Sententia Books

186 pages, $15

Review by Sara Lippmann

The title delivers.  Bound by Blue is everything it promises to be – a haunting, heady collection about those shackled, bound by their individual brand of blue – pain, aching sorrow, screaming memories of childhood trauma.  Meg Tuite takes on the awful, the tormented, and the twisted like no other writer. Her characters are not ones to seek out for a moonlight stroll or to cozy up beside on the couch for a breezy rom-com. They can be terrible, but we understand them as survivors; they have suffered from and remain inextricably tied to the brutal, never-ending cycle of abuse. Even when they are unforgivable they are human. The thirteen stories feel almost feral, boldly defying conventional norms with lyrical complexity and startling imagery.  Tuite’s prose is fearless and fanged, exquisite in detail – mirroring the barbed edges of her characters whose nightmares stalk them long into dawn.

Hurt is everywhere. Almost all of Tuite’s characters are victims of unspeakable acts inflicted upon them by mothers, fathers, random boys, local men, and other family members. A go-getter medical student is ruled by her eating disorder, the outgrowth of a savage backwoods assault. A grown man gouges out his eye, irrevocably ruined by his own mother’s sexual coercions.  A child tears out her own tooth as a cry for help against her older brother’s friend, a predatory neighbor.  A caretaker to an elderly man is haunted by the cries of a demented, downstairs tenant.  A delusional housewife can’t escape the damage of a destructive marriage and a childhood rape. Continue reading →