What a well-named book. Bonnie Jo Campbell's debut, winner of the 1998 Associated Writing Program Award for Short Fiction, is a truly bizarre experience frequently revealing the magical ability of writing to create worlds within worlds.

Campbell is merciless with her downtrodden characters, putting them through barely imaginable indignities. Though these people could be anywhere in rural America, Campbell chooses to write of Podunk, Michigan. Like Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Women and Other Animals seems odd and disjointed at first, but becomes effective when allowed to sink in; approach it as if you were reading the Zen of sick humor and unpleasant human odors.

The stories are unrelated, but eventually emerge as a sort of inbred family tree. Campbell's specialty is her interesting laundry lists of details (comical and symbolic) and her ability to humanize freaks, much as Katherine Dunn does. Many of the stories include circuses or carnivals as well as, of course, women and animals. Frequently the women are animals. The men are worse. It is rare to find a writer so willing to shed her inhibitions and dive into the literary cesspool more recently occupied by such authors as Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx; this primordial ooze having flowed from Flannery O'Connor.

Campbell provides us with little action. Her stories are exquisite snapshots of the weird and damaged. As the book goes on, it becomes more and more compelling. "Gorilla Girl" is an unbridled first-person narrative from the point of view of a teenage sociopath. Such is the power of Campbell's writing that we reluctantly envy the girl's lack of restraint. "Eating Aunt Victoria" is filled with morbid irony. Its NC-17 descriptions are filled with the sap of life, fluids both vital an ddisgusting. Budding sexuality is treated as hormonal, not romantic.

"The Fishing Dog" is terrific, as is "The Perfect Lawn," creepy, fascinating, and even touching (in all of its senses). In "Sleeping Sickness," a woman dumps her dead lover's ashes "as though she expected him to grow again next year."

Let Women and Other Animals work its magic. Though you'll most certainly want to take a shower after reading this book, this is a great and rare opportunity to have your moral foundations shaken to the quick by literature.

Michael Salkind - The Bloomsbury Review, May/June 2000



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