The Language of Elk

by Benjamin Percy

In The Language of Elk, men and creatures stagger in a no man's land between wildness and domesticity, jealous, cracked, burning to be acknowledged. Like the flaming projectiles his protagonists often launch into the sky, these stories crackle with energy and violence and a furious beauty. Benjamin Percy is a force. —Anthony Doerr In The Language of Elk, men and creatures stagger in a no man's land between wildness and domesticity, jealous, cracked, burning to be acknowledged. Like the flaming projectiles his protagonists often launch into the sky, these stories crackle with energy and violence and a furious beauty. Benjamin Percy is a force. —Anthony Doerr

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

184 pages, Paperback

First published February 6, 2006

About the author

Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels -- most recently The Sky Vault (William Morrow) -- three short fiction collections, and a book of essays, Thrill Me, that is widely taught in creative writing classrooms. He writes Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider for Marvel Comics. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire (where he is a contributing editor), GQ, Time, Men's Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and the Paris Review. His honors include an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Writer's Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, the iHeart Radio Award for Best Scripted Podcast, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.

Reviews

[David Abrams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Near the beginning of the first story of Benjamin Percy’s first book, The Language of Elk, there is a scene so startling, so unexpected that, if you’re like me, you’ll do a spit-take of your morning coffee. It’s like you were at a peace rally with Mahatma Gandhi and he suddenly walked up and kicked you in the nuts. Percy’s prose is not necessarily that painful, but it will leave you gasping.

In “Unearthed,” a mother enters her son’s room. We’ve already been told she’s bipolar and strung out on a cocktail of Prozac and Lithium. But then…

And he remembered, finally, the night she shook him awake and said, “You know I love you, right?” Somewhere between waking and dreaming, he saw her hovering above him in the dark and he said, “Yeah, Mom. Love you, too.” She left him then and he lay there, still tangled in his dreams’ cobwebs, realizing too late—after he tossed away the covers, after he hurried down the hall, down the stairs, after he heard the snap of the rifle—that something was wrong.

She left him a red carnation of brain matter on the wall, and on the kitchen table she left him a letter, its handwriting so sharp and hurried it reminded him of barbed wire. “I’m so sorry,” it read. “And I know that doesn’t mean anything. I know that’s just a bunch of shitty words. But I’m really truly sorry.”

There are a lot of good things at work in those two paragraphs—elements of style that, in your hurry to get to the next word, you might bypass the first time you read them. There’s the sensory detail of being wrapped in dream cobwebs, then there’s the tumbling action set off by the hyphens which culminates in that chilling “snap of the rifle,” and the sinking-stomach conclusion of “something was wrong.”

Then we jump over the horrible event itself—Percy doesn’t even give us the sound of the shot—and we’re presented with that “red carnation of brain matter” and the handwriting that resembles barbed wire. Not only are those finely-crafted images, they’re also freighted with symbolism: funereal flowers and an indication of the way the mother (with the equally-telling name of Misty) fenced herself off from the rest of the family.

This scene comes on the third page of The Language of Elk. You still have 181 more to go.

If I tell you that “Unearthed” was probably my least favorite story in the collection, then you might begin to get some sense of how much I loved this book. Benjamin Percy proves to be a nut-kicker at least once every ten pages.

I’m big. They call me Big Boy. Back in the heydays, some ten years ago, I was the star linebacker for the Mountain View Mountain Lions. I am six-foot-five, two hundred sixty pounds, with hands the size of T-bone steaks. Without much effort I can throw people around like cloth dolls, and I did.

I’m not proud of this but one time I hit my buddy Barney so hard his eye popped out. No kidding. This happened during practice, during a blitz drill, and I remember his eyeball hanging there by a red thread. Somehow we managed to shove it back inside him. I said, “Are you all right? Can you see?” and he blinked a few times before giving the thumbs up.

“As clear as mud,” he said. To this day his left eye wanders as if possessed by its own strange life.

--“The Iron Moth”


There was a stretch of highway, just outside Sisters, Oregon, where semis—with their engines roaring, their grills gleaming silver—came rumbling down from the Cascade Mountains, a long steep descent, and slammed into deer, dragging them sometimes thirty feet, tearing them open.

