2 kinds of weird: "Flesh & Blood" by Helen Phillips and "Reeling for the Empire" by Karen Russell

2 kinds of weird. 

S&A: “Flesh & Blood” by Helen Phillips

S&A: “Reeling for the Empire” by Karen Russell

B: Tin House,Issue #54/Winter Reading (Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 2012)

Reading these stories in the same journal made me reflect on the different types of “weird” (AKA, slipstream, magical realism, absurdist, fabulist, fantastical) story-telling styles. 

Helen Phillips’s story starts with a concept and then runs with it.  There’s no real plot, no character development, or conflict—just one person dealing with new, bizarre circumstances.  It feels rather like an exercise to me, rather than a finished story.  In Helen’s piece, the main character cannot see flesh, just everything under it.  It’s treated so literally, without any extraordinary circumstances, so it never seems like a symbolic or allegorical situation, just the exploration of a “what if”.

The conceptual framework of Russell’s story is every bit as bizarre as Phillips’s, if not more so.  Young women emit silk through their bodies and die if it’s not released.  Some factory owner capitalizes on it.  The color of the silk, the pain/pleasure of releasing it, the labor conditions and recruitment situations, and the development of characters beyond the protagonist, along with multiple layers of conflict (internal, between co-workers, against the boss), make this story at once highly symbolic, highly fantastical, and largely plot-driven.  Like Phillips’s story, “Reeling for the Empire” has a cool, unusual concept, but unlike her story the concept is balanced out by the features of story-telling one would expect from a realist piece (in sum: character-driven plot).