Book: Grey: Stories For Grown-Ups
Written By Judy MacDonald (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

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Pick up Judy MacDonald's book of short stories, Grey, and immediately feel the pangs of strange adolescence quiver up your increasingly vulnerable spine. It looks, at first glance, like a children's book; big colors and funny little drawings are the hallmarks of that richly fabled strain of storytelling, banking on the hands of an impressionable reader.

We're older now though, right? And that air of impressionability has withered and gone, replaced with cold coffee cynicism courtesy of all the traffic jams, 24-hour streaming news reports and bad love affairs beneath our expanding belts.

Each story in MacDonald's collection leaves a unique and eerie residue on their reader - a strong impression from beyond the confines of the presented language. Her spare prose, characterized by short, quick sentences, enhances narrative effect, filling the conceived boundary with an evocative, tonal feeling. In "Writer's Block" her seven-year old character Darcy seeks the raw meaning of language. She asks the differences between 'writing' and 'spelling' when thrust upon her. In this everyday struggle, however, comes a real feeling of futility for the written word. The child's questions become our questions; however impossible that seems, we after all being grown-ups. If "Writer's Block" is overt in its questions, then the parallel of Anglo-Saxon colonization of North America to the introduction of starlings to cityscapes in "The Europeans" turns on a great, if not obvious, twist. However clear her intent is from the first line, there is still a head-slapping moment at the end.

As any great author is able to do, MacDonald attacks her reader's sensibilities from all directions.

The stories in Grey are tempting, tantalizing, bordering on terrific. MacDonald never fully embraces a style or subject matter she can wear out. Her concern seems to be with providing coherence in the mood her stories inspire. These are, as the subtitle states, "stories for grown-ups." Whether her characters teach us what it means to be such, or prove how little anyone knows, is debatable; author MacDonald's ability to reveal strange truths through strange tales, is not.

© 2003 - Erick Mertz