Review: The Awful Possibilities by Christian TeBordo

The Awful Possibilities is the car accident that you can’t tear your eyes from as you drive by it on the free way. It’s the horror movie you started watching and now, damn it, you have to finish. It’s the unsettling chunk of story you overhear on the train that fills the rest of your day with wondering about what in the hell those few, truncated utterances could have meant.

It’s bizarre, weighty, and abstract–at times, even grotesque.

As a reader, I struggle with abstract work. Perhaps this is my own failing, but I often struggled to find the significance of many of the stories in this book. To put it succinctly, The Awful Possibilities is a collection of nine short stories that all carry a kind of seedy, scary significance to them. Other than the commonality of having dark themes and scary, often bad things happen to the main characters, these stories are not connected in any way. This isn’t to say that they don’t come together to make a cohesive collection, because they do. The abstract quality running through each and every story brings them together. While reading I often wondered who the narrator was, who the main character was–I couldn’t really tell that the main character in “The Champion of Forgetting” was a child until about halfway through it when I finally figured out that she wasn’t a young woman sold into sexual slavery–and what had already happened in a story versus what was going to happen. I don’t think this confusion arises necessarily from bad writing, because the writing in this collection is well crafted and compelling, but rather it comes from the book’s abstract quality.

This gets to the heart of the reason I didn’t really connect with this book as a reader. I often struggle with abstract literature. Too often, I find, abstract literature is abstract for the sake of being weird, different, and confusing. It’s abstract to be abstract, not abstract to better communicate an idea, to be beautiful, to be subtle, to create meaning. At times, while reading this book, I felt like it was being abstract to be abstract. Why, for example, does “The Champion of Forgetting” start where it starts and end where it ends? Why is it important that we see what we see in this story? What feeling does it leave us with?  I left the story with a vague understanding of how a very young child kidnapped and forced to help harvest kidneys for the black market might perceive what had happened to her. Yet I struggled with the idea that she would forget her own name. I just can’t believe that a child old enough to forcibly inject a grown man with some sort of sleeping medicine and harvest his kidneys herself would be able to forget her own name. It’s the name-forgetting thing that really pulls the whole story apart for me.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to see a book break away form the same boy-meets-girl or girl-meets-boy or some-romantic-or-at-the-very-least-friendship-based-relationship-happens-in-the-course-of-100-to-400-pages model that’s being printed like it’s going out of style (which it most certainly isn’t). Yet, I don’t think this book breaks away from that model in a satisfying way. It doesn’t seem like it’s breaking away because it wants to tell a new, interesting story. Rather, it seems to be breaking away for the sake of breaking away. Despite the fact that this book is mostly well written, interestingly and often compelling, it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. And this taste stems from the fact that these stories seem to be doing little more than striving to be abstract.

But, reader, I want you to take my advice with a grain, nay, a pound of salt. If you like abstraction, the grotesque, the weird, and the plain left-of-center, you’ll probably enjoy this book. Judging the abstract has always been a weakness of mine, and you might find that you do glean a sense of meaning from these stories. Like all of Featherproof’s titles, this is well produced and well edited. Fans of this genre will likely have a good time with this oddball read.