While I have admired Heather Shaw’s creative contributions to Flytrap, the zine she co-produces with Tim Pratt, When We Were Six is the first chance I have had to read her fiction. Some aspects of this new chapbook, such as the photographs and the often casually bizarre tone of some of the writing, are welcomingly familiar to anyone who has read the quirky letters from the editors sections of Flytrap. After reading the six stories in Shaw’s collection, however, I have a new respect for Shaw’s skill as a writer and her particular writing style, which blends dark fantasy with an almost photographic realism.
The photographic aspects of Shaw’s writing should not come as a surprise, considering the fact that her photographs appear both in Flytrap and in When We Were Six. Shaw’s sense of landscape and architecture, form and detail, often adds to the vividness of her stories, adding an almost tactile sense to the prose.
Architecture and landscape, both natural and urban, play a large part in Shaw’s writing, as witnessed by the very first story in this collection, “Single White Farmhouse,” which describes the trials and tribulations of living in a sentient — and lovelorn — house that takes on a life of its own after the family gets an Internet connection. Through the communications between the teenage daughter of the family that lives in the house and the house herself, the reader witnesses how buildings and urban landscapes can be used not merely as settings, but to convey and complicate the lives of the humans who dwell within such structures.
“Mountain, Man” is another story in which landscape expresses something deeper about the connection between an individual’s inner landscape and the outer world with which he must communicate. John Tucker is a man who has rejected the city and all the people who live in it for a more peaceful existence living alone on a mountain. He thinks he understands how to live with nature, yet he discovers that even the best of intentions can have disastrous consequences. This story could easily have been written as a heavy-handed morality tale, but Shaw’s exquisitely delicate details result in a bittersweet story that possesses strong echoes of “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
The same combination of dreamlike fantasy and realistic preoccupation with form and color that gives “Mountain, Man” its prose an almost tactile aspect is apparent in “Restoration,” a “Beauty and the Beast” type story about a young college student named Martin and his attraction for Sloane, a female art student who wishes to paint him. Form once again comes into question as Martin discovers that, like the architectural façades with which he is preoccupied, human faces can present a beautiful exterior without giving any clue to the scars than are contained beneath. . . .
“Famishing” is a natural pairing for “Restoration,” and shares its same preoccupation with beauty and form. Like Martin, Rachel is preoccupied with her outer appearance. Despite the fact that she is on her honeymoon, Rachel cannot escape from the body she despises so intensely that she even dislikes the sight of her own shadow. From the clothes she picks out to the men she dates to the activities she agrees to participate in, her self-consciousness about her body dictates everything she does. Like Martin, Rachel is given the opportunity to change her form, but finds that her inner fears and insecurities are, ultimately, what prevent her from acquiring real beauty. With its examination of female body image and the social pressures that create the preoccupation with weight specifically, this is one of the darkest stories in the collection.
The undeniably darkest tale in the collection is another fairy tale retelling, “When We Were Twelve.” Though this story is a retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” it also returns to the theme of form, with the willingness to choose individuality over conformity as, at times, the sole means of saving oneself.
“Wetting the Bed,” the final story in the chapbook, begins as an extended bit of whimsy about the safety of being a child tucked up in bed at night, but even this story flickers light and dark, like a nightlight with a dying battery threatening to go out.
When We Were Six contains some very compelling dark fantasy stories and, with three of its six stories being retellings of traditional tales, I would suggest this collection to anyone interested in fairy tale retellings. Additionally, anyone interested in reading prose which contains an almost photographic sensibility (a style which I associate most closely with the writing of Elizabeth Hand) should find these stories extremely satisfying.
(Tropism Press, 2007)
