inmate moves into a cell near his. However, the inmate in question is a gall wasp.
“And I was agitated because I hated the gall wasp and I hated the gall wasp because I didn’t understand it. It sat on its bunk, bedroll and shower next to it, all confused and lonely. A real green tomato. Nobody had told it to get hygiene from the canteen before we got locked down until the next shift.”
The dissonance between the idea of a realistic prison drama and the surrealism of one character being a giant wasp who’d just like to be left alone to make galls gives this tale a weird energy. “Glock Dookie” leaves you unclear of the ground rules of this reality, which adds a layer of tension to the proceedings.
As the presence of a gall wasp suggests, Simmons knows his way around visceral and invertebrate-based imagery; “For Paulie” contains a particularly unsettling sequence involving cicadas, while “The Language of Goats” features a moment in which the protagonist has a vivid dream of the life of a horseshoe crab. It doesn’t hurt that Simmons has a penchant for memorable dialogue; the character in the magnificently-titled “Vonyetta Mosley’s Marzipan Palace” who has especially strong opinions about the dietary preferences of the humble triceratops is a particularly strong example.
For as bizarre as some of these stories get — and they get genuinely bizarre — Simmons manages to keep the bulk of them rooted in a concrete sense of place. In some cases, that place is the city of Baltimore; in others, it’s a particular building. It’s a good reminder of how the right details can impart a sense of verité — which makes the horrors to come that much deeper.
***
Fetty on the Switches
by David Simmons
CLASH Books; 182 p.