My Untimely Death by Adam Peterson (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

What follows is the second in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press series have appeared at Big Other (a full-press of Calamari Press) and with Mud Luscious Press’s online quarterly (a full-press of Publishing Genius Press).

Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death, the winner in fiction of Subito Press’s inaugural contest, is a bright and clever collection of flash vignettes intent on showing the absurdity of death, no matter where or how it is manifest, and no matter how much we are expecting, or, in the case of some of Peterson’s narrators, eagerly anticipating it.

Within the opening pieces, Peterson perfectly illustrates what we can expect from the structure of the book: a nameless narrator struck down or otherwise overcome by a death of various modes and methods, often predicted, and always poetically charged and under-written with a brutal touch of humor.

You have consumption, he says.

Do people still get consumption? I ask.

Only people like you, he says.

On the way home I buy black clothes and many, many more handkerchiefs. I have read about this, I think. I know what consumptives do. I never go outside and a deathly pallor overtakes my skin. I eat only beef broth and the flesh disappears from my bones. I become effete, sophisticated. I kiss a boy. Sometimes I faint in public. I cough even when I don’t have to. There is never any blood.

And ‘untimely’ is the biggest joke threaded throughout My Untimely Death, Peterson ever attempting to convince us that any death could in fact be timely, bent on the absurdity of this argument. And while most of the deaths are in fact intuited or otherwise foreseen by the narrator, the methods of the deaths themselves are often surprising – for instance death via the crush of too much love, or via secret post, or via a landmine at the mall. This is where the true strength of My Untimely Death occurs, in Peterson’s ability to reverse both what we expect of protagonists (that they be kept ‘in the dark’) and what we assume as readers (that we will be ‘in the know’):

My untimely death comes from a misstep. My untimely death comes from a footfall. They taught us that land mines are everywhere and so it comes as no surprise when my boot finds one in the parking lot of the mall where I had come to browse racks of clothes, try on new boots, and demo a treadmill which they taught us is the only safe way to walk. My untimely death happens on a cloudy day without wind. I take small pleasure in lighting up the sky and blowing leaves from the fake trees in the parking lot medians.

This was meant to be.

One might expect a load of blood and gore in a book dedicated to various forms of death, but Peterson forges a new route even in this, tidying his prose into clean packets, tiny gifts wrapped in calm, where if blood is spilled it is spilled only drop by drop, mirroring the sparseness of death. This, among so many other moments in My Untimely Death shows the intelligence with which Peterson wrote this collection, and if you are looking for a book that is both grim and humorous, tackling death with a new and clever might, My Untimely Death is it.

My Untimely Death is available from Subito Press.

Subito Press is a nonprofit literary publisher based in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We look for innovative fiction and poetry that at once reflects and informs the contemporary human condition, and we promote new literary voices as well as work from previously published writers. Subito Press encourages and supports work that challenges already-accepted literary modes and devices.

J. A. Tyler is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, including Comatose (Patasola Press, 2012) and A Shiny, Unused Heart (Black Coffee Press, 2011). His recent work has appeared with Caketrain, Redivider, Fourteen Hills, and Wigleaf, and he reviews for The Nervous Breakdown and The Rumpus among other venues. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.