The Missing

by Tory Tuttle

Overview

Each of the seven stories in Tory Tuttle's luminous first collection explores dislocation, whether from losing a child or the protection of a parent, or as a strategy to escape reality. A mother measures the distance growing between herself and her first child, who lived only three weeks; a teenager runs away from abuse, detention, and the indifference of her mother; a janitor's hold on reality dissolves after witnessing the murder of a child; a traveler, lacerated by the death of her sister, seeks solace through flight; a lonely woman whose child was stillborn experiences the world through daily bus rides; a woman is abandoned by her lover and her mother, though in drastically different ways; a wife protects her children by finally leaving her abusive husband. These uniquely rendered portraits, often impressionistic, depict the accommodations one makes to survive a world frequently inhospitable to human desire and longing.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940167125544
Publisher:	Contingency Street Press
Publication date:	05/20/2023
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	520 KB

About the Author

Tory Tuttle lives with her family and their animals in the mountains west of Boulder, Colorado.

Editorial Reviews

05/15/2023

Tuttle’s debut, a slim volume of seven moving short stories, explores the hazy realms between the real, the imagined, and the experienced worlds. In the mindscape of many of her protagonists, whom often are facing trauma, these worlds overlap in a bewildering blend that can lead them to make decisions that might seem illogical. In striking language, the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur in the mind of the protagonist of “Horizontal Hold” who works as a janitor in a school, witnesses a brutal act committed by students, and watches TV in a basement apartment each night, eating “Vienna sausages that looked like children’s fingers and tasted like the aluminum can.”

Meanwhile Emily, the main character in “Next Stop,” feels most alive when she’s riding the bus and watching the world slip by. Movement—as a form of escape, a source of solace, a way of assertion, and a means of engagement with the world—is another urgent thread that runs through all the stories, as is the elusive nature of memory. Tuttle’s language is evocative, and her prose draws its power from the seamless blending of the senses.

In “112 Months,” the best and most poignant in the collection, a mother who has lost her newborn baby counts months that have passed since her tragic bereavement. The birth of other children and the passage of time do not ease her sense of loss, as Tuttle explores a mother’s worst fears, through the imagined tragedies that she fears have befallen her children. Tuttle’s characters face wrenching hardships, tough confrontations, and in “I Saw Him Sleeping” Marcella, a victim of abuse, tries to overcome her acute loneliness and a sense of being abandoned by a mother who neglects her, by always being on the run. The collection is an immersive read that leaves a lingering sadness in the reader’s mind.

Takeaway: Poignant short stories of people living on through traumatic events.

Comparable Titles: Nicolette Polek’s Imaginary Museums, Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews