Review of May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks

May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks is a collection of thirty short stories, some of them a page or two in length. Most of these stories, like the first story “Death and the People,” are modern fairy-tales gone wrong due to people’s rampant desires. The first story in the collection is a story much like Everyman and Dr. Faustus. Death approaches the people and asks a single person to follow him to the afterlife, but the people are so close to one another that they tell Death that if one goes all must follow. Through much persuasion, the people convince Death to take them all to the afterlife. Like Dr. Faustus, the people don’t take Death’s warnings seriously. Away from earth, the people become restless and bored because in the afterlife, humans don’t have the luxuries and means of entertainment they had on earth. They all drain Death to the point of annoyance. He goes to the Ones in Charge for advice. After the people are taken back to earth and offered a fresh start, there is new hope for mankind. The first thing the people speak of when they are back on earth is “how they came to be.” Sparks, or rather the omniscient narrator, gives the people, essentially the reader, a second chance at life—or an idea of what that would look like. Will the human-race destroy the earth once more? Sparks ends the story where other writers might start or continue. 

Each narrator in Sparks’ stories has a unique and distinct voice and point of view. She uses a third person omniscient narrator when a story deals with fables and supernatural events—a technique Sparks uses to distinguish immortality vs. mortality. A third-person omniscient narrator achieves omnipresence—the ability of being in many places at once and one that has more information on its characters than the characters themselves; the narrator in a sense becomes God. In stories with more quotidian characters, Sparks uses the first-person plural or second person point of view to reach a broader audience, since human emotions and common circumstances like loss, divorce, and relationships are presented. In “the dictator is drinking alone,” there’s a strong sense that something important has been lost in the dictator’s life, but the subjective third person narrator does not say what that something is. Sparks does a great job of conveying a sense of grief and unwanted solitude in the dictator’s life with props like whiskey and characters like the dictator’s pathetic son, but that thing that the dictator has lost is never named. All the reader gets in the end is Joey (from the 1953 movie Shane) screaming for Shane to come back.

           

Instead, adult fables deal with the feelings of solitude, awkwardness, hope, despair, and loss, emotions all humans feel at some point. In “to make us whole,” an emotionally unstable mother sketches “blood-flowing clouds” on her children’s bedroom walls—she has no money to buy drawing paper. Her husband committed suicide after “being discovered in Disgrace” (morality plays an important role in Sparks’ stories, to the point where sins become personified). The narrator explains how her siblings have witnessed their mother’s erratic behavior since their father’s death. The mother’s emotions are understandable, and she is sympathetic, but Sparks takes the reader by surprise when the family go on a supernatural journey; their new bathtub comes to life—trees and dresses come out of it, and an arm seeps through the drain and transforms itself into replicas of the family it invaded. Again, the story ends at the moment other writers would label a climax rather than an ending. The outcome of this family’s life could’ve been explored more, but it ends abruptly as a way to leave questions unanswered and allows the readers to fill in the pieces.

     

In one of Sparks’ most visually detailed stories, “the world after this one,” a young girl named Esther describes a life with an unstable sister, Ellie, her obsessively religious father, and a mother who almost seems to appear and disappear out of the living world. This is how Esther characterizes her father. The descriptions that follow are absolutely amazing. Esther’s father cannot love his daughters because every day, he is off trying to save people’s souls. In turn, he cannot be loved because he’s always wrapped up in an internal fight. “His gargoyle face is perfect for preaching, but bad for loving. Esther finds it impossible to love. The nose is too sharp, the cheeks too sunken. It is the face of an ascetic, a man who lives alone with his god and his demons. Now he shakes his head, like he’s coming out of a vague, bad dream, and continues on with his sermon. Esther shrugs and keeps typing on the old Remington. Her father thinks computers are the devil’s code machines” (42).

           

Sparks’ characters are doomed to fail over and over again. The connection between Sparks’s work to Dr. Fausuts can only fundamentally merge if the first story in her connection, “Death and the People,” is somehow linked to all of the characters in this collection. What this means is that Sparks’ more mundane or “human” characters need to shed their corrupt skin to that of supernatural beings to escape what most haunts them, human emotion.