The title of Stacey Richter’s first collection of short fiction, My Date with Satan, might suggest a slice of superficially nasty American Gothic; in fact, its mildly oxymoronic nature is a clue to its originality. “Goal 666”, one of the most successful stories in a consistently impressive volume, is a perfect statement of Richter’s approach to the genre she so subtly subverts. Its narrator, Gabe, is the lead singer in a heavy metal band, The Lords of Sludge, and hilariously earnest about the whole endeavour. Never mind that Gabe was a sweet-faced tenor in his church choir as a boy, nor that his fellow band members, three beefy Swedes, are ticklingly polite and healthy-minded; he has “always wanted desperately to be bad”, and “Doom Metal” will be his ticket to the image that he craves. But the band is joined by Liv, on the synthesizer (“of all the limp-dick instruments in the universe, the synthesizer is the most flaccid”), a pug-faced, hard-bodied pixie who subverts Gabe’s most strenuous efforts to be a child of Satan, and instead seduces the band into playing “Happy Talk” at their first gig: “Below, our fans stared, open-mouthed in horror. Liv lifted her fingers from the keyboard and began to do the happy talkie dance with both hands.”
Richter herself performs similar elfin magic in her stories. Behind the affectless prose of the nihilistic, style-obsessed young (“We consume the most expensive drugs, cosmetics and coffee known to men”, one of her characters remarks), childhood, sentiment, vulnerability and humour keep poking through, like that Rodgers and Hammerstein melody in a wave of heavy metal. The awkwardnesses of youth, the grandiosity and the despair, are mocked, but with tenderness. Some of the stories are troubling; “Prom Night” takes an averagely miserable night of drug-addled deflowering and extends it into a comprehensive sense of lost innocence; “A Groupie, A Rock Star” looks beneath the anaesthetized lethargy of shallow people to inspect, rather hopelessly, the baffled children inside them. Unlike some of her contemporaries, however, Richter isn’t buying into the boredom and despair; she’s gesturing to something beyond it.
Where Richter excels, in all the stories, is in her sense of balance. There are surrealisms – the girl washed up on a desert island inhabited only by young men (“An Island of Boyfriends”), the boy with a precocious intellect whose dim dad and loony stepmother believe in aliens (“who tend to look, as far as I can tell, like David Bowie”) and plan to freeze their bodies cryogenically (“A Prodigy of Longing”). There are weirdnesses (“Rules For Being Human” is a story of ghosts in a bar, consumed by loss and longing), and there are signs of mental imbalance. But there is also a tremendous humour, whether in the narrators’ own sassy sarcasms or in the gentle ironies of their unwitting self-revelations. With only two exceptions, the stories are first-person narratives, and Richter’s facility with slangy demotic, or, in “Ocean”, an almost Nabokovian middle-aged resignation, is spirited and compelling.
“You’ve got to have a dream! If you don’t have a dream! How you gonna have a dream come true?” Gabe’s helpless musical question is asked, in various ways, throughout the volume. The girl with the island of perfect boys wonders whether an anthropologist could figure “if I was happy or not”; “Sally’s Story” begins “I don’t know if this is a happy story or a sad one”. A woman whose earnest desire is to become a fully achieved Cat Lady – a spinster “with as many as seventy-five cats in a one-bedroom apartment” – has her plan compromised by falling in love with a sweet, rat-owning boy.
Stacey Richter writes with intelligence and wit, and her stories, while ostensibly located in darkness (drugs, emotional difficulty, loneliness, death) are, at heart, about love. Whether they insulate themselves by trying to be cool and cold, or whether narcotics and consumerism have muffled their childlike faith and yearning, they all seem, at some point, to be helplessly looking upwards and outwards to light and affection.