Generally speaking, I prefer short stories of social realism, or psychological realism, stories in which a character has an epiphany or in which some aspect of cultural life is illuminated. I like Joyce, Hemingway, Chekov, Raymond Carver. But, I thoroughly enjoyed “Crocodile Tears,” Sides’ second collection. The stories are whimsical, weird, outlandish, science-fictiony, magically realistic and entertaining.
“The Guide to King George” is a riff on a roadside attraction story—essentially a Loch Ness Monster story except the creature in the pond, George, is a “kind of hybrid iguana-bullfrog.” “Imagine a dozen midnight-blue industrial sized refrigerators wrapped together with a bungee cable. An oblong head at one end. A pointy tail at the other.” George eats loads of chickens every day. Like a trained porpoise, he can flop clear out of the water. Be careful. It is in the form of an instruction manual for George’s next keeper because the narrator is about to risk his life swimming with George, trying to cheer up his friend, show him some love.
In a ghost story, the ghost children in a haunted house kill anyone who comes there to live. In another, we are reassured a person can still sell their soul to Satan. Several stories are stories of impending death, in fact, universal death, the apocalypse. In “Festival of Kites,” humans, as kites, take to the sky. Loneliness, in this case love for a child, is the cause of the apocalypse in “To Take, To Leave.” The narrator takes in a space child, in a helmet, and he will cause the world to end in fire.
My favorite story, “Dying at Allium Farm,” is rather the opposite; these characters have eternal life because they’re vampires. The narrator, an obnoxious teenage girl, opens with these words: “I’m dangling a rabbit above my mouth when my mother shines her spotlight-shaming flashlight in my face.” “‘You don’t have to be so obvious about it, Anna,’ she says, snatching my snack….” The family farm grows, of all things, garlic, which they have to handle with gloves.
Snarky Anna is supposed to inherit the farm but of course wants only to flee her little Tennessee town. To her it’s a “hellhole” “that hosts such regular activities as demolition derbies, cow-tipping gatherings and cookie-decorating competitions.” There is no culture here. No one reads. For Anna, “other than draining small animals there isn’t a lot to do for fun.” Unfortunately she’s trapped. Both her mother and grandmother, immigrants from Romania, having absorbed too much sun, need to go into their coffins for a ten-year hiberhealing. Anna will have to wait to go off to college.
