Review: Sea, Swallow Me

Fey Review

Sea, Swallow Me and other stories 

a book of urban magic-realist tales 
by Craig Gidney of Washington D.C.
Publisher: Lethe Press, USA

New edition of Sea Swallow Me by Craig Gidney

Re-released recently!

Review by Louisa John-Krol, Australia
first published 2009, republished here 2019





Like veils of a Sufi dance or the manifold visions of Blake, Gidney’s tales unfold in deepening mystery, with vanishing cafes like the magic theatre of Steppenwolf and the caravans of Knauf’s Carnivàle. Carnies are a frequent presence, from the magazine Carnival of Men in ‘Circus-Boy Without a Safety Net’, to the harrowing finale ‘Catch Him by the Toe’, in which a sly pun on tiger / nigger becomes an etymological taunt. Glimmering on the surface, a rich vocabulary ignites our senses with imagery. This is woven skillfully with the needle of syntax: dramatically punctuated sentences vary in length, whether languidly floating or tensely staccato; dialogue is offset by descriptive passages or suspenseful action; sequencing flows seamlessly from one paragraph to the next; segments are vignettes of storytelling.

Beneath this intricate scaffolding runs a stratum of mythological, historical, literary, cinematic, architectural, anatomical and botanical knowledge. Visual art references (Dali, Frida Kahlo) are interwoven with juxtapositions of European and African folkore (Ondine, The Tar Baby) and Freudian angst, although the portrait of a dead mother also hearkens to Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Exploring the sensual tricks of a yosei, the ambitions of an impoverished poet, or the abuse of a slave girl, Gidney portrays our mortal coil with laconic irony that somehow carries a tone of compassion.

He swings like a trapeze artist from the ErlKing to Eva Peron, from Snagglepuss to Saint Sebastian, Satan or the Samurai; from Beatrix Potter to Baudrillard, Boy Wonder, Bette Davis or Betty Boop; from Icarus to Iemanja or Izambard. These are complemented by musical references: jazz (Miles Davis), darkwave (Joy Division), surreal pop (Bjork), gothic dreamrock (Dead Can Dance, The Cranes, The Swans, The Cocteau Twins, Diamanda Galas), a nondescript haze of dance, rave, jive, techno, acid, ambient or space genres, and popular musicals (The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, West Side Story), interspersed with nostalgic or cult celluloid (Twin Peaks, Blade Runner, Cabin in the Sky). Other allusions are more oblique or unconscious: Olokun of the title-story strikes me as a majestic, chthonic prototype of the Fluke in The X Files, while the concept of the island as a sentient being that hates or loves its flawed interloper, reminds me of the series Lost. There’s even a cheeky tribute to the children’s classic by Welsh writer Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach, with all the wicked wit of David Lynch or Chris Carter.

When Oscar Wilde quipped ‘all bad poetry is sincere’, he was expressing a paradox: that authors need to be at once immersed and detached from subject matter. Using art for morality or self-pity is self-indulgent. Poetic is harder to attain than Polemic. Gidney deftly dances around this trap, sure of his craft. It’s exhilarating to read story after story by someone who not only refuses to preach, but who has no need to do so. One senses that storytelling is his natural element; that it would be impossible for him to miss a beat, unless omission was part of the hypnotism. As in ballet or gymnastics, it takes discipline to present an illusion of effortless grace.

Like Dante and Virgil in Hell, the protagonist of ‘Etiolate’ (the second tale) leads us through smoky shadows of underworld clubs and strangers’ bedrooms; each scene could be one of the cantos of Inferno, where occupants writhe in desire, repeating their cycle of seduction. I’m reminded of a paradox observed by Zizek: that love (including its manifestation as desire) is at once an expression of our greatest freedom and our greatest prison, with phrases like ‘I cannot help myself” or ‘I cannot do otherwise’, echoing down the ages like the fatal compulsion of Romeo and Juliet, or the seductions by Vicomte de Valmont, murmuring ‘It’s beyond my control’ in Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. In other respects, this tale calls upon Cervantes’ formula of obsessive hero Don Quixote (Oliver) and his comical, reassuring side-kick Sancho Panza (Pompeii).

Craig Gidney
from his publisher's press kit

Gidney’s voice could be described as shamanic. With a few deft strokes he guides the reader into different states of consciousness, bending ordinary objects, landscapes and creatures into phantasmagoric versions of themselves, playing tricks like a shape-shifter. This gift reminds me of Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road, in which a spirit child of the Abiku slips in and out of dreamscapes and perceives spirits among the living. Yet Gidney does this with more concise, crisp precision. Stylistically, his craft is closer to that of Italian magic-realist, Italo Calvino, or Britain’s precocious A.S. Byatt at her best (that is, when she’s not seeking applause from an academic literati). I suspect that Gidney’s long, arduous journey to this debut served him well. It gave him humility and creative ruthlessness. As the critic Harold Bloom suggests, the way we read is to misread, but some misreadings are better than others; great artists influence not only what follows but what precedes them. Their power stretches backwards in time, as well as forwards. Thus my perception of magic realists or gothic fantasists, including Poe, Borges and Dunsany, is imperceptibly altered by this talent.

When I first read Gidney’s manuscripts, I had no idea of his colour or sexual orientation. Notwithstanding the significance of gay pride or African-American heritage, his scope is deeper and broader than socio-political identity. (The fact that I’m a heterosexual Anglo-Celtic Australian woman exemplifies this universal appeal.) Tribalism (what we called niche-marketing, before business jargon was discredited) is a double-edged sword, in so far as it provides a protective circle of supporters, yet may exclude potential networks. Recently I bought an anthology centered on the band Sonic Youth, by writers whose involvement presumably would not preclude their contribution to other collections, about train-spotting, socks, leopards, snow-globes or the renaissance of knitted tea-caddies. Furthermore, tribal tags may be a fine selling point, but they can overshadow more subtle ones. Gidney’s albino theme fascinates me on several levels. From the cryptic character Silver to the monkey, swan, snow, cloud, ice, crystal, vanilla bean and white tiger, this albino theme forks into sub-motifs: biology books where transparent ‘tissue’ paper reveals each layer of flesh until white bone is bared, echoed by flayed or scarred skin, dyed hair, layered pastries (‘Strange Alphabets’, ‘Etiolate’) and ‘multi-layered reality’ of seeing ancestral ghosts (‘Come Join We’). This is not just about race or sex. It is a collision of civilization with anarchy, the tension of Apollo and Dionysus.

Psychologically, Gidney’s characters are innately intriguing. Their thoughts, feelings, conversations and dreams speak to our collective humanity. Their decisions and fates keep us guessing. Between the stones of inherited historical constructions – about anything from slavery and lynching to kleptomania, aging, devotion and sacrifice - spaces form, as Gidney pulls assumptions apart. Through these fissures, unlikely angels and monsters loom.

Newly published 2019!

Craig Gidney is a graduate of the Clarion West workshop, a recent finalist of the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story, and online reviewer of music and books on such sites as Bookspot Central. His stories have been published in various anthologies including Magic in the Mirrorstone, Madder Love, So Fey, the literary journal RipRap, and have appeared on online zines such as Spoonfed and Serendipity.

Website of Craig Gidney
Website of Lethe Press

Pictured left: 
another book of short fiction 
by Craig Gidney
entitled Skin Deep Magic