Welcome to Redgunk, Mississippi. It’s a town with a couple of hundred residents, several of whom have been abducted by aliens and many of whom are dating them. It’s a town with a fake mummy in the five-and-dime, not that it stops anyone from thinking the mummy’s stealing pies off windowsills. It’s a town with clones and unicorns and whiskey and kudzu and small-town folks who aren’t necessarily so small themselves even though they know every detail of the tomato-clam sauce that put one of their neighbors in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer after a church dinner, and the men of the town spend far too much time cruising up and down with bottles of Jack Daniel’s looking for young ladies who are entirely too young but who know an awful lot about cuddling up in the back of a pickup truck with the door down and, well, if you’ve made it through this sentence you’ve got a good idea what reading one of William Eakin’s Redgunk Tales is like.
To call Redgunk Tales a short story collection is to give a false idea of what the book is like. Yes, it’s a collection of short stories, and yes, they’re all tied to the fictional town of Redgunk, Miss., but pause a moment and throw out your notion of what that might mean. Redgunk here isn’t a bedrock of continuity or an absolute setting. Rather, it’s a core idea, one that Eakin riffs on in this direction and that, depending on the needs of each individual story. What that means, in practical terms, is that if you go looking for an authoritative guide to the way Redgunk sits on the map, and who all of its citizens are, how they act and what they do, you’re in for disappointment.
Eakin paints and re-paints his canvas according to what he’s writing now, and it doesn’t matter what Mabel Delashmit was doing last story if she fits into the framework of the next one differently. Trying to lay down exactly what is in Redgunk is an exercise in frustration, and does much to remove the book’s pleasures. Then again, if it is that important to you exactly how far it is from Redgunk to the Blake County Line, you’re probably reading the wrong book anyway.
So what are the Redgunk Tales? They’re stories, sit-around-on-the-step-and-listen-to-your-crazy-uncle-bullshit stories. They have that kind of easy rhythm and flow and enthusiasm, and they’re written with a love of the sound of language that doesn’t rear its head often. However, they’re also shot through with references to Diomedes and Irish poetry, to the Python at Delphi and to enough other classical and otherwise erudite nuggets of knowledge that the end result is that there’s a richness to the material that lifts it beyond pure regionalism and into an altogether more sparsely populated neighborhood.
Does Redgunk Tales have flaws? Certainly. Eakin has a habit of tilling the same fields repeatedly. When this involves re-examination of themes from story to story, the effect is superb. When it involves the second Achilles reference in as many stories, the effect is less salutary. A little reshuffling of the story order would have worked wonders to counteract this. In addition, the cover is one of the most distressing I’ve seen in years, a portrait of the town mummy peering through kudzu that’s drawn so as to give the casual impression that one is being watched by a ninja who likes earth tones.
But leaving those minor quibbles aside, Redgunk Tales is a cracking good read. It’s one of those collections that’s so rich that it’s best read one story at a time, so that each can be savored and enjoyed on its own terms. It’s a slower read that way but then again, that’s more time spent in Redgunk. And that just can’t be a bad thing.
(Invisible Cities Press, 2001)