--“Winter’s Trappings”

In that one opening sentence, notice how Percy uses the comma and hyphen to great effect. Rhythmically speaking, the sentence moves like the semis: rolling slowly as it goes downhill, gathering speed, until it smacks into that word “slammed.”

And Percy is funny. He’s damned funny. For example:

I have been searching for years. I have seen the footprints, the rough reddish hair, the plum-sized piece of poop. I have heard his sad sweet cries rising from deep in the woods. Bigfoot exists. Believe me, believe it, and know that I am this close to proving it.

All I need is a body.

My wife of three years, Heidi, she is beginning to believe. At first she was all yeah right. We would argue six days to Sunday. Then I showed her the poop. She has since changed her tune, I think.

--“Bigfooting”

Or this moment in a story about a love triangle involving a bucktoothed best friend and a Bearded Lady. The narrator, smitten with the BL, catches his friend and would-be lover in flagrante delicto and a fight ensues.

What happened next I would never have guessed. George came after me. He was naked save for a pair of white tube-socks. His gonad stood at attention. I thought he would stab me with it. I dodged him and brought my fist to his mouth. His teeth cut me to the bone. I still bear scars.

I believe he meant to kill me.

Again he charged, scepter at the fore. Fighting a naked man is not difficult. This time I tripped him. He fell upon himself. There was a sound not unlike the snap of a bite of celery. I will not go into the details, but know this: George will never be the same man.

--“The Bearded Lady Says Goodnight”

(Men, I don’t know about you, but that celery snap made me double over and clutch myself.)

More than just a fine stylist, however, Benjamin Percy is a writer who goes right to the heart of his characters, and he does it with an economy of language as arrow-sharp as Raymond Carver, for instance, or Ernest Hemingway, or Richard Ford. Percy belongs on the same shelf as those titans of the short form.

These stories are funny, compact, stunning, and have the capacity to break your heart—particularly the story which closes the collection, “Swans,” in which a pudgy teenage boy pines after a squad of high school cheerleaders, secretly watching them while floating at eye-level in a secluded lake where they like to sunbathe. He only makes himself known when he rises to defend the girls against a flock of intruding swans. Without giving too much away, let me just say that the final image of the book is one of heart-splitting beauty.

Don’t get me wrong—the stories in The Language of Elk aren’t so Teflon-coated that they aren’t without a couple of flaws. In his laziest moments, Percy lets a few clichés slip through and some of the weirdest moments seem thrown into the stories just for the sake of being weird. But it’s easy to spot the problems because they’re surrounded by so much that he gets right. They are, you might say, plum-sized pieces of poop in a field of diamonds.

Percy writes of love, pain, loyalty, and betrayal in a clear, crackling voice that invigorates the short story genre. His tales—all of them set in rural Oregon—go to dark, sweet places of the imagination and when he takes us there with him we hear a new music that prickles the skin—a sound that’s as beautiful and odd and haunting as the language of elk in the titular story: the full-throated bugles that roll off the Cascade Mountains and make grown men shiver.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eight stories all set in Oregon. Some are disturbing. Some are just assholery. Big Foot, a bearded lady, an autistic child who speaks elk, grave robbers, and teen yoyeurs: something for everyone or maybe not.

[Julien L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't want to put a label on it too much, but Percy's collection of stories here, along with books like Here, Bullet and the works of Aaron Gwyn, are what I might call a "new masculinity" - stuff that explores the inner psyche of what it's like to be a man, to live in an age where your identity is fraught with tension and often called into question, and this is a series of stories that does exactly that. With his muscular, cutting, and lyrical prose, Percy's stories feature many male characters who are, in some way, shape, or form, broken beyond belief. The title story best exemplifies this, where the owner of the hunting grounds feels a kind of earth-shaking jealousy at the relationship his daughter has with the Elk, and the distance between him and his wife sticks in his craw. Percy's stories explore what masculinity might look like in the contemporary age, and asks questions about whether men can still adhere to an aesthetic and ideological idea of masculinity while still being progressively-minded and willing to change for others. It's an impressive collection of stories.

