Review: A Creature Wanting Form (2023)
“Whenever someone dies you want to touch someone that you know to orient yourself as still alive.”
I never considered whether despair could be a literary genre, but if I had to put this book onto a little shelf in the bookstore and label it, despair is the word I’d choose.
A Creature Wanting Form by Luke O’Neil is a book of short stories for people who think too often about the end of the world. The characters, often nameless and insubstantial, confront crisis after crisis, calamities that are sometimes personal and sometimes political. While the stories here are often disconnected and fragmentary, they share a backdrop of social malaise: climate change, police violence, and America’s rotten inhumane health care system serve as an omnipresent background canvas.
One story that I can’t get out of my head follows a man whose job is to lower a flag to half-mast outside his workplace every time there’s a mass shooting in the news. But the shootings come so relentlessly that he keeps lowering the flag, again and again, until he has to start digging a hole around the flag pole so the flag doesn’t touch the ground – and he keeps on digging and lowering until “the planet itself was spinning on this flag pole’s axis.”
While the stories are bleak, they are often darkly comic. Let me tell you, it is disconcerting and uncomfortable to find yourself laughing when reading about gun violence, as I did. But what can you do in the face of overwhelming tragedy day after day, hour after hour? Like you can only feel terrible for so many minutes every day. Sometimes it is better to laugh than feel bad.
And that seems to be the point of this collection, if it has one – that the world seems awful and maybe nothing matters but it is better to keep going because maybe something does.
Follow my bookstagram: @panthercitybooks
