Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories by Craig Laurence Gidney

Craig Laurance Gidney loves words…sensually, sexually, omnivorously. He streams out floods of them in his stories so that you, too, can taste their deliciousness. He wields them with abandon and precision to create little worlds that rise off the page and engulf you in snow globes of sparkling beauty and perceptiveness. Each story in his latest collection, Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories, has a strong immersive effect.

The first story, “The Safety of Thorns,” takes place in the antebellum South. Israel, a young boy enslaved at a plantation, meets a beautiful man with a magical guitar; in Israel’s eyes, Mr. King, as he styles himself, must be the Devil, his magical moonshine the drink of the damned. But this illicit liquor from Mr. King grants Israel and his fellow slaves the courage to assert themselves against the abuse of their masters. Israel wonders what kind of power the Kings have or, more rightly, what kind of power he has himself. Depressing at its foundation, “The Safety of Thorns,” as the title suggests, explores the self-protective uses of pain, insofar as the Kings, who may more accurately be called broken gods, conceal their glory beneath banal exteriors so that they won’t be hurt, kind of in the same way Israel and others play submissive to survive. Florid prose captures the humidity of the deep South and Israel’s wide-eyed reactions to the Kings without sentimentalizing the brutality in Israel’s life.

“Etoliate” moves to the present day, where Oliver pursues his pale prize of desire among the drugs and dance clubs of Baltimore. Always fascinated by the pallor and strange attraction of Aryan guys, Oliver struggles with his tastes in men, especially since his artwork glorifies the sensual strength of dark-skinned African deities. However, Oliver chases the pale guys and, with them, achieves a moment of climax, but his partners may or may not be dying at the peak moment. Somehow Oliver’s elemental and disastrous sexual experiences have something to do with a seductive, quicksilver, albino-ish man who keeps meeting up coincidentally with Oliver but won’t reveal his name. Besides words, Gidney clearly loves music too with a similar fervor; his unusual, synaesthetic descriptions of the music Oliver hears and the mood changes that it brings establish a dreamy, liquid state. Readers share Oliver’s surreal swims through the night as he looks for clues to the secrets of his lust. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what resolution Oliver arrives at, so the surge of the story kind of dribbles off….

“Her Spirit Hovering” marks the collection’s turn from really good to even better. In this story about a man haunted by his dead, conservative, Southern belle mother’s disapproval about everything in his life, Gidney tightens the hallucinogenic prose and leavens it with acerbic humor. Howard Stone drifts through life, propelled by his fear of what his mama might think about his unconventional art, his interest in an Indian women, and his taste in men. Then his boyfriend, Ned, a disarmingly self-possessed dude (”My self-destruction is merely an affectation; I want to keep it that way”), dumps him. Will Stone exorcise his demons? “Spirit” does not reach for profundity the way that “Thorns” and “Etoliate” do, but it is a more carefully sculpted piece, thus ultimately more effective. I like Gidney’s dry sense of humor.

“Come Follow We” concerns a young boy who gains the ability to see auras and spirits after a long fever. At first, his visions enrich his life, making the outside world more shimmery and prompting him to learn more about his dead family members. When the boy tries to share the beauty of such spiritual sights with his school, they punish him for being a distraction, and, though his elders tell him about his deceased relatives, they don’t tell him the whole story. They’re hiding the sorrowful truth of his seductive visions. Because the young boy learns about his heritage of joy and heartbreak as a descendant of slaves and Native Americans, the spirit visions work as a metaphor for growing up and perceiving the sordid truth that polite society tries to hide. A touching and melancholy story.

“Sea, Swallow Me,” which gives its name to the collection, follows a sickly seeker of spirituality, Ned, as he becomes half-willingly absorbed into a seaside rite worshipping the old African mer-deity, Olokun. For this story, Gidney cranks up his prose to a never-ending series of poignant high notes, a paean to the primordial power of the ocean that envelopes Ned in its beauty, even as he finds it frighteningly powerful. Gidney even rises to stretches of pure prose poetry, as when writing about Ned’s interpretation of the sea worshippers’ chant:

There was a magic about all words that began with the letter O. It was something that Jed had felt as a child when he was first learning to read. It was a silly thing, but the feeling never left him. Owl and opal and Orion were beautiful words. O was the letter that was an endless circle, that surrounded a hole. It was geometric and mysterious, mystical and mathematical, the cousin to 0, the number that signified nothing. He found himself saying the word with the group of worshippers.

Sustaining such a numinous mood throughout “Sea,” Gidney writes about Ned’s encounter with Olokun, and the gifts he receives in a wonder-filled and entirely believable manner. “Sea” represents one of Gidney’s most mature and polished efforts.

Returning to the archetypal experiences of gay youth as portrayed in “Her Spirit Hovering,” “Circus-Boy Without a Safety Net” heralds another appearance of Gidney’s humorous, stylized realism. Risking a reputation as “faggy,” the little geeky kid C. B. privately tends a love for divas, choral music, and flamboyance. Increasingly drawn toward the flair of performers like Lena Horne, C. B. tries hard to determine what constitutes heaven, sin, and temptation. Of course, he falls for Lucifer in drag as Lena Horne, as the lead sentence tells us, an ending that’s no less gratifying for being utterly predictable. Gidney imbues the usual coming-out tale with great details about being an inner-city black kid, and a closet diva devotee, and with boundless amused sympathy for C. B.

“Strange Alphabets” switches tacks, taking on the viewpoint of Arthur Rimbaud, a French Surrealist and Decadent poet, notable for his a) his passionate affair with fellow poet, Paul Verlaine, and b) his philosophy that poetry should be an intense train wreck of all senses. Gidney’s work imagines Arthur in his early teens, before his intoxication by the poetic muse. As a sensitive, envelope-pushing kid eager to escape his disapproving mother, Gidney’s Arthur hops a train, where he experiences his first gay encounter and the first appearance of his muse (who looks suspiciously like his doppelgänger). “Strange Alphabets” runs like “Her Spirit Hovering,” but with historical underpinnings. I find “Strange Alphabets” the stronger work because Gidney has clearly done his homework on Rimbaud. Perhaps more importantly, he adequately captures Rimbaud’s inquisitive, voracious poetic outlook—no mean feat when the poet is allusive and abstruse, even in his native French.

“Magpie Sisters,” the shortest of the stories, is a quick flash fiction about Vonda, a recovering thief. She, like so many characters in Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories, has a brush with something numinous…Magpie, the greatest thief of the animal kingdom. Then comes “A Bird of Ice,” which I reviewed previously on this site.

Gidney closes the anthology with “Catch Him by the Toe,” wherein a carnival comes to the southern town of Azalea. All quarters of town, rich and poor, black and white, are fascinated by the animals and performers, but no act captures their attention more than that of Sambo, advertised as a primitive wonder from Africa who has mystical control over tigers. Then one of the tigers escapes. The spell cast by the carnival and the violent results to which it inspires the townspeople spill forth with the tragic irony of ancient Greek plays. A particularly pointed meditation on the power of racism and fear.

Yes, I know I just used the adjective “numinous” earlier when discussing “Sea, Swallow Me,” but it’s the most accurate adjective for all of Gidney’s work, since it connotes transcendence, brilliance, and mastery, all of which this collection evinces in abundance.

Publisher: Lethe Press (Nov. 2008)
Price: $13.00
Trade paperback: 204 pages
ISBN: 1590210662