16. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

By Karen Russell

This was part of my first order from AbeBooks that I sent to arrive at my in-laws in the Bay Area.  These books were hard to find used, this one especially, and since Olman was there in October to care for his dad, he was able to bring them back for me. 

 

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a collection of short stories from 2006 that was recommended by Paul Tremblay in his afterword.  I was intrigued when he mentioned how Russell was inspired by The Bloody Chamber, but also aware that I’d be setting myself for disappointment.  Superficially, Russell's stories did evoke the spirit of Angela Carter with a modern American spin.  There was a light-hearted, fairy tale like quality to the stories which are set all over America.

 

It started off well enough with “Ava Wrestles the Alligator”, about two sisters left to run the family business, a Gator Theme Park called Swamplandia! situated deep in the Florida Everglades.  Their mother died and their dad, Chief Bigtree, hadn’t yet returned from the Mainland.  Ava is the one feeding the gators since her older sister Ossie is too wrapped up with her succubus boyfriend, Luscious.  When Ava catches Ossie wading into the swamp pond as an offer of sacrifice, the story abruptly ends in media res just as Ava pulls her sister out of the water.

 

The next story “Haunting Olivia” was alright, and evidently not that memorable as I had to flip through the story to jog my recall:  two boys, who lost their little sister some months ago, decide to go in search of her in their “boat”.  They think she was trying to reach a place called the Glow Worm Grotto, where you have to swim under water to reach it. The story again seems to end in medias res where the protagonist is alone inside the grotto and realizes that Olivia isn’t there as his goggles are fogging up. 

 

The only thing a bit different about this story is that the flora and fauna are somewhat out of the ordinary, ie. the boys used the shell of a giant crab as their boats, which they rented from Herb’s Crab Sledding Rentals.

 

Next up was a story with a neat premise -- a day in the life of an unnamed boy and his friends at “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers”, which was also the story's title.

 

The boy shares a bunk with Oglivy (sic), “the only other person I have ever met who shares my same disorder.”  One night, they both woke up screaming at precisely the same time and discovered they had the exact same dream, or “postmonitions” --  disasters and tragedies that already occurred in the past, from the historical (The Bubonic Plague, the Pompeii eruption) to the lesser known (the St. Louis Zoo Cataclysm of ’49).

 

The boy and Ogli are in Cabin 4: Miscellaneous.  The other cabins are known by hierarchy.  Here’s a sample:

Cabin 2: Sleep Apnetics

Cabin 3: Somnambulists

Cabin 6: Somniloquists

Cabin 7: Gnashers

Cabin 13: Night Terrors

Cabin 9: Insomniacs

Cabin 1: Narcoleptics

Cabin 10: Incubuses

 

“Z.Z’s” was creative and clever, and probably my favourite of the what I’ve read in the collection, as truth be known, I didn’t read all of ‘em.  Russell seemed to have fun with it:

This year, we’ve got a New Kid, this Eastern European lycanthrope.  He is redolent of tubers and Old World damp. New Kid’s face is a pituitary horror, a patchwork of runny sores and sebaceous dips. Ginger fur sprouts from weird places, his chin, his ears. You intuit some horror story—homeschooled, his mother’s in a coven, he eats rancid cabbage out of a trough, that sort of thing. He sleep cycles with the moon.

 

By the fourth story, I got a little tired of the style and tone, and wasn’t in the mood for making myself work to get to know another new set of quirky characters.  I started skipping a story here and there, as I was impatient to get to “St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, the final story, as I assumed Russell had saved the “best” for last.

 

The title story is told from the POV of one of the girls at St. Lucy’s, who watches herself and her “pack” of sisters struggle to assimilate and civilize themselves under the watchful eyes of the nuns.  This section sums up the premise:

 

Our mothers and fathers were werewolves. They lived an outsider’s existence in caves at the edge of the forest, threatened by frost and pitchforks. They had been ostracized by the local farmers for eating their silled fruit pies and terrorizing the heifers. They had ostracized the local wolves by having sometimes-thumbs, and regrets, and human children. (Their condition skips a generation.) Our pack grew up in a green purgatory. We couldn’t keep up with the purebred wolves, but we never stopped crawling. We spoke a slab-tongued pidgin in the caves, inflected with frequent howls. Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual. When the nuns showed up, our parents couldn’t refuse their offer. The nuns, they said, would make us naturalized citizens of human society. We would go to St. Lucy’s to study a better culture. We didn’t know at the time that our parents were sending us away for good. Neither did they.

 

As expected, “St. Lucy’s” was charming and well-written, with obvious nods to colonialism and European white-washing.  There was humour, intelligence and magic realism.... but it wasn’t anything like “The Company of Wolves”, and the collection was nothing like The Bloody Chamber either.  Something was lacking for me.  Perhaps I wanted a little less exposition and more mystery?  A little more darkness and sexuality beneath the quirky, light-hearted surface?  

 

In summary, some enjoyable stories there, and Russell is definitely a talented writer, but overall, not quite my cup of tea.