Claiming a Body: Short Stories

by Amanda Marbais

The stories in Amanda Marbais’s Claiming a Body read like dispatches from a frontline strewn with infected relationships, metastasizing anxieties, and cultural fatigue. Propelled by sympathetic characters and assertive voices that both capture and convey a uniquely contemporary dread, these virtual confessions reveal life at its most a woman overcomes her fear of both commitment and grizzlies in the unspoiled wilderness of Glacier National Park; a couple cons friends one last time in the decaying rustbelt before turning on each other; the son of a poultry farmer struggles with inhumane practices while resisting the undercurrent of violence in his high school.

Just as Marbais’ characters seek to cross painful thresholds and unearth their better selves, her collection finds ways to communicate across traditional genre lines, bringing together such disparate styles as noir, environmental fiction, and speculative fiction. Woven throughout is a hard-wrought prose that crackles with a steady stream of references to the modern American landscape that is frequently to blame for the chaos left in its wake.

 

Genres: Short Stories

180 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2019

Reviews

[Dustin M. M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an American landscape strung together by rust and grime, scraped-out humans fight over last scraps and claw at meager paychecks. Every human connection seems tentative and threadbare, in Marbais's stories, all relationships teetering on a razor's edge. Her leading women stare into the void of a post-recession world where men have become volatile waistoids. Danger lurks everywhere throughout this collection, and each story threatens to drive off a cliff. Marbais is a master of tension and gritty realism, but her approach is so unique, laced with absurdity and humor and flashes of surreal. The horror is so intense and inevitable that Marbais's characters tumble into its shadow. This collection is delightfully haunting and has tattooed a flickering neon junkyard into my brain.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote it, so I better love it.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible writer. A strong sense of place and characters that feel so incredibly real.

I really do have to give it 4 stars because I was captivated by the storytelling. But some dark, uncomfortable stuff here.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are hard and lush and real. At times the writing is gorgeous, but the plots are never sentimental. Set in the economically depressed, post-industrial towns of the rust belt, Marbais creates storylines that are cold and exact. They are definitely gritty, but the most uncomfortable part is that they are peopled with characters you already know. You went to high school with some of them. You're probably related to others. The recognition is unsettling. These stories are dark; some are absolutely horrific, and Marbais says, "You need to look at this," not for some down-trodden Midwestern voyeurism, but because someone needs to hold an honest account. Debts are owed, and someone must bear witness. We might get frustrated with some of these characters who don't see what they are getting into, or are afraid of confrontation and don't know how to respond, who are fearful of consequences, but they are all trying, they are all trying to see themselves and the world they are in as it really is, and it isn't pretty.

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

*After a promising beginning, I began feeling I was just reading variations of the same story (a not very compelling one). Not as important, but I noticed several typos in the text. Still, I enjoyed a few lines:
"To have a cat phobia is to not be able to use the Internet. Eli looked up from his computer when I said this.
"'It's all porn and cat videos,' I said.
"Someone posted a cat meme on Facebook and I had become transfixed. 'It's horrible,' I said. 'Horrible.'
"He looked over my shoulder. 'That's because the cat is Photoshopped to look like Nicholas [sic] Cage. That's both amazing and terrifying'" (30-31).
"Bears' chiefly vegetarian diets comforted me. They were only violent if desperate, freaked out, or if they were just an asshole bear" (37).

"One week later, I emerge from the bathroom where I had been tracing constellations of my potentially cancerous moles. They just sit there, in golden-brown treachery" (78).
"...muttonchops creeping over his cheeks like an illness" (82).

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a general rule, I don’t give anything 5 stars, so 4 stars is pretty dang good. If all jerks were as eloquent and incisive as Marbais’ jerks, it does then beg the question, can we still think of them as jerks? Regardless of that question which plagues me still, not ALL of her characters are jerks, but many are, and many plumb the dark depths of depravity in these stories. I did not like them mostly or wish them well. But I persisted because I felt they revealed to me the cracks in my own capacity for empathy, a very dark mirror indeed. Good storytelling has a way of breaching our assumptions about the world in this way.

[Laurie Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Diving into the pages of CLAIMING A BODY: SHORT STORIES is like being first in line at a Michelin Star dessert buffet where each offering is unique, tempting, and delicious. Marbais' mastery of detail shines through in her dark, forthright tales ranging from pleasantly offbeat to fiery, engaging, and unpredictable." —Laurie Buchanan, author of the Sean McPherson crime thriller novels

[Tracey Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each story in Marbais's collection makes up this delectable tasting menu. Try them all. Her characters are drawn with such a sharp pencil that you instantly recognize them. They are your friends, your lovers, your brother or sister. They have desires and dreams, they are damaged and dangerous to themselves. They are real. This collection is an regrettable, unforgettable read.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a dazzling collection -- funny, dark, complicated, and redemptive. The stories are full of characters earnestly trying to dig their way out of crumbling surroundings, but who just keep getting their hands dirty. A 21st-century Americana, "Claiming a Body" strums the connections we have to our pasts, our communities, and our land, all the while looking for auguries in the belch of factory smoke and the haruspicy of fracking fluid. In a country with so much space, these stories expose how we can feel at once adrift and trapped. And yet, still hopeful, and with a puncher's chance. Superb.