Crawl Space & Other Stories of Limited Maneuverability Reviewed
These 31 stories have a way of inhabiting the reader’s mind, working their various ways into the reader’s very heart. How do they achieve that? It’s the tone, the mesmerizing mood of the prose. Richard Krause is something of a hypnotist; he is an Ancient Mariner who has not necessarily shot his albatrosses personally, yet he certainly knows how to bring them forward in the service of a good story. And a reader can be suddenly startled by an image, by a series of events, thinking: How did he know I was thinking that? I hope I am not overstating the pleasing yet uncanny feeling this collection awoke in me.
Permit me an anecdote. The day before I began to read the stories, I prepared a garnish from the seeds of a pomegranate. This is not something I do often. The vision on the cutting board reminded me of bloodshed, of smashed brains scattered on the ground; I have photographic evidence. Then my cutting board rose up in my memory as I read in ‘The Handkerchief’ that a ‘little white boy’ in an orphanage was ‘hastily beaten to a pulp’ ‘like a pomegranate crushed under foot’. I had the recent memory for reference.
The fact of children in orphanages runs through the collection like a distant toxic river of dark blood. Here, in the strangeness of the everyday present, the various violences of the past, whether they are from bullying or war or the boxing ring or the carnage of the highway, fling their twisted shadows forward. So often in the history of the characters there huddles a small and powerless child. Perhaps the most vivid and potent of all the stories is ‘Crawl Space’ itself, one of the longer stories in the book. It documents the converse of the odor of sanctity. This is a disgusting pervasive smell death and decay of that emanates from the dark and breathless claustrophobic gap between the earth and the house.
Returning to the matter of the tone – I must hasten to say that, for all the torments of the characters and situations, the reader is in fact not tormented. No, the reader is perfectly safe in the prestidigitation of the writer, and can, while being startled and moved, somehow remain the wide-eyed serene observer. An innocence flows just beneath the surface of the terrors and catastrophes that beset the characters, and there is a sense throughout the collection that hope and goodness are sometimes just possible, that beauty exists in spite of everything. Yet adulthood and experience can be grotesque. There is ‘something implicitly frightful about adults’. And, ‘violence is always just around the corner’. Does anyone really escape the memory, no matter how small the enclosure or how secure the locks?’
Do yourself a favor and take a dive into the crawl space.
— Carmel Bird, author of Field of Poppies and countless others
Get ready to go spelunking in these cavernous stories. More than entertain with escape, they descend, ascend, and pierce into the substance of being.
With the introduction of some themes the book – sex, punishment, family, and irony, among others – the disturbing opening tale of abuse and pleasure, and their intersections, is indicative of the exposition that follows. There is no gently going into the night in this book, rather, characters grope around in a gaping, ever-present abyss of traumas past and present. The stories get inside of a multitude of feelings, indulge and expose, poke and question, but never judge. Judgement is reserved for institutions, like repressive cultures, the law, war, some churches and schools, that limit maneuverability among feelings. “He was the instrument that brought the best out of us” (28), but the music teacher in one story was fired. What could come out is meant to stay inside, festering and fostering internal judgement and strife in several stories. A father combats feelings of inadequacy toward his son and his gregarious friend. A teacher’s high ideals prevents him from accepting love from a desirous woman. In a few stories, men imagine they’ve killed someone by dint of will, with their lustful thoughts. With characters becoming their own enemies, the stories offer an omniscient point of view. Often told in the subjective first person, the audience is invited in as “we.” An objective reality is established through repeated dialogue, reiterating others’ undeniable perspectives.
Questions posed throughout the text operate similarly, the stories remind readers of a vast mystery that goes largely unsolvable despite efforts to get to the bottom of things. The middle stories are shortest, each elucidating one metaphor, like Bull, Pelican, Teddy Bear. Seemingly innocuous subjects become passages into fraught histories. These shortest stories serve as palette cleansers before the beefiest tale: Crawl Space in which a homeowner searches his house’s air ducts for the source of a noxious smell. He’s convinced it’s from a girl he stalked, who haunts him. Alongside the humorous physical contortions required of him to find her, run his anguished thoughts. A ripe combination of creepy and funny produce an absurd, tantalizing, and unforgettable result in this latest collection from master storyteller, Richard Krause.
— Mari Carlson
The Horror of the Ordinary Reviewed
Nothing is as it seems in Richard Krause’s second collection of stories, The Horror of the Ordinary.
