Cursed Images, Reuben Dendinger’s short story collection, finds the grisly, the enchanted, and the horrible lurking in the quotidian fabric of hipster existence – odd jobs and trust funds, roommates, art and artists, drugs (prescribed and recreational) and booze, ideological servitude, cuckolding of men, and sexual fetishism. For many of us, it’s a familiar scene: none of the characters are married or with children in tow, working meaningful jobs, in close-knit families, or fulfilled in life. No “morose Mary,” Dendinger delivers a fresh-feeling macabre whose curious narrative tone provides illuminating and, at times, electrifying, contrast to the gloom and outright doom pervading the lives of the characters traced in his pages.
Take, for example, the Milo whose decaying life is recounted in “Milo’s Commute.” Rejected by his lover, he takes up life in the barren and littered post-industrial outskirts of the city, renting a room from a loner obsessed with his dead dog so that he can dedicate himself to his aesthetic vision only to eventually find meaning and satisfaction in the sick pornography he makes against his will: “drawings of anthropomorphized train engines, engaged in grotesque and violent sexual acts.” (p. 246). Art, a potent force throughout the volume, is multi-faceted, and not always redemptive, as in “The Brooms of Carlack,” in which it is cursed, utterly so, as are those who come into contact with it.
And in “The Piss Queen of Ghostheart Moor,” we come to witness the terrifying limits of our own emotional intuitions when confronted by the heartache of those we inadvertently injure while wrapped up in our romantic quests: “I remained a phantom to you, even though I was real, so real, so warm and ready and waiting for you.” (p.136)
The Freudian “return of the repressed” is also an active agent in “The Real Simon Dick,” where, as in elsewhere in this volume, political partisans find themselves occupying awkward spaces.
Can you relate to the Kafkaesque horror of finding yourself glued to your most utterly despised ideological rival in your home, at parties, and at your local bar ?
How strange then, and unexpected, actually alarming, to discover this man sitting on the sofa in the basement of our house, smoking cannabis, my cannabis, out of our green plastic bong. (p.141)
Cursed Images was a creepy companion on my hot and humid subway commute through the stickiest and most violent days of summer, transporting me to the comforts of November cool. And, for that, I am most thankful.
