Book Review : Burnt Tongues (2020)
Short story collections and anthologies are kind of overrated. They usually are well-crafted booby traps designed to make critics endorse as much mediocre writing as humanly possible. Sometimes they aren’t, though, but there has to be a good reason for it. I almost immediately regretted accepting to review the anniversary reprint of Burnt Tongues, a short story anthology co-edited by the great Chuck Palahniuk himself, but I shouldn’t have.
It is exactly what an anthology should be an also kind of underrated.
Burnt Tongues is the greatest hits from Palahniuk’s workshop, which I don’t think exists anymore. Anyway, that means lots of nobodies EARNED their way in and these nobodies are GOOD. Not just good, they’re GOOD. They’re also bound by an idea. Palahniuk and his co-editors Richard Thomas and Dennis Widmeyer call it transgressive fiction, but it is more complex than that. Burnt Tongues is about a feeling, a day in your life you’d rather forget.
For example, Neil Krolicki’s powerful opener Live This Down tells the story of young girls romanticizing suicide. Not going to sell you the twist, but such emotional gullibility is both extremely relatable and a source of wild problems. Followup story Charlie, by Chris Lewis Carter explores a different brand of vulnerability where the vulnerability of a wounded animal reflects the narrator’s own vulnerability against his childhood memories. It’s uncomfortably great.
Although I really loved these two stories, my favorite in the entire anthology was perhaps Brandon Tietz’s Dietary, where an overweight woman becomes super competitive against her abusive physician. Her salvation becomes her damnation. It’s both tragic and funny in all the wrong ways. Brian Piechos’ Heavier Petting is another standout. Also Fred Venturini’s Gasoline, which was prelude to maybe one of the twenty or thirty best novels I’ve reviewed here.
The rest of the stories of Burnt Tongues range from quite good to forgettable, but none have the strength and identity of the five I’ve named above. They’re either a little to idiosyncratic or a little to close to what Chuck Palahniuk does himself. So I guess Burnt Tongues suffers a little but from the same disease every short story anthology suffers from, but not it never really quite capsizes into mediocrity and forgetability. These stories will stay with you for a while.
Burnt Tongues’ definition of transgressive fiction is more about transgressing social taboos than anything else, which is great. It is straightforwardly enjoyable, unlike other works of transgressive fiction which can feel byzantine and iconoclastic. Burnt Tongues is about fondly remembering the moments in your life you wished never happen. Making peace with the sight of your house burning down and for that I can only praise it. It fights the good fight.
7.4/10
