SPITE: Or Wounds That Wouldn't Heal

by Alexander Theroux

This is a remarkable collection of rich, up-to-date, and astonishingly original short stories, a body of ten unsparing and implacable narratives, each with a different setting and plot – the reprisal for a bitter event in the fourth grade; a hot dog vendor's one nemesis in New York City; an account of several hair-raising murders in Maine; a prep school teacher plagued by a revengeful former student, and several other tales (but not all) culled from his razor-sharp memory of hurtful personal moments based on his own life. This is a book to be placed fittingly with two other assemblages of his truly memorable short stories, his Early Stories (2021) and Later Stories (2022).

284 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2025

About the author

Alexander Theroux is a novelist, poet, and essayist. The most apt description of the novels of Theroux was given by Anthony Burgess in praise of Theroux's Darconville's Cat: Theroux is 'word drunk', filling his novels with a torrent of words archaic and neologic, always striving for originality, while drawing from the traditions of Rolfe, Rabelais, Sterne, and Nabokov.

Reviews

[Kalle Vilenius · Rating 4 out of 5]

My wish has been granted; there are more short fictions from Alexander Theroux! A youthful vigour permeates this collection of ten new stories by an old writer. The blurb in the back advertises some of them as being partially autobiographical, and indeed such elements can be recognized, and yet each of these stories goes places the man himself certainly never did. Rather than a simple confessional or the venting of rage, this is art that uses those spiteful feelings and unhealed injuries as fuel for further explorations of the human condition.

The first of the stories, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, begins in a mode that feels like it must be autobiographical, so lively and pained is the description of the humiliation suffered by the protagonist at the hands of a cruel teacher, Miss Sharkey, as the boy, clowning around at a school assembly, is forced to sing in front of everyone all by himself. Perhaps there was some pedagogic function in this humiliation, or perhaps Miss Sharkey was simply having a bad day and took it out on him. Regardless, it devastates him, changes his personality and leaves him a shadow of his former self into adulthood, moping around on the porch of the family home with no direction to follow.

That is, until the narrator dons an Insane Clown Posse shirt, grabs a gun and drives to meet this old principal while blasting AC/DC in his car. Not just autobiographical, then. A revenge fantasy, perhaps. Can it be considered cathartic, though? As unpleasant as the teacher’s treatment of the protagonist was, I don’t think the reader can fully join in on this gun-toting madman’s quest for a balancing of the scales – and he acknowledges this at the start “whether to your satisfaction or not” – he says. This is a repeating element in many of the stories, a purifying resolution is denied both the spiteful hero and the reader, leaving one to wonder if allowing these feelings to fester might not be worse than the offenses that gave rise to them.

And yet, one wonders even further about that offense, of the wound that wouldn’t heal. To see the happy, energetic, playful boy turn into morbid, listless young man because of his trauma, is to be faced with an immeasurable loss. This is what the collection is about, thematically speaking. It’s a series of portraits of just such ugly, incomplete holes in people’s lives, lacking catharsis and closure, lacking justice, lacking any true redemption, wrongs that birth other wrongs. These are the wounds that wouldn’t heal.

The Trials of Qwert Yui Op, well, there’s a name any reader of Darconville’s Cat will recognize as belonging to a member of the Quincy College faculty, and anyone who hasn’t read that great work will still feel the ring of familiarity, even if they can’t quite consciously say why. The man here is not an academic, though, but rather a laundromat owner, a deeply patient and long-suffering one, inscrutable behind his emotionless mask and his poor English, his alien nature only further emphasized by this name that is no name at all.

There is a saying that still waters run deep. This may be an apt description of the hatred hidden beneath the still surface of the laundromat owner, who endures much verbal abuse at the hands of mob-connected clients. Ralph Penicl, a man who takes a job helping around the laundromat, is witness to some but not all of what goes on, and from his limited perspective we are treated to a description of that still surface, the hidden depth only hinted at until the consequences of that building resentment finally manifest. The Trials of Qwert Yui Op is one of only two stories in the collection where the events are recounted by someone who bore witness to them rather than being a direct party in the core conflict, and this decision helps build ever greater distance between the reader and the truth at the core of Qwert Yui Op. Another wound, certainly one that wouldn’t heal, but one we can only guess at the depth of.

The Portrait of Geraldine Oikle is a tried-and-true Theroux story: that of a sour relationship. The protagonist, art teacher Donn Croivak, finds himself the target of the eponymous Geraldine’s amorous advances, and love, as ever, turns to hate. One might draw comparisons to accusations of impropriety with a student levelled at the author himself. There is a precedent of Theroux using a painter as an alter ego for a writer, as was the case in An Adultery, and if that wasn’t enough, at the very end of the story, Croivak’s wife earns a Fullbright scholarship, and the two go to Estonia. Doesn’t this ring familiar? Of course, the wife this time around is the writer and the husband the painter. Digging up every autobiographical reference isn’t necessary, but sometimes it’s fun to see what you can recognize.

