152
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
BUILDING A BETTER BIRDHOUSE: CLIFFORD GARSTANG’S TROUBLED MEN a review by Dale Bailey Clifford Garstang. House of the Ancients and Other Stories. Press 53, 2020. —. The Shaman of Turtle Valley. Braddock Avenue Books, 2019.
Hickory, NC, resident DALE BAILEY is the author of eight books, including In the Night Wood Wood (John Joseph Adams Books, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019). His story “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtimes’s Masters of Horror television series. His short fiction has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award and has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker awards.
About halfway through Clifford Garstang’s debut novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, Aiken Alexander, his protagonist, starts building birdhouses. It takes him a while to get the hang of it – he describes his first birdhouse as a “monstrosity” – but once he gets the birdhouse ball rolling, he never looks back (at least until someone burns down his workshop, but we’ll get to that). He’s soon cranking out birdhouses that look like pagodas, cathedrals, and, memorably, the Chrysler Building. When they start piling up, he takes a few to the local farmers’ market in Turtle Valley, VA, home to generations of the Alexander clan. Business at the farmers’ market picks up fast. Soon it’s all Aiken can do to keep up with demand. He’s got a thick roll of farmers’ market cash in a coffee can under his workbench. The owner of the local gift shop wants to stock his passerine palaces. Finally, he has to build bleachers in his workshop to accommodate the tourists driving out to watch him at work. I mention this not only because birdhouses are a major element of The Shaman of Turtle Valley’s plot, but because Aiken’s birdhouses are a pretty good metaphor for the work every novelist or short story writer – and Clifford Garstang is both – undertakes. Like Aiken,
who builds birdhouses explicitly modeled on real buildings, a fiction writer is in the business of building illusions so convincing that the reader is compelled to set aside the world around her, slip inside the pages of the book, and make herself at home. Tested against this birdhouse aesthetic, both The Shaman of Turtle Valley and Garstang’s second collection of short stories, House of the Ancient and Other Stories most resemble Aiken’s early and imperfect products. They are polished and sturdy, but they never quite achieve the soaring majesty of the cathedrals and Chrysler Buildings that Garstang seems to be aiming for. There is in both books the sense that Garstang is making – or trying to make – some grand statement: the stories in House of the Ancients, like The Shaman of Turtle Valley, focus on men and their relationships with the women around them. At their best, those men are cast from the same mold as Aiken Alexander. They are troubled and inarticulate, broken by the world and constrained by a model of masculinity that allows them little latitude to express – or even understand – their emotional turmoil. At their worst, and they are often at their worst, they are cruel and selfish and violent. They are sexual
CLIFFORD GARSTANG received an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. He’s the author of two linked short story collections published by Press 53: In an Uncharted Country (2009) and What the Zhang Boys Know (2012), which won the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Shenandoah, among others. He has received Distinguished Mention in the Best American Series, the Confluence Fiction Prize, and the GSU Review Fiction Prize, and has had a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and scholarships to both Sewanee and the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, as well as residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, Hambidge Center for the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony.