Little Ones
Grey Wolfe LaJoie
Reviewed by Mariya Kurbatova
The South is sinister. The South is heartbreak. The South is packed with quirks and critters. In twenty-one short stories, Grey Wolfe LaJoie kaleidoscopically captures the pain, absurdity, and firefly-glimmers of hope inherent to the Southern and Appalachian experience.
Their debut collection Little Ones, published by Hub City Press, opens with a quiz. Readers are asked if they find Ulysses S. Grant, Tibetan Monks, Humpty Dumpty, or Pope Victor the Terribler inspiring. We’re asked about our dreams, our sign, and “why are you looking at me like that?” The quiz is playful, sad, strained, and sets the tone.
Other ephemera are scattered between pages of prose: a comic, an interview scribbled in childish handwriting, pencil-thin illustrations in the margins, a fake (and poignant) Wikipedia page. Little Ones becomes more treasure trove than book, refreshing in its variety.
The protagonists too are eclectic. In “Maria,” a precocious girl with a head full of bugs mixes plaster in a graveyard. In “Snek & Goose,” a goose puts a snake to sleep with bedtime stories of a human’s folly. In “Frank,” the titular character is a decomposing racoon that addresses its readers directly. Are we really such voyeurs to watch his body break down in real time? Have we nothing better to do? We also meet a mostly mute locksmith, a horse weary of her rider, a dog with bad dreams, a sinner driven mad by steak, the Pope. In “A Tale for Children, Told by Mister Jasper” we learn of a girl raised by coyotes; “Work” is about a funeral dove trainer. Certainly odd, though never cartoonish, Lajoie renders these characters so tenderly. They’ll make you giggle, then break your heart. Their shifting perspectives stitch together a quilt of experience as Southern as whisky, roadkill, fireflies, and death.
To children, not yet familiar with tropes and plot conventions, stories always surprise. Little Ones will return to whimsy even the most cynical adult readers. Yes, violence, addiction, rot, loneliness, and dread do seep through every narrative. But an innocence, a childlike eye makes fresh these sordid old tales. LaJoie is an author skilled in subversion, sprinkling unexpected details into each story. A product of Western North Carolina, they possess an insight and empathy towards the region that makes each story sing. And so, Little Ones joins a long tradition of Southern storytelling, reminiscent of folk tales told as a treat, a haunt, a lesson.
The South is damned. The South is apocalypse. The South still bears children at the end of the world. “How Come All the Schools Shutted Down” is “a guide for children living in the end times,” and this story tells us: “Sadness, fear, and feelings of profound futility are all perfectly acceptable emotions for a child living here in the final days of the empire.” Little Ones is not a collection that sugar-coats pain, vice, or decay, especially in their peculiar Southern and Appalachian forms. But, in “How Come All the Schools Shutted Down”, the author also reminds us: “It’s important to recognize that it’s not your fault.” Life has dealt us a weird hand; at least it makes for good stories.