Geraldine is presented as an unstable person and begins plaguing Croivak with phone calls. This leads to the following bit:

“After each telephone call is made, or, say, in its refusal ring for those awaiting a cherished call, however, a silent phone can exaggerate loneliness, abandonment, especially in the instance of devastating anti-climax when a stalker in getting no response abides there after each dud, the aborted black receiver limp in her revengeful but disappointed hands. One telephone necessarily implies the absent presence of another.”

This is good stuff, it reminds me of Roland Barthes’ segment about telephones in Lover’s Discourse. Other interesting tidbits: seeing words like “drow” and “underdark” in conjunction, one can’t help but wonder if there’s some D&D influence here. It’s little things like these that add vigour to the work. The portrait of Geraldine that Theroux paints with words and Croivak paints with paint is dubbed Spite, and in many ways this story could be a synecdoche for the collection, a capsulation of what it’s trying to do in in its portrayals of… well, spite and unhealed wounds. Croivak attempts exorcism through art, a cleansing, that which has been denied in the previous stories. Does he achieve it?

Coca-Cola Kids is a story of almost Pynchonian zaniness. That is, it’s not just zany and humorous, with three goofball protagonists, but also filled with hard science the way a Pynchon story might be, and the immeasurable power of a megacorporation hanging over it like the shadow of some inscrutable titan. The trio of chemistry students here seek to earn themselves immortality in the annals of history by uncovering the secret recipe of Coca-Cola and apply all their learning and book smarts to that end, their egos inflating, distrust and paranoia slowly consuming their companionship. It’s a breezy read, and while not the strongest story in the collection, certainly the most fun. As someone who doesn’t have even a high-school level understanding of chemistry, I was a little awed by the science on display here but cannot speak on how accurate it is. Regardless, it makes the mystery of Coca-Cola something I was actually invested in. Kudos.

Duet in A Minor is an account of a cellist having a bad experience with a woman who approaches him after hearing him perform. Not much happening plot-wise, but a pair of vivid portraits are painted of two deeply incompatible people having an increasingly awkward time in one another’s company at the cellist’s house, surrounded by albums and the occasional live performance.

The jump from chemistry to music just hammers home the point that this is a writer with several encyclopaedias (and the internet, probably) shoved into his skull, ready to be deployed at any time. And the cellist is a Lovecraft-reader on top of everything else! The effect of how the stay stretches on, becoming less desirable as it does, is hard to describe and ought to be experienced. One might think that the one being wronged is the long-suffering host who has to clean up after a slovenly and ungrateful guest, but one would guess wrong, if she were to be asked.

With Dogleg to the Left I was initially disappointed: another story, back-to-back, about a man having to deal with a horrible woman with slovenly manners and a minor speech impediment? It felt far too repetitive, to start with. But fortunately, the tale takes a drastically different turn: our “hero”, the henpecked sheriff Mordaunt, turns his thoughts to murder, and his intense Bible-reading, presented initially as one of his few comforts in the face of the shrew he’s been married to for 15 years, becomes something far more sinister. The point here, as in the opening story of Three Wogs, is that victimhood is not necessarily virtuous, that sometimes bad people have even worse things happen to them, and the challenge we as the reader are faced with is whether we are able to separate our dislike of the victim from the ethics – or lack thereof – of the act.

Sheriff Mordaunt isn’t only a biblethumper, but also an amateur inventor of truisms. I haven’t read Theroux’s two books of Truisms yet, so I don’t know if the ones that Mordaunt comes up with here are also found in those collections, but especially “Continue to carry bricks from your past and you end up building the same house“ has a ring of truth about it. Is this commentary on the collection itself, on how using the same stock of past experiences leads to the same kinds of stories being told?

Fr. Mario might support that idea, as it opens with another decidedly familiar topic in Theroux’s work, a child still suffering from bedwetting at an embarrassingly advanced age. Jean-Paul, the child in question, is subjected to the cruelty of his uncle, formerly Louis, now the eponymous Fr. Mario, a man whose qualities seem quite at odds with the Christian values he should be extolling, and the effects this had on Jean-Paul as he grew up are explored.

The story ends with a delightful poem, and in that poem is found the truly vindictive, spiteful thought of just what kind of mercy Jean-Paul would offer his uncle if given the chance, and without spoiling it, I’ll hint to the awkward bed-wetting problem being somewhat connected. Unlike most of the other stories, I’d say this one ends up a triumphant note, because the poem and its punchline, petty as they are, are also damn funny. The wound remains unhealed, but it feels empowering.

Rafaat, The Hot Dog Vendor, is a story about Rafaat, the hot dog vendor and boy does this story make me hungry. The typical Therouxian detail and meticulousness is turned, for a few pages, on that deeply American fast-food, and reading those few pages leave you salivating. The rest of the story is decidedly less delicious, as it concerns Rafaat’s situation: he’s a Palestinian refugee in New York, and his status as a refugee leads to much pontification on the situation between Israel and Palestine. Those readers who find themselves – for reasons that they surely must consider valid – on the opposite side from Theroux in regards to that conflict will likely be uncomfortable reading this.

