I Want To Show You More
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humour, Jamie Quatro’s debut short-story collection is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family.
Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations. Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children, and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.
Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want To Show You More is the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in Quatro's debut range from realist gems to macabre nightmares, exploring love, faith, and marriage in the contemporary American South. Fantasies of infidelity structure the work with interlocking tales about a wife and mother who has an unconsummated affair with a long-distance lover ("Caught Up"; "You Look Like Jesus"; "Holy Ground"; and "Relatives of God"). Disease, sex, and death are persistent muses: in the gothic fantasy "Demolition," a rogue mystic turns a church congregation into a sex cult after the destruction of their church; two teenagers with mysterious illnesses find solace in one another in "Sinkhole"; and in "Better to Lose an Eye," an embarrassed teenager attends a pool party with her quadriplegic mother. Here and elsewhere Quatro strives for a dreamlike atmosphere, which leads to some heavy-handed fare, like "Decomposition," in which the corpse of a woman's lover decomposes in her marital bedroom. In a more subdued mode, the tragic stories "Here" and "Georgia the Whole Time" follow a family as it deals with a mother's cancer and struggles to grieve after her death. Quatro's dark imagination unfolds in spare, minimalist prose that strives to shock with its decadent themes and frank sexuality, an outr effect that wears thin, despite fine moments of horror, humor, and genuine tenderness.
