A housewife in the midst of a nervous breakdown, hurling dishes against the floor, suddenly overwhelmed by the horrors of motherhood. An imaginative little girl who lives with her grandparents and sees a mermaid at her baptism. A lesbian Holden Caulfield. These are the women Chavisa Woods watches and inhabits in her debut collection of short fiction, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind.
As Flannery O’Connor beckons us into the restless, gothic American south, and A.M. Homes backs us into bizarre and frightening corners of our suburbia, Chavisa Woods guides us through a strange, troubling vision of domestic life in the rural U.S.
Woods veers, story to story, from a straightforward telling to a densely visual, sensuous and poetic mode, as well as from realism to fantasy. Even within her stories, she keeps readers suspended, uns