‘Burn’ by Morgan Talty

Burn by Morgan Talty, 2018

The magic trick:

Summing up a wide range of ideas and conflicts in one brief story

I’ve been trying of late to do a better job keeping up with recent story collections; ones hailed as the best of the year. It’s not easy to keep up with this site, let alone align my reading with the cutting edge. But I’m trying!

Anyway, having spent the bulk of the last decade trying to read the best of the best from the last 200 years, I will admit it’s a bit of a comedown to read the super-recent stuff. Simple math dictates that a “pretty good” story from 2022 probably isn’t as good as one from 1924 that 100 years later is hailed as a masterpiece.

Today, though, I bring you an exception. The Night Of The Living Rez collection from 2022 by Morgan Talty might be on that classic level. Will we be talking about it in 2124? Who knows? But I can at least tell you it really moved me and has me excited anew about the possibility of short stories.

So this weekend, I have two stories from the collection, beginning today with the opener, “Burn.”

In many ways, “Burn” is like a brief instrumental opener to a really good album. It’s never going to be a standalone single, but it sure sets a great tone for the mood and feel of the overall work of art.

Crucially, “Burn” does a stellar job of presenting a strange middle ground between western trash pop culture and the spiritual world of the Penobscot Nation’s reservation where this story – and the entire collection – is set. Like literally, a character in this story is frozen in the swamp that serves as a kind of boundary at the end of the reservation. It’s an outstanding introduction to the collection’s ideas and conflicts.

And that’s quite a trick on Talty’s part.

The selection:

“Twenty bag,” Fellis said. “And stop at Jim’s and get some tall boys and a bag of chips. Any kind but Humpty Dumpty chips.”

Down Fellis’s driveway I imagined the look on Rab’s face when I gave him the money. What I tell you? How about that gram?

“Dee!” Fellis yelled. “One more thing: Bring me my hair, so we can burn it. Don’t want spirits after us.”

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