Curbside Splendor

150 pgs/ $12.00

Welcome to the cabaret. Amber Sparks’ May We Shed These Human Bodies is a menagerie of twisted fairy tales, ghost stories, and wild fables. Her stories are often fantastical but her prose is almost scientifically precise. No muss, no fuss. Sparks is our fairy tale cartographer, mapping a world of modern magic and human error.

We begin with Death and the People, a darkly comic fable. Death comes for one of them, and the people stand up to him and say no. “If he goes, they said, then we all go.” Death, who is one suave son of a bitch, looking “tall and elegant and kind of preppy in a crisp white button-down and chinos,” gives in.”You all have to come with me, then.” This story is both humorous and poignant. The people are irrational, insatiable; a chorus of gaping maws, like we really are.

I love how Sparks takes the most surreal characters and renders them tangible- making us empathize with Death, for example. The feral children, the cannibalistic seniors, the trees who become people, the wives who become animals, a big City hungering for mobility, a legion of ghosts- they are all hoarding desires, even the dictator drinking alone,”watching Shane and weeping into a glass of whiskey.” Continue reading →