Fever Dogs
Stories
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Finalist, 2017 Balcones Fiction prize
Kim O’Neil’s debut collection, Fever Dogs, is a fictional biography of three generations of women. It begins at the turn of the twenty-first century with Jean, a young woman at an impasse. Romantically adrift, in a dying profession, she decides that to make herself a future, she must first make herself a past.
To deal with a violent history, Jean’s mother has violently erased it. Starting from a bare outline that includes an unspoken death, a predatory father, and a homeless stint, Jean reconstructs the life her mother, Jane, might have lived. But origin stories can never completely cover their tracks: like Jean’s story, Jane’s cannot be told apart from that of her own mother.
What follows is a set of stories spanning nearly a century in response to questions the narrator wishes she had asked her mother and to which she has disjointed answers at best. In the absence of answers, the narrator, in various points of view, invents them. As the stories progress backward in time, the footholds in fact grow fewer and the shift to fabulism greater. But in her attempt to unravel her mother’s origin and her own, Jean finds that the stories she invents—like the dogs who run through them as witnesses, allies, and objects of desire—serve as well as any other in the makeshift task of authoring a life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seven interconnected stories plumb the murky depths of a family history in O'Neil's debut collection. "How to Draw from Life" introduces Jean Bridges, a young woman at an intersection of dead ends: her job, love life, and family are all fading away quietly around her. From this contemporary starting point, the collection retreats into the past, seeking and rarely finding solace in the stories that came before. Questions Jean wants answered by her mother, Jane, begin each subsequent story "How did your sister die?", "Why did you leave?", "How did you meet?" though knowing Jane's reticence to delve into such things, it's unclear what is truth and what Jean has constructed to assuage her own emptiness. What is clear throughout is that one generation's survival trait is another's wound: a girl who saves her future husband becomes the mother of children who die; a mother who nurtures pets and patients fails to connect with her daughter. Rooted in the mostly real geography of Massachusetts across the 20th century, O'Neil's stinging stories of unremarkable adulthoods create a resounding, hollow feeling where love and hope could have been.
