Compression Scars

by Kellie Wells

Overview

The eleven stories in Kellie Wells's debut collection cover a wide range of eccentric characters—from a young girl experiencing her friend's strange demise to a set of opposite-sex conjoined twins. Forced to deal with the debilitating confines of the physical world—usually manifest in some kind of deformity or affliction, from compression scars to mysterious blue skin—Wells's characters struggle to transcend their existential disappointments and find some way and someone to love.

In the title story, Ivy and her best friend Duncan struggle to understand their mortality as Ivy learns of his potentially fatal internal scarring caused by a moped accident. As Ivy says, "Things can get so strange so fast," and they frequently do in Wells's stories. But Ivy and Duncan help each other escape their frightening, difficult world, if only momentarily, through imagination, good humor, and closeness.

"Godlight" addresses most specifically the questions that are evident in all the stories: Do you believe in God, and do you believe in reincarnation? Jonas, the Hyatt Regency Hotel's live-in light bulb replacement man, encounters two different characters—a child who lives in the hotel and a woman who claims that her identity has been altered for the Witness Protection Program—who ponder these questions. Meanwhile, Jonas is left wondering what has really become of his missing daughter, Emma.

The physical world is brought into question frequently in this collection, and in "My Guardian, Claire," we see what can happen when someone tries to transcend it—and succeeds. During a séance to reach the narrator's late mother, Claire reaches the spirit world and never truly returns. The narrator tries desperately to retrieve Claire through a hilarious trip to the Exotic Animal Drive-Thru Paradise.

Compression Scars is an eloquent and original collection that vibrantly captures the oddities of both the everyday and the out-of-this-world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820340463
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	10/01/2011
Series:	Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Series , #36
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

KELLIE WELLS teaches in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals.

KELLIE WELLS teaches in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals.

Table of Contents

Compression Scars
Blue Skin
Godlight
My Guardian, Claire
Star-dogged Moon
A. Wonderland
Cassandra Mouth
Swallowing Angels Whole
Sherman and the Swan
Secession, XX
Hallie Out of This World

Editorial Reviews

Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. Here is a thrilling debut from a writer so agile and subtle in her terms that, like Walter Abish and Kathryn Davis, she dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them.

author of She Drove Without Stopping - Jaimy Gordon

By turns achingly poignant and downright hilarious, rendered in prose as supple and surprising as it is consistently brilliant, these stories take us into a world of angels and grotesques, of grace notes and grave truths, of the lost and, finally, the found.

author of World Like a Knife - Ellen Akins

Slyly comic yet deeply felt, Wells's marvelous fiction embraces the sacred weirdness of the everyday life. These are magical stories, in every sense of the word, by a writer with a conjurer's feel for the hidden compartments, death-defying escapes, and lighter-than-air levitations of language.

author of Equal Love - Peter Ho Davies

With a brilliant and imaginative cast of eccentric characters, Wells invites us into a world where 'things can get strange fast.'

Colorado Review

Distinguished by a compressive force born from invention and intensity rather than economy, Wells's aptly titled Compression Scars is a memorable debut. The writing is consistently fresh and often beautiful, though for Wells beauty is a by-product. The primary function of her language is incantation—necessary to effect the alchemical transformations that inform each story.

author of The Coast of Chicago - Stuart Dybek

[A] debut collection of luminous short stories that reflect both the fragility and flexibility of the human spirit . . . Sometimes dark, frequently droll, by turns heartbreaking and humorous, Wells' phantasmal stories shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy that continues to haunt long after the last word has been read.

Booklist

Beautiful pain-streaked stories.

Third Coast

[A] debut collection of luminous short stories that reflect both the fragility and flexibility of the human spirit . . . Sometimes dark, frequently droll, by turns heartbreaking and humorous, Wells' phantasmal stories shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy that continues to haunt long after the last word has been read.