The 23 stories play with appearances, ironies and mysteries. Some stories deal with masks characters hide behind. Fur coats or good deeds or fat or escape conceal ulterior motives. Sometimes the crimes characters obsess over bringing to justice are the very crimes they fear they commit. Other stories turn perceptions on their heads. A sniper’s target is mistaken as Osama bin Laden. A restaurant customer can hardly eat his food imagining it was made by Israeli operatives, when, in fact…. The stories reference Kafka, only, in these tales, animals are personified rather than people turning into animals. The final narratives are longest and most self-reflective and existential, asking questions about identity and the nature of storytelling.
First sentences tantalize. “It was like he was visiting them,” one story begins. What is “it”? Who is “he” and “them”? The narrator is often tangential to the main character, a distant yet invested observer. As the stories progress and pronouns become persons, the point is not for the plot to become clear; rather, the point is the act of uncovering layers that obscure and complexify the truth. The texture is rich and thoughtful.
Much contemporary literature taunts readers to deduce the target its symbols point to. Instead, Krause is candid with symbols, fileting them open and exploring their depths. Beetles, cockroaches and splinters explode into infestations. Political and personal atrocities plague the text, from the treatment of animals to concentration camps to orphanages to food hoarding during the Great Depression to the current obesity crisis. Sexual fantasies turn perverse. Pedophiles lurk in plain sight. Victims inflict revenge when perpetrators least expect it. Be ready to confront a disturbing dark side in these stories. The bright side is the book’s careful, artistic attention to visceral and psychological detail developed into stories as intricate as a Japanese puppet show.
The Horror of the Ordinary is a collection of surreal, grotesque and beautiful short fiction breaking open the mundane as a carrier for the absurd.
— Mari’s Book Review
This collection of “stories,” at least for this reader, wasn’t so much “stories” as “studies,” or “musings” that dug down into areas of the psyche where the reader will feel uncomfortable. In fact, rather than “horror” of the ordinary, I might have called these stories “discomfort of the ordinary.”
A man obsesses about killing Japanese beetles on his property, and invokes Gregor, the man in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” who wakes to find himself changed into a cockroach. Our narrator in a way becomes the revolting, insatiable eater in his garden that he imagines the beetles to be.
In yet another musing, an orthodontist takes sadistic pleasure in tightening the braces of his young patients ever-so-slightly too much, and even more in killing the rare animals he hunts across the globe, mounting their sightless head on his walls to amuse and delight those same children who don’t understand the horror that brought them to their final resting place.
Krause uses few of the standard literary conventions – opening paragraphs, descriptions, dialog and action. His preferred style is a series of questions, or, as I said “musings.” “Who are these foreigners who have invaded our homeland, flooded our major leagues, found an ally from intermarriage, and now this? Does it not show something’s wrong with the game?”
The events themselves in these short pieces are slight: Hamid is killed; a man strips beetles off his trees; a nun retires to her places of birth; a boy is injured by a hard-batted foul ball. The thoughts spilled onto the pages of the book are dark, troubling, disjointed – like trying to hold a conversation when the music is too loud or the other party isn’t responding in a way you’d expect. You say, “How are you today,” and they respond “The pants are about to split at the seams, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.” At first you might be amused, or bemused – and after a while you’d begin to feel uncomfortable, and finally, if not horror, then certainly unsettled, disturbed, uncertain. And if their words almost made sense – were just out of reach, or invoked other characters or times or people or events with which you might have some familiarity, without being clear and precise about it – so much the more distressing as you try to grasp onto something familiar but it slithers away and won’t be firmly gripped and held before the words move on to another idea or turn around on themselves.
Hence the “horror” of the ordinary. The things that might lurk in what appears to be normal – if you had eyes to see, or the imagination to invent.
— Nancy Roberts of Table Hopping | The Write Stuff
Studies in Insignificance Reviewed
These stories tantalize by bordering the darker sides of human sexuality. In exploring these darker venues, Krause has been able to illuminate humanity in general – through fleeting forays into cruelty and revenge, or, say, uncertainty and masochism. You will find stories ranging from a man falling into an increasingly bizarre relationship with a German couple in their country home (“The Brown Shirt”), to a Japanese man who cannot rid himself of the childhood memory of spying on a pair making violent love (“Taro”), to an orphan intrigued by shoes (“Shoe Polish”). All of Krause’s characters share obsession, and while their obsessions may seem “insignificant” to outsiders, they reflect not so insignificant political and religious obsessions that have recently and historically caused so much global harm.
