AFRAID OF THE DARK: a brief introduction to Nancy Christie’s Short Stories

The short story ain’t what it used to be. Neither is being a writer. The pride that literary lights used to take in being writers is gone with the Internet, Reality TV, 140 character communication, the well-documented short attention span, the well-recognized dumbing down of our culture. A sort of Song of Roland is heard in the literary land. (And if that reference escapes you, Google it.)
I should say immediately that I am a serious admirer of Nancy Christie’s work. She is by no means a new writer. (Like so many wordsmiths most of her work over the years has been journeyman stuff; she has led the freelance writer/teacher life that so many literary folk are forced to live in these post-literary days.) But if she is not a new writer, her short stories are new writing. Exciting new writing.

The short story, like the poem, is a tough buck. And much as some of us may long for the cultures and days of living, breathing O. Henrys, Guy de Maupassants, Katherine Mansfields and Ernest Hemingways, this sort of literary endeavor, this art form, is pretty much the creature of obscure and non-descript periodicals whose names end in “Quarterly” or “Review” (The Past) or in very, very strange names (apparently from The Future). And therefore, all praise to Pixel Hall Press for publishing this amazing new collection, Traveling Left of Center & Other Stories.

For Nancy Christie’s stories are amazing. The world she shows us is a terrifying world of deluded, demented people. The sort of people who never get a second look or a second thought from you and me. But whose lives are nightmares. These nondescript, unbearably fragile people are, she makes us discover, everywhere, either fearing danger where none exists or failing to see the shadow of the doom that falls across their paths. Often their most ardent wish is a death wish. And what is more terrifying, often when they get their wish, they welcome it.

The world of Nancy Christie’s short stories is a world of both the sudden gratuitous cruelty as well as the prolonged torture that human beings inflict upon each other and upon themselves.

It is a world peopled primarily by desperate, helpless women, sinking into their own deadly quicksand (though there is an occasional feckless man in there somewhere). These short stories are the chronicles of these people’s inevitable individual defeats.

And if all of this sounds dreadful, why praise the writer? Because her world has been so well hidden from us that when she reveals it, we catch our breath as the first readers of Poe or Kafka or the darker passages of Mark Twain’s later works surely must have gasped.

Her world is so real! And just when you think — by which I mean desperately try to escape it through disbelief — “This can’t be!” — a sudden, strange and surprising detail pops up in a strange and surprising place and you are pulled back into facing the truth.

There are writers who are wonderful because they make you say to yourself, “Yes, that’s how it is!” Then there is Nancy Christie, whose writing makes you say, “So — that’s how it is…” You say it with the wonder and dismay of a reader discovering proof of what life is for the secret few — and, you realize with new-found terror, what life can be for all of us.

That is why Nancy Christie is a wonderful writer.

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Traveling Left of Center & Other Stories will be published in August of this year.