A Review of: Home Remedies by Angela Pneuman

Apparently the word linked has become profane to much of the story-writing community—and sadly thus to the story-reading community as well. It became so, however, only after the word began to be used in a new way. It had been used as an adjective full of nuance representing, roughly, the resonance that made a collection a book, and not just some stories someone wrote. The problem is that publishers and writers seem to have redefined linked in a way that smacks of a rigid formula—of a pigeon’s hole. It now specifically embodies the following qualities: recurring characters, localized events, parallel conflicts, and/or a universal theme or situation. Take a look at the bookstore. Most new collections of short fiction will have at least one of these qualities, sometimes more. You won’t have to look long; they will be proudly advertised in book-jacket copy and in catchy blurbs. That’s marketing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it means more books are sold and read. What is problematic is when a book reads as if written with a jacket-flap hook in mind.

When I picked up Angela Pneuman’s Home Remedies, I had the sinking feeling that hers was this kind of book. Her hook, it seemed, was to shine a light into the darker corners of Kentucky, places peopled by conservative Christians. I mentally checked localized events and universal themes off my list. As it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised. Four of these eight stories feel like they are part of a truly vibrant collection. The characters are bigger than the pages they inhabit, not because the stories themselves are small, but because the characters register a humor and terror that are so large.

These four are successfully connected, not by anything easily blurbed, but by Pneuman’s subtle explorations of female rebellion and her characters’ urges to overcome static inertia. Each story is a contained world—there is no spillover of characters or obviously paralleled conflict. Kentucky does not dominate the reader’s attention. There are churches in every story, but again, they are not central. “All Saints Day,” the story most closely associated with religion, takes place in the fellowship room of an evangelical church, where the kids are putting on a bible character costume-show down the hall from an exorcism. But even here, conservative Christianity seems peripheral.The quiet resistance of a girl against her community is...