Booklist

"By turns achingly poignant and downright hilarious, rendered in prose as supple and surprising as it is consistently brilliant, these stories take us into a world of angels and grotesques, of grace notes and grave truths, of the lost and, finally, the found."--Ellen Akins, author of World Like a Knife

"Distinguished by a compressive force born from invention and intensity rather than economy, Wells's aptly titled Compression Scars is a memorable debut. The writing is consistently fresh and often beautiful, though for Wells beauty is a by-product. The primary function of her language is incantation—necessary to effect the alchemical transformations that inform each story."--Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago

"Slyly comic yet deeply felt, Wells's marvelous fiction embraces the sacred weirdness of the everyday life. These are magical stories, in every sense of the word, by a writer with a conjurer's feel for the hidden compartments, death-defying escapes, and lighter-than-air levitations of language."--Peter Ho Davies, author of Equal Love

"With a brilliant and imaginative cast of eccentric characters, Wells invites us into a world where 'things can get strange fast.'"--Colorado Review

"Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. Here is a thrilling debut from a writer so agile and subtle in her terms that, like Walter Abish and Kathryn Davis, she dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them.--Jaimy Gordon, author of She Drove Without Stopping

"[A] debut collection of luminous short stories that reflect both the fragility and flexibility of the human spirit . . . Sometimes dark, frequently droll, by turns heartbreaking and humorous, Wells' phantasmal stories shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy that continues to haunt long after the last word has been read.”--Booklist

"The people in these stories are vulnerable, eccentric outsiders attempting to find their way in a world that puzzles and dazzles them. Wells adeptly portrays both their vulnerability and their fortitude. Her strong, unaffected prose contrasts sharply with the surreal quality of many of the stories. This collection introduces a writer of startling imagination and great promise."--Library Journal

"Beautiful pain-streaked stories."--Third Coast

From the Publisher

For this debut collection, creative writing instructor Wells won the University of Georgia Short Fiction Prize. Her characters are unable to avoid disaster in a world where "things can get so strange, so fast." Fathers and mothers disappear; children are left alone to cope with their fears and fantasies. In "My Guardian, Claire," the young narrator is trapped in a role reversal. In "Godlight," a Jesus-like figure, Jonas, replaces burned-out light bulbs in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The light that he keeps for himself the light that comforts him is the light he sees when he imagines his dead daughter in heaven. The people in these stories are vulnerable, eccentric outsiders attempting to find their way in a world that puzzles and dazzles them. Wells adeptly portrays both their vulnerability and their fortitude. Her strong, unaffected prose contrasts sharply with the surreal quality of many of the stories. This collection introduces a writer of startling imagination and great promise. Suitable for all public libraries. Marcia Tager, Tenafly, NJ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This year’s Flannery O’Connor winner offers a range of tales orbiting consistent pop-culture themes.

A sentiment from "A. Wonderland," a modern retelling of the obvious, captures the spirit of Wells’s debut collection: "She knows he’s too old for Alice but feels sex with a much older man is a small price to pay for a good nonsense poem." But Wells’s rejection of straightforward plot in favor of nonsense is ultimately hit and miss: the random feel of "Blue Skin" simulates the disconnectedness felt by brother and sister as they struggle to grow up motherless in a helter-skelter world; a man whose sole job is changing lightbulbs ("Godlight") is intended to shed light, as it were, on life in an apocryphal hotel; "Sherman and the Swan" is a meandering tale of a boy born to the world as a marrow donor (too late) who comes to think the sister he failed may be reincarnated as the cygnet in his care; the most experimental piece is "Secession, XX," with a side-by-side newspaper-column structure meant to simulate the physiology of Siamese twins (left side of page, girl; right side, boy) whose point of view is shared, to say the least. The experiment is conducted mainly to explore plain old pedestrian feelings, which is what any experimental fiction should ultimately be about. Unfortunately, Wells doesn’t always deliver on this mark. Too often, she relies on puns, double-entendres, and the general raucousness of modern product placement, which, even though it’s her subject, dates her and gives her work the cultural penetration of bell-bottom jeans. And even as one admires the ideas, one wishes they weren’t quite so cute—the reader longs for inspiration from the mind rather than the headlines.

The choppiness here may be recognizable, but that doesn’t mean it’s good story. A vision still on its way.

Kirkus Reviews