[Tonya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow. This book was not what I was expecting. It's well written, and each of the stories are self contained. And while parts of it are funny, overall, the book feels dark and deals with some really heavy issues.

[Mitchell Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Language of Elk, the debut book by writer Benjamin Percy, contains 8 stories about the people and life in a place called Oregon. As the jacket text reads, The Language of Elk assembles its cast from the mountain towns and low-life taverns and high desert ranches of Oregon -- a state that in isolated pockets remains a still-unfinished place, the frontier."

The stories in this book show us some unique characters and surprising situations. There a man who digs up and steals Native American relics, including the mummified corpse of a dead man, in his living room, a former small town high school football hero trying to find his way in adulthood, the owner of a ranch where soft men come to play cowboy and hunt their own game for a few days, a man who hunts for Sasquatch, a man who work together on a marijuana farm, and a man who falls in love with the bearded lady at a circus that comes to town.

Benjamin Percy is a promising young author who can tell a story and whose descriptions of relationships are very strong. His prose is sharp, right on, his settings strong, and his characters unique and memorable. These are stories that will linger in your mind for a long while after reading them. Overall, this is a strong first book from a talented young man, whose work engages his readers' imaginations and hearts, and will have you wanting for more. This book is highly recommended!


--as reviewed in Midwest Book Reviews

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you unearthed an ancient artifact would you take it home and display it? What if the find was a corpse?

What do elk think about? Do you think it's possible to bond better with elk than other human beings?

If you were a big foot hunter would you be mad if your wife was having an affair with the creature? Would you even know the signs of such a tryst?

Can a bearded lady find love? Can a bearded lady find lust?

The Language of Elk challenges the reader to think about these and other very creative, interesting, and sometimes somewhat outlandish situations. I admit, I was quickly captivated by this book's wit and freshness from the very first story. However, when the stories only got more entertaining and imaginative from there I was completely thrilled. Although some of the situations seem far fetched, the foundation of realistic human behaviour described adds something extra special to the charm of these works.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this book is not quite a 4* read, but I'm rounding up because the stories got better and more interesting to me as I read. There 8 short stories about men, mostly young, and Oregon. These stories are not about the bright young folks of the tech world but rather about men living a much harder life. There's the teenager whose father, since the death of his wife, is struggling with reality. There's the cowboy, who job includes harvesting the semen of a champion stallion and who falls in love with the bearded lady. There's the guide whose daughter is autistic and talks to the elk.

I liked the later stories in the book better than those at the front. They are connected to the rural life - hunting, ranching, etc., a side of Oregon about which I am not at all familar. They are all somewhat dark, but I like that in a story.

[Brett Starr · Rating 5 out of 5]

more great, clever stories from Benjamin Percy...

"The Language of Elk" has alot of really good stories, unfortunately I was spoiled by reading his new book, "Refresh, Refresh" first. I then found about this book!

This book has eight short stories, all good and very well written in my opinion!

My favorites were:

The Language of Elk
The Colony
Winter's Passing
The Bearded Lady Says Goodnight (this story is outstanding and genius!!!!)

if you read / or have read "The Language of Elk", do yourself a favor and read his new book "Refresh, Refresh", its excellent

more people need to know about Benjamin Percy's writing, I know I'll read anything he writes from now on.....

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the few pieces of short story fiction that is set in contemporary Central Oregon. I like the surreal and dark undertones of several of the pieces.

If I were to get into a discussion of regionalism, I would say something about the tone of this is more dark, damp western Oregon, then dryside of the state. In that sense, I think it mirrors my own take on things. It somehow seems to approach the landscape and culture from the outside, rather then be a distinct upwelling from within the high desert.

I completely recommend the book. I like short stories for vacations. This would be a great read for anyone about to explore Central Oregon.

[MountainAshleah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written very early in the author's career, this collection of short stories has a surprisingly mature outlook (I am speaking about the stories other than the few coming-of-age pieces that are about characters with a greater life learning curve). Percy is at his best in this collection when describing the Oregon wilderness/rural areas and the creatures (human and animal) that inhabit them. Recommended for readers of short stories of the contemporary west.

[Geeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, stories that take unexpected turns.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this first collection from Percy; raw, electric and unusual stories set in his native West. His bent is a force to be read!