Darlin' Neal's Rattlesnakes & the Moon: A Review by Robyn Oxborrow

Great stories can make us see our lives in a new way, pulling us in, taking the time to make us feel welcome so we step alongside the main character. In Rattlesnakes & the Moon, Darlin’ Neal creates this atmosphere effectively with stories that look into several characters’ lives to build a chilling collection. Readers will notice certain characters popping up in different stories, and may be tempted to flip back to previous chapters while reading to piece together each characters’   life and find a satisfying end. But—much like life—these tales are not ordered into a neat package with a foreseeable end.

The tone for the entire collection is set in the first story, ‘Red Brick’, where an unnamed child and her family visit her grandfather in a senior home. The child is startled by the unfamiliar place and her grandfather’s breathing mask. After being sent on a task, she becomes lost trying to find her way back, and must carefully choose the correct door to her family. Throughout Rattlesnakes & The Moon as readers become this wandering child, and each story is a new door waiting to be opened.

Neal builds her scenes in large, empty spaces, where it seems each character is on their own island. Readers begin to feel isolated, but more involved with the families. The characters often look out upon their vast landscape as a void that could hold better things, as in ‘Things She Can Hear’:

Through the kitchen window, she checks on the children playing in the yard. Cold weather is here and a frost is coming and soon they will have to come inside. Clouds make shadows on the mountains. Farther and higher in the distance, she can see snow on Mount Baldy. She strikes a match and burns the newspaper in the fireplace.

Neal completes her stories with slightly ominous dialog as her characters attempt to see the smallest hint of the future, as in ‘Man Wrapped in Gold’:

“He gives the will to us,” I repeated. “Mother, are you listening?”

“I’m listening, Caroline. Come closer.”

“I can’t get any closer,” I said and laughed. The ice had run into my veins and I kept realizing I was not falling. “I want to leave here some day.”

“Oh, Caroline, sleep,” she said. “What does someday matter?”

“I’ll leave and send for everyone when I can.”

“I can never go. Where will you go? Nowhere. Please let’s sleep.”

All I wanted to do was sleep, but Liddy and Pearl were sleeping and I was afraid of their sleep. I lifted Liddy’s hand and it felt like a rock.

Ordinary scenery mixed with casual dialog eases reader into the story where they are open and ready for anything. Slowly, Neal moves us to the edge of our seats as the plot moves into darker, unknown territory.

‘Sister Shadow’ best exemplifies this as we follow Elsie going to great lengths to give her sister Maydie Lee, who spent years in a mental hospital, a release for burial. As we ride in the dark night with Elsie and her son, readers move back into Elsie’s past where signs of her sister’s mental health started to fail:

The red light blinking against the glass seems to flutter across her eyelids. It washes over her face, again and again, like a soft hand. Then those hellish screams once more and Maydie Lee is beside her. It’s Elsie’s hand that’s soft, moving the hair back from Maydie Lee’s face. She manages to get her arms around her and rocks until Maydie Lee calms. ‘What? What?’ she asks because Maydie Lee is mumbling.

Images of Maydie Lee’s deteriorating state and the eerie, blinking light set up for the near-supernatural ending. It’s recommended that one should not read this story alone and late at night.

It’s difficult not to pause for several hours after each story. The burdens that the characters experience create a sense that readers are going through these struggles themselves. Neal’s stories magnify smaller moments and let us see how they affect the way we navigate through life. Simply to end one story and begin another would be like walking blindly through our own lives without consideration of the obstacles to be overcome. We can’t help but feel connected to these characters, and through them see how life is not a neat package like in a movie, but something that takes effort.

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Robyn Oxborrow is a freelance writer crawling around Reno, NV.