The Predatory Animal Ball by Jennifer Fliss
You know how they say you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover? Well, on this occasion, I chose to ignore that advice. I spotted a photo of the incredibly gorgeous front cover of The Predatory Animal Ball while scrolling on Twitter. I looked up the blurb and it sounded interesting. On impulse, I then got in touch with my local bookshop and bought a copy. And, I’m happy to report, that impulse was spot on.
This was my first time reading a flash fiction collection. I was expecting it to be scattered, thematically inconsistent, probably a bit hit-and-miss. But the coherence and command of Jennifer Fliss’s debut collection took my breath away. It opens with two pieces of micro-fiction – ‘Pigeons’ and ‘Watercolor Felon’ – which are each less than a page long but nonetheless succeed perfectly in setting the tone for the whole collection. The tone, if you’re wondering, is one of wry savagery illuminated through beautiful language and precise, biting imagery. By the time I finished the third story, ‘Sex Drive’, Fliss had me completely hooked: “The fine folks of Sex Drive have created a neighborhood watch. They watch, they listen, they salivate at the thought of being watched and listened to. So do you, don’t you?”
These aren’t easy stories. The subject matter is often dark, filled with damaged relationships, lost children and broken people. Occasionally it verges into the speculative, as in ‘Degrees’, a startling vision of rising temperatures leading to apocalypse, or ‘The Child Executioner’, which is as harrowing as its title suggests. The titular story (one of my favourites) is about a bereaved mouse who crashes the wrong party. There are also moments of odd comedy – one story features an older version of Edward Scissorhands, and in another the main character runs into Bob Ross at a petrol station (“Look at those trees, I said. Tell me about those trees, and Bob Ross was like, I’m just filling my gas, friend.”).
Many of these stories demand a second read, or even a third. ‘A Greater Folly is Hard to Imagine’ invites us into a room with beautiful wallpaper, where we then learn that a young woman, “deemed hysterical”, has been imprisoned for the good of her health. She pulls strips of wallpaper down with her fingernails, “like removing viscera from a body, stringy trompe l’oeil entrails”. It’s only in the annotation at the end that Fliss reveals the true significance of the wallpaper, and our understanding of the young woman’s imprisonment switches abruptly from tragedy to horror.
The finely-crafted precision of these stories is masterful. I’m already excited to see what Jennifer Fliss does next (apparently a short story collection is forthcoming soon). In the meantime, The Predatory Animal Ball is the perfect book for anyone who appreciates great stories, gorgeous language, and a truly unique perspective on the world.
The Predatory Animal Ball by Jennifer Fliss (Okay Donkey Press, 2021)
Katie McIvor 