Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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The Torturer’s Apprentice, John Biguenet’s first collection of short stories, features an astoundingly diverse cast of characters. A modern-day stigmatic, unmoved by religion and perplexed by his mysterious wounds, seeks to heal himself with hydrocortisone cream. A young man, desperate to earn the affections of his beloved, demonstrates for her his uncanny ability to metamorphose by tugging malleable bones and muscles into the forms of various animals. A seasoned medieval torturer is forced to apply the instruments of his trade to his young and gentle apprentice. In the stories, the O. Henry award winner vividly reveals an outlandish (and often grotesque) imagination and a keen verbal sense. In these fourteen startling stories, the supernatural meshes so effectively with the mundane that his most outlandish situations seem perfectly acceptable.

The stories take place in an impressively broad range of locations and eras, from a city in a fictional South American country to the antebellum Deep South to the medieval European countryside. Despite such disparate settings, the stories cleverly evoke many of the same themes and the supernatural elements Biguenet includes help to bring universal issues sharply into focus. While a number of stories explore the constantly-analyzed subjects of love and family relationships, Biguenet provides, by placing his startling stories in unconventional settings, fresh and thoughtful considerations of what it means to be a parent or wife or lover.

 “Fatherhood,” for example, challenges the traditional notion of family: soon after a young couple’s first pregnancy ends in miscarriage, a ghostly toddler appears in the nursery, and the couple must decide whether to shun the unusual tot or to embrace a deeply unconventional family life. In “The Open Curtain,” Pierce returns home from a business trip and notices from the driveway that his wife and children, whom he observes through the window, seem like strangers to him; the attention he devotes to forming new routines in response to this curious amnesia results in a new and harmonious family life. In “Do Me,” one man’s response to the demands of an unusual relationship in raises questions about the very nature of love.

A number of the stories focus on a kind of metamorphosis; characters often find themselves changing (in both positive and negative ways) to accommodate unusual circumstances. The atheist stigmatic grows accustomed to religious fame, embracing the possibility of strengthening the faith of others without having faith himself. In “My Slave,” which has its setting in southern America just before the abolition of slavery, a new slave-owner is deeply disturbed to find himself among a “kind of secret society of fellow slave owners,” but soon grows accustomed to this new identity. In “I Am Not a Jew,” Mr. Anderson, while traveling in Europe, saves himself from a group of neo-Nazi youths by repeating the title phrase, which he continues to repeat once he returns home, finding that this mantra polarizes his world and alters his perspective. Even Gregory, the forlorn young lover who manipulates his body into horses, eagles, and dolphins, often finds that once he has transformed into a shape, the return to human form is difficult; transformations linger, “at least in isolated patches on his body, beyond the weekends.” In each of these stories, Biguenet deftly explores a quirk of human personality through its ability to alter itself; characters begin to understand themselves as others perceive them.

While the subject matter of Biguenet’s stories is often unorthodox and somewhat disquieting, his writing is carefully-crafted and fluid, with graceful descriptions. In “Rose,” Biguenet describes Mr. Grierson taking sorrowful inventory of the hope chest of his recently-deceased wife: “fingering the silk negligee bruised brown with age, inhaling the distant scent of gardenias on the bodice of an old evening gown, burying his arms in all the tenderly folded velvet and satin.” Biguenet’s writing also reveals an ironic and dark sense of humor. The atheist stigmatic, for example, applies lotion to his wounds “religiously.”  Ironic humor abounds in “A Plague of Toads,” as the narrator’s --- and reader’s-- disgust with the creatures that have mysteriously invaded the city is heightened by descriptions of the “amphibian inundation” and the accompanying “twittering roar.” A particular “squat toad, corroded with warts,” seems perpetually to mock the unlucky narrator.

Whether they portray frightening amphibians or endearing specters, people with mysterious abilities or those who yearn for them, the stories offer an insightful assessment of the motives behind human actions and interactions. Through unorthodox situations and unexpected transformations, Biguenet explores with startling honesty the virtues and flaws that reveal themselves when we encounter extraordinary situations.