— Joe Taylor Livingston Press on Studies in Insignificance
“Krause’s collection of stories is a haunting exploration of humanity in its weakest but not necessarily most tender moments. The characters Krause explores find their obsessions just sort of crippling. There is the opponent of a chess-playing dwarf and a shortchanged cab driver, both obsessed with size. There is the child of an abusive home, obsessed with bug extermination. There are the true obsessive compulsives focused on toothpaste and cleanliness or completely ridding a town square of pigeons. Breaking through only occasionally are their foils, the spouse attempting to understand, the old woman who feeds the birds. Despite that, Krause’s stories—often more detailed character sketches than truly plot driven stories—are at base disturbing, and yet you can’t look away. There is the pressing sense that one might learn something, however troubling, from the almost universally pitiful men and women he introduces. This is dense, unsettling fiction–but beautifully wrought.”
— Debi Lewis Booklist review of Studies in Insignificance
Epigrams
Richard Krause’s collection of epigrams, Eye Exams jabs at collective truths, creating its own perspective, or lack thereof.
The preface defines an epigram as “a concise, often witty short statement that has a twist.” Epigrams are time-full, whereas axioms, aphorisms and other quotes-to-live-by are timeless standards. Epigrams may be true for now, but not later, yet make a lasting impact nonetheless. This collection’s epigrams deal in a variety of topics, from mundane to moral, such as: knowledge and beauty, carnal desires, power and courage, art, philosophy, religion, justice, honesty and jealousy, mastery and failure, and word play. A common theme is how observations reflect most the observer.
Written over 4-5 years, mostly in New York city, the epigrams do come from a context. I found myself trying to locate the story in the collection. The literal space between the epigrams on the page lends itself to letting the imagination wander and make connections. Who is the author? Under what circumstances would this statement have come about? Some statements use “I;” some “he” or “she.” To whom do they refer?
Eye Exams itself becomes a subject. It addresses readers as “you” or “we,” inviting introspection, critique and reaction. It holds up a mirror, examines us, our vision, scrutinizing our beliefs and thoughts. It is difficult not to respond to its many bold statements, like “Violence is the knife no one knows you are carrying, that can’t be found even if you are frisked.” But as strong as our agreement or disagreement may be, the collection wiggles out from under any blanket appraisal. “Contradictions are the unheralded completion of everything.”
Best read in short bursts, as the disparate insights startle and linger, this flexible book confounds and compels. It tests our willingness to question ourselves for the sake of truth.
— Mari’s Book Review
Richard Krause’s ‘Optical Biases’ makes us redesign our way of asking questions. His epigrams invite us to reconsider the significance of knowing the difference between what we want and what we need, what we ask for and what we get, and what we are and what we think. ‘Optical Biases’ dislodges our perspectives and we catch our eyes gesturing at life’s movements and rhythmical patterns. We wink at our thoughts that celebrate us.
— Camelia Elias Professor of American Studies
Eye Exams, by Richard Krause, is a collection of witty aphorisms that will catch you off-guard, make you smile, and pause with new understanding of the world around you and the people within it.
— Susannah Eanes Propertius Press
His aphorisms often take the form of ‘proverbial play’; i.e. the core of the aphorism consists of a well-known proverbial saying or familiar expression, which the aphorism then tweaks through some ironic reversal or witty gloss. It’s a tough trick to pull off, since these types of sayings can easily seem contrived or merely apposite. Krause does it with panache. These aphorisms are published in FragLit, the online journal dedicated to the fragment and all things brief, edited by Olivia Dresher.
— James Geary July 27, 2009 All Aphorisms, All the Time (author of Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists & The Word in a Phrase, A Brief History of the Aphorism)
I first blogged about Richard Krause’s aphorisms back in 2009, noting that his “aphorisms often take the form of ‘proverbial play’; i.e. “the core of the aphorism consists of a well-known proverbial saying or familiar expression, which the aphorism then tweaks through some ironic reversal or witty gloss.” This is still Mr. Krause’s modus operandi, luring readers into a psychological double take when the expected meaning of the immanent truism is suddenly upended, which leaves you invigorated if slightly uneasy about many of the sayings’ darker undertones…
— James Geary May 30, 2012 All Aphorisms, All the Time
I’ve blogged about Richard Krause’s aphorisms twice before, first here and then here. His collection of epigrams Optical Biases is recently out from EyeCorner Press. Here’s what professor of American studies Camelia Elias has to say about Krause’s work: “Optical Biases makes us redesign our way of asking questions. [Krause’s] epigrams invite us to reconsider the significance of knowing the difference between what we want and what we need, what we ask for and what we get, and what we are and what we think. Optical Biases dislodges our perspectives and we catch our eyes gesturing at life’s movements and rhythmical patterns. We wink at our thoughts that celebrate us.” And here’s an epigram to get you started…
–James Geary November 28, 2012 All Aphorisms, All the Time
Response to Individual Stories
“Coach”
In deference to the deposed biology teachers/coaches of the world, I write on World Wildlife Fund notepaper. The story begins in a surreal setting, moves to the Globe Theater of small town America, the basketball court; from there into the living rooms and kitchens of small town families; from there into the murky realm of suppressed sexuality and unrequited love; from there to the front page of small-town newspapers, and to the court of public opinion—guilty as charged. Coach Lambkin becomes the scapegoat for the community’s sins. Finally he and Crabtree become confused in the newspaper account and in the minds of people. Chilling!
Your description of Lambkin is crystal clear, down to the smoothing of the tie. Your depiction of the girls and their parents is excruciatingly honest.
-–Sharon Whitehead Professor of English
“Goodness”
This story penetrates—like the awl Jack carried in his pocket. But the nature of good/evil, like sister Mary eludes Jack. The portrait of Mary in her “goodness” is chilling because it is so accurate, but for those who didn’t know our “Sister Mary.”
There are thousands like her, millions even. Jack is Cain, cursed like the rest of us, only he knows it. He is not Lord Jim but he has met Kurtz.
-–Sharon Whitehead Professor of English
“The Lifesaver”
Now I understand why you had to write this piece while on vacation. The metaphor does make the connection not just for the writer but for the reader. And the metaphor is so rich: the lifesaver, the pez, the “sweetness” that takes the edge off life’s bitterness. You capture the dynamic family relationships; the autonomy of the individual, the isolation, alienation; the successive waves that pull us under, like the waves that carry us out, further and further, beyond where we can get our footing, stand, and walk to rejoin those on shore.
-–Sharon Whitehead Professor of English
“Alumnus of the Year”
“The Alumnus of the Year” makes astute observations about seduction, power, greed, and philanthropic motives. The description of the devastation of explosives is vivid and chilling. I also like the lines, “When we have anyone so firmly in the palm of our hands we withdraw from them to stand in the shadows, ashamed of the control we have over their frailties.” And “Numbers comfort us against the vagaries of fate.”
–Betty Peterson Playwright Professor of English
“The Betrayal”
“O.M.G. This story raises the hair on the back of my neck. Having spent my fair share of time in a nursing home (as a visitor) and with aging people, I’m there with Jack. What or who betrays us paltry moderns? The gods? Our minds? Our families? Was it any better for the aged in primitive cultures who walked off into the frigid wilderness? Are there Rockwellian families that actually revere the aged and gather, hands joined, around the death bed? You do provoke me with the characters in your stories. I love Jack because he cleans for Ollie and because he won’t call Social Services.
-–Sharon Whitehead Professor of English
“Art”
“Art” is one of your strongest pieces of writing you’ve done: strange yet accessible. It riveted me. The title character is immediately gripping; you’ve anchored in minute details of behavior what might have otherwise seem mere “colorful” eccentricities. The conclusion of the story took me by surprise, yet seemed inevitable too.
–Frank Kelly Playwright Professor of English
Response to Unpublished Novels
Response to Unpublished Novels
Ildiko
I just finished reading Ildiko. I had initially begun it right after I saw you. I remember your saying that the first couple of chapters might be a little hard to read. I dismissed this as false humility on your part, but I did have trouble with them and that put me off continuing for a while. Other things intervened and then I got that call from you, and I pressured myself to do it. Every time I saw the manuscript on my desk I’d feel guilty. Anyway, yesterday I started reading it again from the beginning and again I found the first couple of chapters hard, but I kept on going this time. Reading all of in the course of the last two days has been very intense.
What I responded to most viscerally was the rhapsodic power of it. It frightened me quite often when the intricacies of the obsession were laid out in such meticulous emotional detail. The richness and clarity of your writing and the incisiveness of your perceptions were not new to me, but their cumulative power in a narrative was new.
Initially I sat at my dining room table with the manuscript lying flat in front of me, but after a couple of chapters I put the manuscript on a dictionary stand and read the rest of it almost upright. I peeled the pages away and placed them face down in a pile to the side. At times I felt as though I couldn’t read fast enough—I wanted to engorge myself.
Thank you for letting me read Ildiko. It was a wonderful experience for me, which I regret having postponed …
— Frank Kelly Playwright Professor of English
Ildiko is an intense work. I read it in one afternoon and evening. I wasn’t standing up—but I wanted to pace through certain sections (Steve and Sybil’s chapters). Then as the end became clear, I needed to be sitting so as the let it settle around me, the sad inevitability of it.
You write with such power and insight especially relating to sexuality—one’s striving to make a lasting connection, and then, one’s retreating from it, spent by the effort, fearful of the result.
The narrator’s analysis of Jack—of the human condition—reminds me of Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment. It requires great courage and great artistry to lay bare the human soul.
-–Sharon Whitehead Professor of English
I loved it! I read most of it one night—and finished it the next morning. It very definitely kept my interest—but how much was the fact that I knew the characters—I don’t know.
It was very erotic—I found myself breathless at times—it may not be the same for a man—but women will love it.
– Patricia Fagan RN
Kneading You
Where do I begin? I read this in one sitting (with an occasional bathroom break). I got sucked in totally by the story. The characters are compelling, though tortured and doomed from the start. I interacted with Jack and Misty, talked back to them, urged them on, reined them in. I was exhausted when I finished and found myself relieved to be in the van with Jack, driving round and round in foreign territory, praying to myself that he’d not find her. Dear God, the suffering has to end!
Your utter and complete faithfulness to telling the story, the whole story, no glossing over, not posturing, not romanticizing, is so brutally honest.
-–Sharon Whitehead Professor of English
Artists spend their entire life in search of truth and beauty. When they discover it, they’re devastated by what they’d found.
This is a truly remarkable and moving work.
–Steve Cleberg Director of Theater at SCC
Sequels to Kneading You
Thank you for granting me the honor of reading your remarkable work. I admire
the writing—am truly awed by it, and immensely enjoyed the almost Nabokovian tension created by the coupling of aesthetic distance with such intimacy. I read the manuscript with as much objectivity as is possible under the circumstances, always mindful of your request not to read it as an interested colleague but as a disinterested reader. You wanted to know if the novel is a good read. Yes.
–Betty Peterson Playwright Professor of English
The first installment of your “trilogy” was quite impressive, as I believe I expressed to you, but the writing in The End is your strongest to date, becoming progressively stronger with each chapter, so controlled, so measured and sure, preparing the reader for the end, but only just enough, so that it is still a bit of shock when Jack is actually able to gather himself for that final moment and commit such a heinous act.
The novel contains many brilliant passages I wish I had written, and you have allowed us to glimpse some of what occurs in the male psyche at its most vulnerable, which takes no small amount of courage. From one writer to another, you have my admiration, and I have every confidence that you will find the right publisher for the manuscript when you are ready.
–Betty Peterson Playwright Professor of English
I finished the third part of the trilogy. Once again, I tried to pace myself, but once I picked it up on Friday, I had trouble putting it down till I finished it sometime Saturday. And I had a roaring headache by the time I laid the manuscript aside. The story continues to be compelling, heart-wrenching, angst-ridden, excruciatingly honest. I wouldn’t work otherwise, but still I understand your compulsion to write it.
Here are my thoughts on the significance of the novel:
The trilogy is an intricate, intimate study of the human heart/mind/will. I relate to the story on many levels. Jack had developed a persona behind which he felt pretty secure, not happy, but firmly planted. A person came into Jack’s life who uprooted him and everything he thought he had battened down. Misty becomes the focus of every moment of every day. Jack was living on two levels—one conscious, deliberate, public, the other private, involuntary, chaotic, passionate. The sex plumbed unimagined depths of feeling, primitivism, animalism, connection, significance, profundity. The person became Jack’s god, his religion. He was tempted to throw everything else away even those things in his life that were pure and worthy. Jack and Misty’s relationship was based on insurmountable, unquenchable need on both sides. Neither of them could make the other whole. Both were incomplete in critical ways, had needs no other human being could satisfy. The match was doomed—not because of society’s taboos but because the two were toxic for each other. The union self-destructed.
With that said, it is as if The End concludes the only way it can metaphorically—someone has to die. A blood sacrifice is required to atone for the crimes Jack and Misty committed against each other and against themselves.
-–Sharon Whitehead Professor of English