Ken Poyner's Constant Animals is best described as short speculative fiction laced with irony, droll humor, and satire. To say that much of Constant Animals is bizarre would be understatement, for Poyner’s world is our world turned upside down. Poyner''s fiction reminds me of Jonathan Letham's short fiction or better yet the surreal prose poetry of Russell Edson. Poyner’s Animals features mermaid wives in living room aquariums who wait for encyclopedia salesmen to fertilize their eggs. In one story a man elegizes his grip, in another a man takes up wearing a sled harness to make work easier and continues wearing it, much to the confusion and awe of those around him.
Most of the stories are written in first person, without much dialogue. Dialogue would get in the way of Poyner's flash fiction, which is what these stories ultimately are. A few are two pages or less, most come in under five. The short story remains the most modern of literary genres, but it has never been the most profitable. Readers tend to like fat operatic works of fiction to sustain their reading lives for months. Big fat novels have proven to be unshakable, though the short story, and poetry, are better suited to subway and bus commutes, and our modern quick attention span. And flash fiction? It marries the best of poetry and the best of short fiction in a punk rock fashion.
Poyner's style is a bit absurdist, and his stories read swiftly. The emotions are muted, but the situations, which play out like social comedies, or nightmares, would call for histrionics in the best of us: affairs, mid-life disappointments, but Poyner, like Letham, or David Foster Wallace, reminds us that even when life is its most absurd people often do not know how to react except to try to keep on being normal. Their reactions are anti-reactions. In "The Sister" a family paints doors and landscaping on an enormously fat sister and sell her as a house to a couple who is known the wiser. The couple eventually has a child, and the sister falls in love with a tan house across the street. One morning the families wake up to find themselves on the lawn "looking for the walls" while the sister lumbers off into the sunset with the tan house underneath her arm. They simply cannot fathom what has happened and go about with their lives as if none of it did.
In another story a man wears bear suit while he performs in a circus until the man and the suit merge and the man becomes the bear. In another a man carries a monkey and worms out the social norms such relationships defy. A prostitute made of glass sits in the dark and checks her surface for cracks and chips. Alien species mate and dirt farmers sell their children. Poyner's world in Constant Animals is a menagerie of odd, and it all happens at arm’s length, detached, floating, separate from us.
Many of these stories pine with lust, most of them from the male perspective. Some of the stories are randy, others express a detached male guilt about lust. Poyner is at home writing about this breed of modern men, who are almost shy and embarrassed about their desires, tamed almost, but not quite. The men of these stories often are lost creatures, de-masculinized in the modern world of clerks, lawyers, statistics and abstract thought.
The one theme that needles these stories together is the underlying instinctual urge to mate and love that lives in our DNA. We cannot escape it. Poyner humorizes it, shows us the irony, the cruelty of it but it's there nevertheless. If these flash fiction peices were written by another author its quite possible the outcomes would be violent, or tragic, given the same circumstances. But Poyner is witty, weird, and wild, and in his capable hands he gives us a myriad of worlds that shimmer and resemble our own, albeit through a warped window in a funhouse. I suggest you take him to the beach, and take a vacation from the romance and the formula mystery of summer beach reads. Poyner's style is bizarre but readable, and enjoyable, and a vacation from the norm.
Comments