THE TOWN OF WHISPERING DOLLS

A set of 19 Rust Belt stories that reject the label “flyover country" with arresting strangeness.

Neville (Fabrication, 2009, etc.) seduces a reader with language, but there’s nothing romantic about her words. The book is haunted and haunting, not only by a group of roaming dolls, but by the consequences of American empire. "Grotto," the opening story, makes for a mysterious and disturbing kickoff: Narrated by "the mother of a girl who is now a doll,” the story introduces a chorus of dolls that sing by removing their heads. "As you know, the heads are empty. And so the singing comes from the emptiness at the base of the head, like wind blowing over the neck of a bottle. I can't say where the breath comes from, but it always comes." The following stories illuminate the area’s history, geography, and economy, providing context for the dolls and the people struggling to survive. With the mill shut down and farms displaced, the locals can sometimes earn a bit of money by dressing up in "head scarves and choir robes" to play captured civilians at the army base’s fake Middle Eastern villages for training exercises. These circumstances are deranged, perhaps even more than “a plague of dolls” infiltrating a community already beset by poverty, drugs, and environmental degradation. Neville has a lack of cynicism while confronting these crises that makes the stories searing. The narrator of "The Plume" says matter-of-factly, “Why am I telling you this? Out of love, I suppose, for this little strip of human habitation. Out of anger. Out of the wish to confess.” The second half of the collection has some terrific writing but is less impressive than the first. Once the dolls disappear, the stories read like simple premises rather than complete and complex narratives, and the conceit of the book loses its vigor.

A potent combination of style and substance that loses some steam halfway through.