by GennaRose Nethercott ★☆☆☆☆
Just over a year ago, GennaRose Nethercott created not just a great book, but my Best Book of 2022, with her debut novel Thistlefoot. It was a little weird, featuring a sentient house that can walk around on chicken legs (yep, you read that correctly), inherited by a brother-sister duo who use it to tour the country. It's an admittedly strange setup, but it totally works. Here is what I wrote about it at the time:
The novel focuses on a ton of interesting themes -- the complex relationship of siblings, existing in a world where you feel like you don’t fit in, and the importance of preserving history, to name a few -- and it’s sitting in this spot on my list based on that, as well as being one of the more beautifully written books I read this year. Nethercott has a wonderful command of the English language, and I was unsurprised to learn she has been a poet for some time before finally trying her hand at a novel (Thistlefoot is her first). She leverages alliteration frequently to give the novel a lyrical quality.
Great plot, great writing, and the result was a surprise rise to #1 in a year that was, admittedly, a bit of a down year of reading for me in 2022.
So, naturally I had high expectations for more fiction from Nethercott. She had clearly proven her writing chops to me with Thistlefoot, and a great writer is a great writer, right? Unfortunately, Fifty Beasts has all of the weirdness (and then some) of Thistlefoot and almost none of the literary magic, leaving my experience reading Fifty Beasts to go down as the most shocking disparity between expected and actual outcome for a review this year, a distinction it may hold for the history of BarlinsBooks.
The book description will tell you that Fifty Beasts is a collection of short stories "about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, ravenous yearning: the hunger to be held, and seen, and known." I can buy that, a bit, as a light through line connecting the stories. There are a few that are better than others -- "The Thread Boy", "A Lily Is a Lily", "Possessions", and my favorite, "Drowning Lessons" were all pretty decent 3- or 4-star short stories for me. But they were bracketed by a dozen or so other "stories" that were seriously flawed or just downright throwaways. In a few instances ("A Diviner's Abecedarian", "Fifty Beasts To Break Your Heart", "A Haunted Calendar"), Nethercott simply lists things. There's plenty of creativity, but there's also a lack of linearity or focus, and, as far as I could tell, no true and actual purpose. I found myself thinking "this feels like she's published the results of a mad lib she created while massively high on something". I'll give you a couple of examples, both in their entirety: the first an entry for one of the titular "Beasts", the second one of the days from "A Haunted Calendar"; I've taken the liberty to add underlines where the hypothetical mad lib results could have been inserted:
DYRN
Few have seen the Dyrn coatless. Wrapped in many furs, it does not know cold, nor wind, nor touch. Like a rose, the Dyrn is built of layers that, when peeled away, reveal the true beast. One coat is bearskin. Another is goose down. Deeper still, there is a birch-bark coat and a coat of eyelashes and another of sea foam. At the center, once all the layers have unfurled, is nothing but a single tooth. A Dyrn tooth is considered most lucky in the pocket -- to those hunters cruel enough to reveal it.
Day 22 Don't hitch a ride in the blue Chevy. It's been driving circles through this town since 1801. Back before pickups were invented. But if the driver leans out his window to offer you a Slim Jim, you're advised to accept. They're very good Slim Jims. Exemplary, devastating Slim Jims.
Hopefully those excerpts help bring to light some of my head-scratching dissatisfaction with this collection.
In the acknowledgments, Nethercott says she "wrote these stories while on tour with my first publication, The Lumberjack's Dove...sometimes in my car at 2:00 a.m., parked next to a dive bar somewhere, before falling asleep in the back seat. Sometimes on a couch or in a guest room or, on one occasion, in a woodsmoke-warmed, rain-soaked yurt." I think that tells me all I need to know: The Lumberjack's Dove came out in 2018 -- six years ago! My sneaking suspicion is that her publisher clawed this random collection from Nethercott's dusty shelf of discarded musings as a way to quickly capitalize on the success of Thistlefoot. Regardless, despite a few decent offerings, this is mostly a rambling disaster that will leave all but the most open-minded readers wondering what they just read. Perhaps the point of these is buried deep within, waiting for someone smarter than me to decode it, but this collection missed badly in my opinion. I still ardently stand by my appreciation of Thistlefoot -- it's a great read! -- but with the same fervor I would encourage you to avoid Fifty Beasts, if for no other reason than to not unduly taint your opinion of an author who I still believe has tremendous talent and creativity, and has done wonders to hone that talent over the six years since these stories were originally composed.