Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott
I loved GennaRose Nethercott’s novel Thistlefoot, one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I followed it up with 2024’s story collection, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. This collection displays the beautiful, the eerie, the surreal, and the terrible, written in Nethercott’s precise, poetic prose that reminds me of the writing of Kelly Link.
The books contains fourteen stories. Many are about lost loves, or loves gone wrong; many are fables, and some play, dangerously, in that liminal space between reality and fantasy. I’ll list the table of contents, and then focus on the stories that touched me the most deeply.
- “Sundown at the Eternal Staircase” – The curving staircase, descending into the earth without ever stopping, is a popular roadside attraction in a town. This is the story of two girls who work there.
- “A Diviner’s Abecedarian” – A group of middle school girl use everything from A to Z to divine the future. A new girl comes to school and they decide to deal with her.
- “The Thread Boy” – A witch’s son, made from thread, grows up and goes on a journey, where he learns about fish, humanity and connection.
- “Fox Jaw” – The main character’s true love is sometimes a man, and sometimes a fox. Even when she leaves him, she can’t quite leave him behind.
- “The War of Fog” – “The War of Fog” happened in the past, and only lasted nine days. The daughter of a historian helps her father record the facts of the war, slowly realizing that time has changed forever.
- “Drowning Lessons” – Dalton’s sister can drown in a shower, or a puddle. He can’t tell if she is drawn to liquid, or it is drawn to her, but he struggles to keep her alive, even at a high-school party.
- “The Autumn Kill” – In a post-apocalyptic world, “harvest” has a bloody meaning, as we learn from our narrator, a girl shaped to be nothing but a hunter.
- “Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart” – Structured as a bestiary, the title tale collects 50 plant/animals. All of them were identified by a trio of florists. Along with the catalogue of increasingly strange creatures, the catalogue tells us a story about the florists. This tale is illustrated by Bobby DiTrani.
- “A Lily is a Lily” – Not all ghosts are dead, as the main character learns when he encounters of ghost of his first love, who he left when he returned to the US from France.
- “Dear Henrietta” – After six years, the narrator writes a letter to her friend Henrietta, to tell her a story and a secret she kept for a very long time.
- “Possessions” – Three college friends turn to the occult to find their fourth friend, who has disappeared. The rooster they sacrificed in the ritual returns and offers to help them, for a price.
- “Homebody” – When they buy a house together, the artist protagonist’s relationship with another artist, surprisingly, does not get better. Her relationship with the house does, though.
- “A Haunted Calendar” – Like an Advent calendar, only… not. A collection of perfectly written vignettes. I didn’t check the word-count, but they might all be drabbles.
- “The Plums at the End of the World” – A fable about a goat girl, a vampire, their friendship, and a tree which grows the most beautiful and tempting plums.
GennaRose Nethercott
Probably my two favorites are the fables, “The Plums at the End of the World” and” The Thread Boy.” “The Thread Boy “is the sweetest story in the book. It starts when a witch wants a son, so he goes to the market (that pronoun was a surprise!) and buys many kinds of thread. The witch throws the thread together into the form of a boy, and the thread boy is born. He is a good son, and when he grows up and wants to see the world, his father doesn’t hold him back. The boy goes from town to town, and meets many people. Bits of his thread often connect, so he is bound, in a way, to various people, even if they move (one is a sea captain). When he comes home for a visit, his father is worried about these connections, but the story didn’t go the way I expected. This is beautifully, simply written story about the nature of connections.
“The Plums at the End of the World” has a bleaker ending, but before that happens, we meet the Goat Girl (half human, half goat), who was sold to a sideshow, where she met Oliver, a vampire who considers himself an angel of death. They become close friends and when the sideshow closes, they retire to a little house together. The Goat Girl meets a traveling salesman who sells her a seed for a plum tree. The tree grows the most lush, fragrant, juicy, enticing plums you’ve ever seen, but if you eat one, your hunger will have no bounds, and you won’t stop eating until you’ve eaten the world. This is the downside—the upside of the tree is that the ground beneath its branches become wildly fertile and any crop will thrive. The townspeople (especially the men) grow more resentful of the Goat Girl, and the story turns dark. The ending is not unexpected, but perfectly done.
This is the last story in the book, and long before it, I had identified “yearning” as one of the books’ themes. This is a powerful story about being yourself, and about yearning.
“Sunset at the Eternal Staircase” is beautifully written, with two convincing young women who work at the concession. No one can explain the origin of the staircase, no one can reach the bottom, and many of the employees become “disgraced” by breaking one of the many, many rules about the place. Nethercott’s blending of strange and surreal with rock-bottom, concrete realism works especially well here.
“Drowning Lessons” reminded me the most of something Kelly Link might have written. In an economically failing town, Dalton tries to protect his older sister, Sophia, from drowning. Anywhere. Sophia drinks out of sippy cups so that fluid won’t go up her nose and drown her. She can drown in a rain puddle, or in water from a tipped cup. Her chance to go away to college is gone, and she is revealed as increasingly bitter and desperate as the story unfolds. Dalton has his own issues; he’s in love with Quinn but doesn’t know how she feels about him. At the party at Quinn’s house, these two issues collide. The party, at once a convincing teenage party or at least one from a certain era, and strangely surreal, is the most beguiling part of the story, with (I think) a sideways glance at another tale in the book, “The Diviners Abecedarian.”
“The Autumn Kill” works as shadowy, poetic horror, luring us in with melancholic language that tricks us into believing everything is a metaphor…but it’s not. Our protagonist knows and resents her place in a community that exists after economic and ecological collapse, and her final act is a blow for freedom.
“The War of Fog” drew me in from the title. I watched the emotional struggle between our main character and her historian father with intrigued interest, but soon noticed that other things in the story were strange. Structure is vital to this tale, and Nethercott pulls off an innovative take on a well-known sub-genre of story.
For much of the same reason I liked “The War of Fog,” I liked “Dear Henrietta,” and that was the graceful control Nethercott exerted on the language. At first, this first-person story in the form or a letter to an old friend just seems rather sad and nostalgic, as the writer reminds Henrietta of the time several years earlier when Henriette let the writer stay at her house in Switzerland. But there is more than nostalgia going on here, more than anger at a failed marriage, and more than loss.
These were my favorites. Every story shifts perspective on reality in some way, and every story is written in prose that owes a debt of gratitude to Nethercott’s background as a poet. Prepare to be baffled and seduced by the tales in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart.
these sound fascinating