Savage Love by Douglas Glover

Savage Love Reviews

• 
  Cheryl

  These short stories throb with energy and peculiar forms of lust. Savage love is present in some form or another in these stories, but they are really asking the same as the characters in “Uncle Boris Up in a Tree”: ”How should one behave? What does it mean to be alive?”
  The story opens with “The photo was taken just before all hell broke loose.” Each person in the photo is briefly described: Uncle Boris the clown, Jannik the wastrel, Daphne the family slut, etc. Then follows the description of all hell breaking loose.
  
  My favourite was the first of the ones grouped together as Fugues, “Tristiana”. It is 1869, in Idaho Territory. ”Against the winter he had scrupled not to lay in a sufficiency before the snow dropped. The snow surprised him…buried his traps, buried his hut, his pole barn, his stock. He started by killing the lambs, stuffing their skins in the cracks between the sappy logs. Then he kilt the ewes, one by one, then he kilt the ram, then he kilt the ox and the riding mule, which was starving also. Then he kilt his wife. And then his dog, regretting of the dog more than the rest because it was a pure Tennessee Plott hound.” Black, savage, but some sort of weird love is there in the rest of the story.
  
  “Crown of Thorns” is another story about being askew. A disturbed man lives half in and half out of reality. The ending was pure poetry.
  
  Another set of stories are grouped into “Comedies” but comic scenes are found in the other stories too: “…the ineffable Senior Citizens Contract Bridge Club of Iona Station, a crypto-fascist anti-tax cabal, where the denizens drank Alberta vodka and accused each other of suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease while plotting, in the usual fashion of ethnic Ontarians, against artistic expression of all kinds, sexual freedom, freedom of speech and forensic archaeology,…” (from The Sun Lord and the Royal Child).
  
  The Proustian scholar in “Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night” is also asking what does it mean to be alive, and how should one behave. “And I thought how Proust teaches us that all love resides in anticipation, not the beloved, that love achieved is only on loan, that we are martyrs to our desires, which are endless. I had explained this to Geills between bouts of lovemaking. She said, “Is there a French word for ‘Lick my butthole and I’ll be yours for life’?”
  
  His prose rushes forward, clauses tumbling into one another, and then the clauses pause for a breath while simple declarative sentences step forward and take charge. The stories pirouette from shocking violence to comedy to poignant tender love, and sometimes this all happens simultaneously.
  
  It is a literary tour de force.
• 
  Steven Buechler

  There are many of us who have realized that the fairy tales we were told in our youth were complete lies. There are no princess waiting for us to be saved. There are no dashing princes to enchant our lives. In short there is no such thing as "happily ever after." And many of us have damaged our psyches in trying to build such a life. Douglas Glover is an excellent story teller for us who have realized a disillusionment with those simple stories, and his book Savage Love is an excellent collection of his work.
  
  Page 11-Dancers at the Dawn
  
  Moonlight illuminates the dancers and the whitewashed concrete bird bath by the standpipe, the coiled green garden hose, the liquid amber gum tree, and the tree nursery under the chicken-wire frame that keeps out rabbits and deer.
  Phoenix Prill, the girl from the hospice, says insomnia is a symptom of a morbid and excessive fear of death.
  I say, "How could any fear of death be excessive? What would be the sense of a tempered fear of death? Perhaps, like everyone else, I should look forward to death and sleep well? Do you sleep well?" I ask her.
  "No," she says.
  
  Glover is a frank and bold writer. His stories are not for the squeamish and can be difficult to read at times but if a reader wants an honest understanding into the dark elements of the human psyche, he is the perfect writer.
  
  
  my complete review
  
• 
  kimberly_rose

  I didn't realize it at the time, but the sudden doki doki badump badumps and immediate, snatch-from-the-library-shelf breathlessness was the peak of my experience with Glover's stories. I will remember and investigate further that rush of word-love, reading the title Savage Love (in its savage font) and art-love, seeing the perplexing, intriguing cover art.
  
  My feelings were the Titanic: sinking slowly, heavily, destructively, with far-reaching repercussions (I will not be boarding with the SS Tales of Glover again). Desperate scrabbling to grip tightly, hold onto something--anything!--I could like about or learn from or feel toward these stories amounted to nothing but the sense of choking someone, watching bruises form, face purpling, while demanding him to speak to me. It would never have worked between these stories and me. We set each other off, we didn't bring out the best in each other, we were ill-matched; our relationship was surface only.
  
  Dreary. Dull. Pretentious and self-important. Bitter. More often than not, a bleak worldview. Unlikeable, underdeveloped characters, rare growth. With meaning and symbolism I was as eager to explore as I was in high school, exploring over-rated books such as Animal Farm and Catcher in the Rye.
  
  But the font for the contents and titles, and the cover art? Well, doki doki badump. Off to explore that response. Savagely.
• 
  Andrew

  Why do they come after me? he thought. Why does the world insist? he thought. He lived in a slaughterhouse universe under a doleful sign of dream from which he did not wish to awaken, for that seemed like death to him. You stop and you die, he thought. He met the girl coming back to find him, which was a surprise as he expected betrayal at every turn. He followed her glance and noticed for the first time the hematitic stains on his hands, his arms and spattered on his shirt, as though he had bathed in blood. She dismounted and shuffled to him without her sticks, taking his hands in turn, inspecting them with her fingers, palpating for wounds, then suddenly grazing his wrist with her hungry tongue, a gesture he could not interpret, though he felt it directly in his balls as if his body had rendered up a meaning he could not himself name. He found her muteness eloquent in ways he could not explain; she did not deceive him, veiling herself in words as people generally did until he just wanted to shoot them to make them shut up and be.
  
