Black Static

Published in trade paperback and eBook editions by Apex Book Company in January 2018, Cry Your Way Home is the second collection by American author Damien Angelica Walters. It contains seventeen stories, all of which are previously published, including two that first appeared in Black Static.

The unnamed protagonist of opening story "Tooth, Tongue, and Claw" is a second daughter and so entered into the lottery to be given to the monster, but she manages to forge her own destiny. Beautifully written and touching on ideas such as the myth of Andromeda and Jackson's "The Lottery", this is a story that at heart deals with the concept of betrayal, and how in fighting monsters we can become monsters, though Walters doesn't share Nietzsche's misgivings on the subject. Courtney acquires a stepsister in "Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden in My Smile", but Alyssa's resentment is strong enough to change reality itself in this variation on Cinderella. Walters dissects the myth of the happy family unit, showing how resentment grows and presenting us with a truly sinister figure in Alyssa, someone who will insist on getting her own way. "On the Other Side of the Door, Everything Changes" is a heartbreaking story of abuse and the way in which a lack of communication between a mother and her teenage daughter can lead to tragedy. It's a story that feels all too real and with keenly felt emotions that reminded me of both vintage Bradbury and King's classic short "The Last Rung on the Ladder". Walters gives us something truly sad and you feel for the characters trapped in this horrible situation, each desperately needing the other and yet unable to find the right words.

"This Is the Way I Die" is a variation on the story of Frankenstein, with a man recreating a young woman's body at her request, though ultimately only she can save herself. It's a fascinating story, one filled with a sense of sadness and fate, of love denied, and perhaps the physical transfiguration is only a metaphor for the transformative power of love, while self-love is the key to acceptance. Callie in "The Hands That Hold, the Lies That Bind" starts to sprout thorns and her mother won't tell her why. It's an unsettling story, one where the rules are broken and nothing is quite what it seems, with her mother's secretiveness proving her undoing and the mystery of Callie's father adding another element to the mix. Ostensibly presenting us with a word picture of a crumbling circus, the story "Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant's Tale" is really a beautifully rendered tale of how we get trapped in certain roles and can never break free of them, prisoners of our past and our memories. "The Judas Child" acts as the pander for a monster, the story showing how easy it is to fall into behaviour that is complicit with evil, and at a push you could see it as a metaphor for paedophilia and Stockholm Syndrome.

"S Is for Soliloquy" is one person's account of a love affair, but one in which there are unaccounted for absences, leading to a revelation as delightful as it is beguiling. It's a wonderful variation on the idea of opposites attracting and so wittily expressed that you can't help but be won over by the author's audacity. The protagonist of "The Floating Girls: A Documentary" is haunted by guilt that she let down a friend who then became one of 300,000 girls who simply floated away. It's a compelling story, one that intercuts the personal and media accounts of the phenomenon, along the way raising doubts about what really happened, and in the denial of the event there is the same feeling that lets us turn a blind eye to abuse, the ways in which people become detached from their lives. A powerful story, one that will linger in the memory. "Take a Walk in the Night, My Love" originally appeared in The Madness of Dr. Caligari edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr, which I reviewed in Black Static #55 when I had this to say - 'Julia starts to sleepwalk in "Take a Walk in the Night, My Love" by Damien Angelica Walters, and this is the start of a readjustment in reality, with her eventual discovery that all the things she believes to be real are an illusion, but with a final caveat that turns the situation around yet again. It's a clever story, with a subtext that touches on misogyny and the use of women as objects, while at the same time providing a different context, one in which two unhappy people will submit to anything to find a release from their woes.'

A woman has panic attacks in which she imagines she is drowning in "Falling Under, Through the Dark", but all this only leads her back to the truth about the accidental death of her son. This was a harrowing story, one with new levels revealed at each twist in the plot, and the statistics about drowning grounding the story in our reality. "The Serial Killer's Astronaut Daughter" has to deal with the complications that arise courtesy of her father's crimes and his hope to manipulate a stay of execution. The story is rooted in feminist concerns, the ways in which women are moulded by masculine expectations and how the deck is stacked against them, so that situations which wouldn't be a problem for a man become nothing but problem when women are involved. It's a clever piece, declamatory without being obvious about it. "Umbilicus" has a grieving mother ready to do anything to bring her daughter back, even sacrifice the world. This is perhaps the strangest story here and, to my mind, the least effective, one where the outré elements swamp everything else and the message of female empowerment, if that's what it is, gets obscured.

Fairy tales are at the heart of "A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take", the story of a woman who is trapped in the stories of others but has the power to find an ending of her own. It's a gripping read, but overall felt a little too ambiguous for my liking, as if the author was so focused on the prose and concept that the plot suffered, regardless of which misgiving it provides a lot for the reader to think about on the theme of how stories shape our lives. In "Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home" a mother uses an unusual baby monitor to evade the baby's constant crying, the story depicting the horrors of having a child who won't stop crying, the effects it can have on a couple, though I'm not sure I completely understood the story's ending, other than that the woman took all of the blame, a development that contains its own critique of gender dynamics. "Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice" is the tale of a girl who is different and how the school's mean girls expose her true nature with tragic consequences. It's a piece that zeroes in on the way in which bullies act, how the ringleader gets their followers to do whatever she wants and how they then set out to blame everyone except themselves, at the same time touching on the passivity of the victim. Pitched as the testimony of one of the hangers on, the story is a document chronicling abuse, both heartfelt and heart-rending. Finally we have "In the Spaces Where You Once Lived" in which Helena struggles to cope with husband Jack's dementia, only to have him possessed by something alien. It's another of the collection's stranger stories, one where the depictions of the horrors of dementia are pitch perfect, but IMHO the attempt to do something more with the material undermined it slightly.

While I didn't fully appreciate everything here, Cry Your Way Home contains enough gems to reward all but the most demanding readers and confirms the fine impression left by the author's debut collection Sing Me your Scars. In Walters we have a talent to cherish, a writer with a wide ranging imagination who is not afraid to tackle uncomfortable subject matter and does so with understanding and passion. Recommended.