Gary Amdahl's I Am Death
I'm working on a review of Gary Amdahl's newest book, I Am Death, a collection of two novellas. In the title novella, there's a passage that's as good a piece of description as any I've read recently, but it's simply too long to use in my review. That said, it's also too good to not share, and I think it's a great example of Amdahl's prose. This is his narrator Jack taking a tour of the Chicago city morgue with Henrique Friend, driver for the morgue and the subject of a newspaper article Jack's writing:
The cooler was as big as a gymnasium, cold and silent, with two hundred and fifty bodies on display, as if in a museum, or the backstage workshop of a museum, figures in various states of disrepair and corruption. Here was the man whose co-worker had missed a stud and fired a nail from an automatic nailer through a piece of wallboard into his friend’s heart. Here was an infant who had fallen into a mop bucket and drowned. Here was the old man who starved to death and the old woman who’d fallen down a flight of stairs, her skin a taut, dry bag punctured here and there with broken pieces. Here was a female who’d lain for many years in a shallow grave. Here was a man whose head had been severed in a car accident. Here were two lovers who’d fallen asleep in the back seat while carbon monoxide fumes assailed them like guilt-laden dreams. Here was an entire family as if in a Republican fund-raising exhibit, unblemished but unmoving. Here were assorted gang members, frayed holes in flannel shirts matching deep black holes in their flesh, at the bottoms of which resides slugs. Here was someone who appeared, medievally, to have been drawn and quartered, limbs stacked neatly by his side on the stainless steel tray. And here was the young mother, pregnant again, unrecognizable to the young father in her shrunken state, her skin crisp and black like obsidian but preserving in its strange shape the image of her final thought, the molten tongue in the gaping crucible of the mouth saying the word, the vacant orbits of the eyes retaining still something of the blinding light of that word, the charred and splintered bones of her arms held out imploringly or perhaps in invitation, asking for and promising great love, the greatest love, free and eternal, without condition, but finally, without foundation.
I said to Ricky, “It’s too much,” to which he replied, “Either that or not enough.”
I Am Death comes out June 3, 2008, and my review will be out before then. Keep an eye out for this one.
Matt Bell
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Reader Comments (2)
His previous effort, also from Milkweed, Visigoths, a story collection, is also highly recommended.
I reviewed Visigoth when it came out, and still find myself pulling it off the shelf from time to time. It's definitely one of my favorite short story collections.