Casey Hannan, Mother Ghost. Tiny Hardcore Books, 2013.
casey-hannan.com
A gay man comes out of the closet every day of his life. His mother is the first to know. She says he'll be lonely, but he'll never be alone. The men who take his time are taxidermist veterans and autopsy pathologists, deer hunters and bartenders, museum directors and curators of contemporary art. They haunt each other on porches and beaches and in the back of trucks. They're the places a gay man goes to escape his mother. She's still there, though, in the air between them. She is Mother Ghost.
"I'm Pith like ‘pithy,' like ‘succinct,'" begins the aptly-named narrator of the opening story of Hannan's debut collection. Both the actual book and the individual stories—many of which focus on the ambivalent relationship between a young gay man and his mother—are small, but they pack an intense emotional punch. These tales are not for the faint of heart. Hannan leads the reader down a dark, occasionally surreal road, where startling snapshots of human strangeness await those brave enough to follow. Even as gay stories—sexual exploration, coming out, familial homophobia—have increasingly become part of the larger narrative canon, Hannan has created his own lexicon of recurring symbols: ghosts, blood, ominous strangers, snakes, dogs, deer, horses, all of which have their own personal meaning, located somewhere beneath the surface, communicated in whispers that feel confessional and imperative. In these stories set on suburban porches, in kitchens and bars, fields and museums, a vague danger lurks everywhere, and although the characters may appear unperturbed by the occurrence of sudden violence, the philosophical and emotional impact is not lost on the reader. With intricately crafted, delicate yet jarring language, Hannan presents a vision of the world that is wholly original and enthralling. - Publishers Weekly
Casey Hannan's blog, should you visit it, suggests the style of writing you will see in his collection Mother Ghost. He recently wrote, "Josh told me to do something about the brown recluse. I did something." Hannan is a writer who implies violence. This same type of implication is the title and theme of Mother Ghost. It's unclear what the ghosts want or do in some stories (I was often fascinated by their unique forms and occasionally failed to sympathize with the haunted as a result), but they do appear in various manifestations: people living whom we fail to see, the long- or newly-dead, a memory or voice, or the living who are terror-stricken. If you've read the description of Hannan's collection, you'll know it focuses mainly on a gay male (the oft-repeated character Pith) coming out to his parents. A collection that speaks to current social concerns, Hanna writes protagonists who can be difficult to get a read on—again, the art of the implied—but I almost never worried for those boys/men. They were brazen and, at times, seemingly unaffected. In a rare twist in which the mother is the narrator, she remembers, "Pith told me he was gay when he was in high school. I told him he was lucky. My parents would've hung me up in the barn with the tobacco. Pith said, 'I'm sorry, Mom, but these aren't the good old days.'" Many of these stories express the concerns of the gay community but still contain unexpected plot found in less traditional fiction, something more gothic, perhaps. In the most gothic of the stories, "Lake Mouth," the characters are mothers and aunts with children in tow who are affected by the ghosts of the nearby lake. Those ghosts enter their stomachs and change their communication. An aunt explains that the boom of a fighter jet overhead is "what ghosts sound like when they're not sitting in your stomach. If you put your head down in the lake, you can hear the ghosts screaming like a really big shell put to your ear." Hannan crafts his stories so well, always implying, that when he does write what's happening you almost can't believe it. Two young men step out of a house full of people having an orgy. When they spot a deer on the road, they laugh at the awkward way the deer walks. The first-person narrator ends the story in a slow, dream-like haze: "You startle the deer, though, and it leaps into the intersection, hitting a car full of orgygoers just back from a beer run. Some of them are already naked because they can't wait to taste a stranger, but the only thing they taste now is the blood and the glass and the shame that comes from being naked during a travesty. The deer is dying too, so it keeps kicking someone in the face through the windshield. Teeth crack like vibrating dishes. I keep on the front porch. You never know what you'll do when you don't know what the fuck to do. Someone says, "Help. Me." So I pull out my phone like I'm easing a gun, like maybe someone else will make the call first, but I realize, between puffs, there's no one else around who isn't slowly dying."
Even if this moment from "Trigger Shy," which is just over two pages, seems ludicrous, there is a true, beating moment there when someone knows what he's supposed to do—it's logical, he's seen it on television and in the movies—and when it's his turn to make the call, his logic is reversed: call friends first and then paramedics. The boundaries of what a reader will believe are pushed, but the authentic voice leads the reader into that cold, numb space in which the narrator has entered. Truly, Hannan's collection is one you will speed through, as his style has a peculiar balance—of NOT always showing, in addition to not telling—that makes the characters unknowable but deep, creatures yet humans, grounded in reality but cold to the touch. There wasn't a single story I didn't love and feel moved by, a superhuman feat in a short story collection. — Melanie Page
Hannan’s book circles around precocious gay children, dogs & cats, snakes, cigarette smoke, ghosts, bodies of water, ghosts, horses, coming out, ghosts, men who leave, mother & ghosts. These are are excellent things to write stories about, & Hannan’s stories are exceptionally well written, with language turning into new ways to deliver information. The language hits hard, in a really cutting way, it’s language that fills scars. The only shortcoming could be the abundance of ‘coming-out’ tales grouped near each other in the first half of the book, but mostly the language & abstraction of narrative makes up for the repetition. As we move forward things seems familiar in the book-world, but there is always something new, always something haunting. - Mike Kitchell
I said a little while ago on Twitter, as I slowly made my way through this collection, that I wanted to put Mother Ghost between two slices of brioche and eat it. The stories are packed like sardines in oil, or stone-dry, air cured jamon. Tender and pinboned and unctuous or else small and salty on the tongue. I had to take my time with each, otherwise I felt the texts would stop speaking for themselves and the reading of them become more an act of consumption than, as it should be, an act of marking their fine intensities.
Several of the stories I had read before in other places, and these remain as good as ever, and happily can dwell with me: ‘Piano Hands’, ‘Horse Street’, ‘Water People’ and more. A few were knew, and it will take me a while to get to know them. Most immediately I was struck by ‘Soft Monsters’, a story of art and perception and :
The curator is hot. He’s wearing a nice suit. I can tell it’s a nice suit because it doesn’t make any noise when he walks. My suit sounds like a handful of grocery bags even when I’m standing still. There’s a breeze and my pants flap.
The curator asks me if I like art.
I suck on my cigarette. I have epilepsy. If I suck on my cigarette too many times, I’ll have a seizure. I suck on my cigarette again.
There is at times a deadpan quality that curiously both masks and draws out dark depths, gothic elements. The stories are full of smoke and mother-cruelty, porches and lakes and beaches and islands. Water and liquor mark and blur the edges. Action takes place on lines of demarcation between differing elements or in spaces that have been designed for constant change, like galleries. While sometimes the stories slam to an abrupt ending, it feel right for the style. Like a lid clacking closed on your fingers; you are not allowed to take away with what is inside so easily.
If I’ve relied on metaphors of the senses in this review even more than I do than normal, it’s in response to the slenderness of the stories and my desire to pick at them rather than let them be whole. A collection to return to, to sit with on a dusky night while the moths are out. - schietree.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/endless-reads-review-mother-ghost-by-casey-hannan/
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Casey Hannan's blog, should you visit it, suggests the style of writing you will see in his collection Mother Ghost. He recently wrote, "Josh told me to do something about the brown recluse. I did something." Hannan is a writer who implies violence. This same type of implication is the title and theme of Mother Ghost. It's unclear what the ghosts want or do in some stories (I was often fascinated by their unique forms and occasionally failed to sympathize with the haunted as a result), but they do appear in various manifestations: people living whom we fail to see, the long- or newly-dead, a memory or voice, or the living who are terror-stricken. If you've read the description of Hannan's collection, you'll know it focuses mainly on a gay male (the oft-repeated character Pith) coming out to his parents. A collection that speaks to current social concerns, Hanna writes protagonists who can be difficult to get a read on—again, the art of the implied—but I almost never worried for those boys/men. They were brazen and, at times, seemingly unaffected. In a rare twist in which the mother is the narrator, she remembers, "Pith told me he was gay when he was in high school. I told him he was lucky. My parents would've hung me up in the barn with the tobacco. Pith said, 'I'm sorry, Mom, but these aren't the good old days.'" Many of these stories express the concerns of the gay community but still contain unexpected plot found in less traditional fiction, something more gothic, perhaps. In the most gothic of the stories, "Lake Mouth," the characters are mothers and aunts with children in tow who are affected by the ghosts of the nearby lake. Those ghosts enter their stomachs and change their communication. An aunt explains that the boom of a fighter jet overhead is "what ghosts sound like when they're not sitting in your stomach. If you put your head down in the lake, you can hear the ghosts screaming like a really big shell put to your ear." Hannan crafts his stories so well, always implying, that when he does write what's happening you almost can't believe it. Two young men step out of a house full of people having an orgy. When they spot a deer on the road, they laugh at the awkward way the deer walks. The first-person narrator ends the story in a slow, dream-like haze: "You startle the deer, though, and it leaps into the intersection, hitting a car full of orgygoers just back from a beer run. Some of them are already naked because they can't wait to taste a stranger, but the only thing they taste now is the blood and the glass and the shame that comes from being naked during a travesty. The deer is dying too, so it keeps kicking someone in the face through the windshield. Teeth crack like vibrating dishes. I keep on the front porch. You never know what you'll do when you don't know what the fuck to do. Someone says, "Help. Me." So I pull out my phone like I'm easing a gun, like maybe someone else will make the call first, but I realize, between puffs, there's no one else around who isn't slowly dying."
Even if this moment from "Trigger Shy," which is just over two pages, seems ludicrous, there is a true, beating moment there when someone knows what he's supposed to do—it's logical, he's seen it on television and in the movies—and when it's his turn to make the call, his logic is reversed: call friends first and then paramedics. The boundaries of what a reader will believe are pushed, but the authentic voice leads the reader into that cold, numb space in which the narrator has entered. Truly, Hannan's collection is one you will speed through, as his style has a peculiar balance—of NOT always showing, in addition to not telling—that makes the characters unknowable but deep, creatures yet humans, grounded in reality but cold to the touch. There wasn't a single story I didn't love and feel moved by, a superhuman feat in a short story collection. — Melanie Page
Hannan’s book circles around precocious gay children, dogs & cats, snakes, cigarette smoke, ghosts, bodies of water, ghosts, horses, coming out, ghosts, men who leave, mother & ghosts. These are are excellent things to write stories about, & Hannan’s stories are exceptionally well written, with language turning into new ways to deliver information. The language hits hard, in a really cutting way, it’s language that fills scars. The only shortcoming could be the abundance of ‘coming-out’ tales grouped near each other in the first half of the book, but mostly the language & abstraction of narrative makes up for the repetition. As we move forward things seems familiar in the book-world, but there is always something new, always something haunting. - Mike Kitchell
I said a little while ago on Twitter, as I slowly made my way through this collection, that I wanted to put Mother Ghost between two slices of brioche and eat it. The stories are packed like sardines in oil, or stone-dry, air cured jamon. Tender and pinboned and unctuous or else small and salty on the tongue. I had to take my time with each, otherwise I felt the texts would stop speaking for themselves and the reading of them become more an act of consumption than, as it should be, an act of marking their fine intensities.
Several of the stories I had read before in other places, and these remain as good as ever, and happily can dwell with me: ‘Piano Hands’, ‘Horse Street’, ‘Water People’ and more. A few were knew, and it will take me a while to get to know them. Most immediately I was struck by ‘Soft Monsters’, a story of art and perception and :
The curator is hot. He’s wearing a nice suit. I can tell it’s a nice suit because it doesn’t make any noise when he walks. My suit sounds like a handful of grocery bags even when I’m standing still. There’s a breeze and my pants flap.
The curator asks me if I like art.
I suck on my cigarette. I have epilepsy. If I suck on my cigarette too many times, I’ll have a seizure. I suck on my cigarette again.
There is at times a deadpan quality that curiously both masks and draws out dark depths, gothic elements. The stories are full of smoke and mother-cruelty, porches and lakes and beaches and islands. Water and liquor mark and blur the edges. Action takes place on lines of demarcation between differing elements or in spaces that have been designed for constant change, like galleries. While sometimes the stories slam to an abrupt ending, it feel right for the style. Like a lid clacking closed on your fingers; you are not allowed to take away with what is inside so easily.
If I’ve relied on metaphors of the senses in this review even more than I do than normal, it’s in response to the slenderness of the stories and my desire to pick at them rather than let them be whole. A collection to return to, to sit with on a dusky night while the moths are out. - schietree.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/endless-reads-review-mother-ghost-by-casey-hannan/
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