REVIEW: The Gunman and The Carnival by Catherine Gammon

Disclaimer: Bridge Eight published Catherine Gammon’s previous novel China Blue, winner of the Bridge Eight Fiction Prize in 2021.

Short Fiction. 144 pgs. Baobab Press. February 2024. 9781936097500.

Catherine Gammon wields suddenness like no other. A change of scene, a perfectly timed line break, a moment of intimacy. Sometimes, a single sentence:

“The next time she saw him, he was married.”

“She sat with her mother, and then her mother died.”

Throughout The Gunman and the Carnival, her new collection of stories through Baobab Press, Gammon allows sudden movements to carry her stories forward. It’s enough to make you peek before turning a page fully, to take a deep breath in preparation of holding it.

If you’ve read Gammon’s work before, you know there’s a carnal electricity that drives her prose. It’s cerebral in its deployment, yes, but the subject of bodies boils the blood of her work and understanding this, she can control a reader’s interest page-to-page, story-to-story.

Sometimes that means finding a dead body. Sometimes that means two actors uncomfortable in their own bodies. Sometimes that means realizing you are pregnant. That’s not to say Gammon is averse to the poetics of language:

“Why be a litter wizard when on every street corner you find a spent syringe?”

Reading Gammon’s short stories brings to mind memories of reading Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore. There’s a concern for the individual line. There’s a deep emotional undertow. There’s curious, perhaps regretful, reflection. Every story exhibits a different exercise—carnival acts, if you will—and each one feels so informed by memory it’s difficult to accept them as only fictions. Like Hempel, these works long to return to a past with the wisdom of the present—or relive the past in a modern world—which of course is impossible and makes even the shortest of lines all the more devastating to read.

“Past and present pressed together, superimposed, inextricable.”

“She had first known sex in her sleep.”

In the story “Cul-de-sac”—from which the title of the book gets its name—Gammon works in vignettes, which might be where she shines the most. The story mentions the coronavirus, alludes subtly to The Good Place, and does so without taking us out of the story. The Gunman, sacrificially aged thirty-three, is a sympathetic character “until he pulls the trigger.” All we need are scenes and glimpses, then everything else falls into place.

“Stardust” introduces us to Bianca, a woman who “accepts” she is pregnant and must wrestle with the certain belief that the new child will be no good because of who the father is. It’s not quite “Hills Like White Elephants” because it’s not meant to be devastating. This is a woman assuming control, the kind of woman who makes a fiction hum.

The Gunman and the Carnival is a wonderful read. The stories simmer and imprint on you. They make a fellow writer wish they could be as nurturing with their own work and remind you the breadth with which fiction can impact the world, a reader, a life. You’ll want to read them one after another, but you shouldn’t. Like a good wine, they need a minute to breathe.

You’ve met her characters. You just haven’t gotten to know them. You haven’t taken the time to wonder what they think and feel. You can’t follow the scattered logic of their decision-making, except of course you can. As long as you take the time to read it.

Somehow both timely and timeless, both meditative and disruptive, both modest and salacious, Gunman accomplishes what all good collections make us do: shake our head, cover our mouths, watch our breath, and lead us to dream. It challenges us, engages the monoculture, and questions perceived truth.

It demands reflection.

There are fewer works that do so with the skill and grace of Catherine Gammon. She isn’t a writer to watch—she’s a writer to revisit. Again, and again, and again.