Electricity and Other Dreams
Call it southern gothic, or call it magic realism, this debut story collection from native Arkansan Hicks includes more than two dozen exceedingly brief stories, each one a fantastic blend of local folklore and twentieth-century legend. Hicks has a gift for jamming contemporary concerns into mythic time, whether it’s a witch who ruins Miss Teen Georgia’s promising future, or the pirate Bluebeard checking out cashiers at the supermarket. In one story an Iraqi contractor purchases a cursed ring possessed by a djinn, with otherworldly results. Elsewhere, three alligator-hunting brothers wax philosophical as their trophies transform unexpectedly into discombobulated humans. At times macabre and often hilarious, the book’s catalog of strange creatures ranges from crawfish gunfighters who cannibalize their own kind, to Japanese warlords who board a commercial jet, to a weatherman who conjures storms rather than just reporting their whereabouts. Hicks’ masterful combination of familiar scenes with uncanny creations reads like the love child of Eudora Welty and Edgar Allan Poe, or what it might have been like if Tim Burton had directed Beasts of the Southern Wild. --Diego Báez