Some might even accuse him of antisemitism, as Rafaat’s observations about the Hasidic Jews who frequent his stand tend to be of the familiar satirical, cutting bend of Theroux’s incisive caricature. Using the narratorial soapbox, he juxtaposes Jewish, i.e. Old Testament (or rather, “misunderstood” Old Testament) ideas of neighbourliness with those of the Christian kind, and here we find the heart of the matter: Theroux is, first and foremost, writing as a Christian humanist, one deeply upset by the events he’s describing, and seeking to understand how a lack of his humanist sentiment could so manifest itself in others. This answer he seeks in differing theology, in alien modes of thought.

And yet, even this is not enough: Rafaat’s antagonist Maggid is not a representation of his ethnic or religious demographics. Let us look at this excerpt:

“Worse, even his fellow Hassids found him fearful, giving him wide berth. Many of Rafaat’s customers were kind and gentle Jews, and he scandalized them, as he did most of the other customers, for Maggid never hesitated to step rudely in front of them, shouldering them aside, to order with a loud voice and an extended arm at the end of which was a wagging finger – even, secretly, on the sly, a hot dog of pork, which was a taboo in his religion.”

Maggid is just an asshole! Plain and simple. The rest is incidental to this fact. But Rafaat’s pontifications about religious differences and the history of their respective faiths does lead to some interesting points about materials in the Old Testament being traceable back to older texts from other faiths and cultures, ideas that no Biblical literalist would ever admit to, but that anyone with an open mind will be quick to notice when looking into it. Wisdom, Rafaat argues, has been handed down many paths, not just among the “chosen” people, and the greatest error made is the taking of this wisdom literally. Rafaat is a highly educated immigrant working a low-paying job, reminiscent perhaps of Dilip from Theroux’s Three Wogs, but unlike Dilip, it’s Raafat’s education that ultimately leads him down the dark path he chooses.

Dis-appointment at WNOT is the easiest of the stories to tie directly to Theroux himself. Ostensibly about the falling out between the author Aleister Porch and the radio host Ted Keeble – one criticizing the other’s softball questions during interviews, the other banning the one from being interviewed altogether – it paints a vivid picture of the kind show where popularity is sought through the trivial, while important, though less palatable topics – and interview subjects – are ignored for reasons both practical and personal. A telling quote:

“Aleister Porch’s small publisher had always compiled a prospective buyer’s list which was sent out to readers by way of email for any who wished to buy copies in hardcover or paperback, highlighting a special 150 reserved in limited, signed editions. Over time, Aleister, who had published a sizable body of work so far, twenty-five books in all, eight titles with his new publisher, various books of short stories, early and new, a book of fables, and several books of poetry, by a simple glance at looking at the orders list was well aware of who did and who did not buy his books. It was among other things a barometer of who were his friends.”

It doesn’t take much a leap in logic to see who this is about, as I’ve gotten my grubby hands on a few of those limited, signed editions of Theroux’s more recent books, and the body of work shown here corresponds to his nicely. Not that I’m bragging or anything.

The final piece here, Reading Hartshorn, is a sad tale, yet – spoilers? – ends in the narrator remembering what it is to be happy. It’s a tale of humanity’s baser instincts for sex and violence, yet also has beautiful things to say of the things we may find in space, through our regular telescopes and those we launch outside our own atmosphere. It’s a juxtaposition that leaves the reader with a transcendent final image to ponder, an idea of leaving behind the oldest of old crimes repeated and looking instead at the newest of new discoveries in that final frontier of which even our ancestors have been dreaming of since they first looked to the night sky. For all the bleakness and wallowing in this story and all the others, it is a lofty note to end on, and an optimistic one. Maybe the spilling of all this bile could give the catharsis denied to many of the characters instead to writer and reader both, and let us range free?

It should be noted that once again, proper copy-editing continued to elude Theroux, and more than once there were uncorrected typos, and in Portrait of Geraldine Oikle, there’s a paragraph where the same couple sentences are repeated back-to-back almost but not quite verbatim, and even a cursory reading should’ve led to fixing this. Still, these foibles, annoying as they are, remain minor in the face of the pleasure the stories themselves bring. When you read a lot of Theroux, you almost come to know what to expect, and yet there’s always more he can teach you – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, reading him is always an education – and the time spent reading him is never wasted.

At less than 300 pages, Spite is a small collection, but it ranges far during those pages. While it often treads ground that’s familiar to a reader of Theroux’s previous works, other times it goes places new and unexpected. It doesn’t overwhelm with its vocabulary like some of his previous writings have – pusillanimous, dysphemism, Rumpelstiltskinian and autokabalesis might be the only big words that jumped out at me that weren’t STEM-related – but the stories aren’t written to dazzle so much as to allow the reader easy access to the topics being explored. Foreign languages, song lyrics, poetry, some musical notation and the epigrams – sometimes more than one epigram per story, from the authors wide readings – liven things up. It’s an idiosyncratic work, one instantly recognizable as originating in the mind of a specific author, and with the worries raised regarding AI -produced art in Dis-appointment at WNOT, that is a thing to be valued in this age, art as individualistic expression. Let us celebrate it while it’s still here.