  ***
  
  Short story collections can sometimes be difficult to review. Oftentimes I find myself resisting the urge to pick them apart and grade the individual components as if I were marking a student’s paper—noting which stories work and which don’t and coming up with a cumulative score of some kind denoting the package’s overall worth. This method is sometimes useful, though more often with mosaic collections, wherein each story exists both on its own and as part of a larger theme. However in situations like I find myself in at the moment, to do so would be detrimental to the book as a whole.
  
  Douglas Glover’s Savage Love is a collection of twenty-two stories divided across four sections: Prelude, Fugues, Intermezzo Microstories, and The Comedies. The stories themselves, varying greatly in form and length, are an uneven assortment. The ones that work are surprising, shattering, wickedly absurd tales rife with parenthetical, fourth-wall-breaking asides and understated cynicism; those that don’t work as well flit by harmlessly without managing to detract from the high quality of storytelling that surrounds them.
  
  In “Tristiana,” a beleaguered and weather-beaten farmer in 1869 becomes a self-styled angel of death and finds in his mute, stump-footed Indian companion a wife and accomplice. “Crown of Thorns” introduces Tobin, a not-all-there boy in love with the babysitter who disrupts the clean surface of his parents’ marriage. “Light Trending to Dark,” the strongest of the Fugues, offers up a front row seat to watch as an unfaithful husband’s life quickly unravels with several explosions of sociopathic ambivalence; he self-destructs his family with such effortlessness one might think it was his mission in life.
  
  The Intermezzo Microstories are flash fiction of often no more than a few paragraphs. While some of the stories in this section did leap out at me—“The Ice Age,” “The Poet Fishbein,” and “Twins”—most I found to be uninteresting and a bit too esoteric for my tastes. In musical terms, an intermezzo is a composition slotted between the movements or acts of a larger performance. In the case of Savage Love, these microstories feel for the most part like a collection of experiments designed to bridge the tonal divide between Fugues and The Comedies without significantly adding to or detracting from the collection’s more visible themes. To this end they succeed.
  
  The collection’s final section, The Comedies, is also its strongest. While I enjoyed Glover’s writing throughout, it’s in the absurdism of the book’s final six stories that he really comes alive. “The Lost Language of Ng” tells the life story of a man—possibly a fraud—from an ancient civilization about which little can be taught due to the world-ending ramifications of hearing his traditional language out loud. “Shameless” touches upon the ways children diverge from expected paths in life, and the different ways love and lust can and will shape one’s experience. (The story also includes an incredible six-page paragraph positively sick with the imagery of lust unfettered, unsatisfied, having taken over and been taken over by the mistakes in one’s past.) It’s the final story, however, that proved to be my favourite in the book. “Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night” is perfunctory in its absurdity, like a mid-life crisis bottled and vigorously shaken with an unhealthy dose of spunk (yes, that). By the end of this story, reflecting on The Comedies in its entirety, it feels as if Glover has addressed the ridiculousness of love and connection from all possible angles, thus clearing the table for something new.
  
  By numbers alone, I truly enjoyed only eleven out of the twenty-two stories in this collection. At first glance you’d be forgiven in thinking that means I disliked the book, but nothing could be further from the truth. Those eleven stories were so sharply written, so delightfully acerbic as to justify the whole. And of the larger stories it was only a few that didn’t stick with me after the fact; it was primarily the microstories that failed to capture my undivided attention. All that being said, Savage Love remains one of the strongest, most refreshing short fiction collections of 2013.
• 
  Greg Giannakis

  A picture of humanity in all its ugly and abhorrent glory.
• 
  Barbara Sibbald

  Disclosure: Douglas Glover was my instructor in an Intermediate creative writing course at the now-defunct Kingston School of Writing.
  
  I thought I knew something of love, but apparently not its darker underpinnings. The title story is nothing short of Brilliant! but all offer twists and turns, back alley views of love rife with conflict and pathos. The stories are shockingly varied, invariably enjoyable. Some are quite startling, others refuse to leave your mind and resurface in half-wakeful dreams.
  
  Just what I'd expect from the under-sung master of short fiction. Bravo Douglas.
• 
  Adarah

  Will try a reread somewhere down the line. Didn't enjoy it this time around but my mind has been pretty scattered making it hard to focus on the stories.
• 
  Becky

  I loved everything about this compilation. Every.single.one. The last two stories in The Comedies made me feel like I was a schizophrenic or like I had taken too many drugs. I fell in love. I lost my sense of self.
  
  "I don't want to be your wife any more-I want to be your lover. I want to throw everything away for you. I want to live in fleabag hotels and work nights as a waitress to support your novel. I want to have your babies. I want you to leave me for mysterious strangers, abandon me on lonely train station platforms, skip out on me in motel rooms with flickering neon lights shining on my bare skin as I lie waiting for you. I want to be lost without you, die for love, find you, humiliate myself trying to win you back. I don't ever want to go back to where we were."
  
  How pathetic. How fantastic.
• 
  Marissa

  Goodreads winner copy.
  
  A collection of somewhat dark but quirky short stories. Revolting at times but you cant seem not to read further. A page turner as you seek to discover what the author next story will entail. The beginning story is not for the meek at heart but that is not what the majority are like.
  
  Fast paced read.
• 
  Andrew Sare

  How this book only has 35 ratings is beyond me. Douglas Glover seems to somehow be obscure even though he's got good reviews from critics and has won and been nominated for major awards. This is great literature.