I'll Tell You a Love Story

by Couri Johnson

Satan’s youngest daughter works at a call center. The Twelve Dancing Princesses lure men into an underground nightclub. A dancing bear falls in love and into addiction. The Queen of All Magic throws a party on the bayou to celebrate the death of her soulmate. I’ll Tell You a Love Story does exactly as its title promises; tells love stories. Stories that blend the ordinary with the mythic, mixes the everyday with fables, and shifts between hope and heartache.

206 pages, Paperback

Published April 14, 2020

Reviews

[Lillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

All of these stories worth together to make something greater than their parts: a book about how painful and difficult it can be to love, and how you hope for the chance to anyway. The settings span Louisiana bayous to Ohio call centers to the expanse of all time and space, and still each character remains grounded in their own journey. Wolf's Wake, which had a Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys feel to me in its celebration of the wavering line between life and death, was a standout, and so was Anatomist, the tale of an earthquake survivor building skeletons from a nearby cemetery overturned in the quake. I also thought that the last two stories, This is Where You Leave Me and The Center of Everything, did a great job of showing the thesis of the short story collection, as well as leaving the reader (or at least, this reader) with the aching sense of finality that means a truly excellent book.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

As always in a collection, individual stories can be hit or miss, but a cool little tapestry of the pain of love and the ways we try to understand it.

[JT Hwang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think most of us have heard of the saying "love like you've never loved before."

This collection of short stories by Couri Johnson takes this saying to heart, precisely because many of the stories detail the breakdown of a relationship in lieu of the happy beginnings. It is a testament to the author's voice that she manages to push the reader into the next heartbreak over and over again right after each independent story has ended.

Love of course, cannot be fully articulated in all of its intricacies that makes sense for all people, but I think her method works precisely because it utilizes the ambiguity. Describing love after the dissolution helps in freeing the perspective from puppy love bias but at the same time frames it in nostalgia, the rose tinted goggles that it is.

With love you are between a rock and a hard place. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Many of us have felt the pain that love causes, but are drawn to it again and again because of what it can and does represent. If you want to experience a bit of that feeling, do read this collection.

[mr kultist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice compendium of short stories by the same author. Good mixture of fairytales, fables, and modern tales, with love, relationships, and horror intertwined. It was an easy read for me, and English is my second language, so not so many fancy words or deep rhetoric. My favorite short story was the last one "The Center of Everything", it was a kind of Lovecraftian love story.

[James Callan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories in this collection really wowed me and many of them are ones I will not be forgetting any time soon. The only thing holding me back from jumping up and down about how good this book is is that the few stories I didn't enjoy very much usually ended up being the longer ones. Overall, a brilliant collection and a great voice to the narratives.

[Christina Pupino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couri had me mesmerized in one of the most unique, disturbing, and beautiful ways I have felt. She managed to make me creeped out, unsettled, yet touched and understood all in the same breath. Her approach to different multitudes of love and everything that comes with it was such a breath of fresh air in the world of literature