As soon as I heard that author Aimee Bender was coming out with a new collection of stories, Willful Creatures, I went on-line and reserved a copy at the library. When it arrived, I gulped it down in one sitting. Which is easy to do with a writer like Bender who has mastered the art of sparse and succinct (yet somehow still lush) storytelling.
All her stories, as well as her novel, seem like demented fairy tales. Indeed, I once read that the genre was a heavy influence. Her words have this very particular style about them that is pretty much indescribable. The best thing is to just pick up one of her books and see what I mean for yourself. She may be the most creative writer working today. She uses language in a way that no other author I’ve come across ever has; each adjective conjures a dream and each metaphor forms a world.
This style is best seen in her novel An Invisible Sign of My Own about a disturbed young woman who suffers from a very particular case of OCD that drives her to knock on things incessantly, obsess over numbers, shy away from physical human contact, and deprive herself of happiness and enjoyment in a misguided attempt to help cure her father’s mysterious ailment. You would think a protagonist like this would be a total drag to read about, but Bender somehow makes her accessible and sympathetic to readers. She makes her human.
Indeed, Bender seems to specialize in making fantastical creations into genuine characters. She did so in her debut, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories, and in Willful Creatures, she does more of the same. This latest effort, however, is darker than any of her other work. Perhaps Bender is maturing and leaving behind the fanciful whims of her youth? This collection is definitely more Brothers Grimm than Disney.
Divided into three parts, the stories range from a little man being kidnapped and trapped in a cage to be used for his new owner’s sick sense of enjoyment (“End of the Line”) and the cruelty of adolescence (“Debbieland”, “Jinx”) to the extent of a mother’s love (“Dearth”) and the antics of mentally unstable, lost women (“Off”, “Fruit & Words”). All the stories, while cloaked in levity are pretty damn dark. In this world, people are often cruel — they murder, mock, beat, and damage the soul.
