Sticky, Sweaty, Extremely Queer Stories
I enjoy short story collections, but it’s rare that I read one in which I love every single story. Whenever I come across a collection like this, I want to scream about it from the rooftops and shove it into the hands of everyone I know (and everyone I don’t know, too). Laura Chow Reeve’s incredible debut is the latest collection to fall into this category. Published in March by Northwestern University Press, it’s possible you missed this one—and if that’s the case, you’re in for a wonderful treat.
A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve
In these sticky, sweaty, extremely queer stories, Laura Chow Reeve writes about the people, histories, traumas, places, and ideas that can haunt a life. Some characters are haunted by unusual, unplaceable memories, some by the deaths of loved ones, and others by their own obsessions. In one story a woman turns into a lizard; in another, a girl learns from her popo how to pickle memories. Ghosts—though not conventional ones—are everywhere. So are transformations. Reeve’s characters are constantly shapeshifting. They hear and see things other people cannot; they move through the liminal spaces; they’re comfortable (and uncomfortable) straddling genders, perspectives, worlds.
Many of the stories revolve around a group of queer friends living in Florida (mostly Jacksonville, though the characters do move around—there’s one story called ‘Migratory Patterns’). The setting is vivid, full of Southern heat, swamps, and brilliant flowers. Reeve brilliantly captures the restlessness, pettiness, and closeness of this friend group. There’s hilarious dialogue and messy breakups, endless drama and the gossip that goes with it. It’s deliciously fun to read, but it also cuts to the bone.
The world we live in often feels so strange to me, so impenetrable. What I love most about this collection is the way Reeve addresses this strangeness in so many ways: in tender, intimate exchanges between lovers, in scenes of queer friends making jokes at a going-away party, in a character’s obsession with mirrors, in the unexpected power of a tarot reading. Nothing is quite what it seems. The stories are constantly surprising, and yet full of familiarity, moments of recognition. By writing into the unexplainable, and by examining the ways that ghosts—both metaphorical and literal, violent and loving—shape the lives of her characters, Reeve explores how sometimes what is unseen shapes the world.
These weird and unsettling stories are full of odd happenings and unexplained mysteries. They are about bodies and desire, memory and queerness, multiracial identity, grief and grandparents. Every story dazzles, dances. There are no misses.
