Last Encounter with the Enemy

Greg Johnson's stories do what good stories should---pull you so totally into another time, place, and situation that the "real" world disappears. But they could not be less escapist. These people have a rough time, dealing with absent parents, mistaken relationships, sundered marriages, and surprise deaths. Some are granted momentary insights ("Marina," "The Reliquary"); some see too clearly the fates they consign themselves to ("Huswifery," "The Chinese Box"). But others triumph in their chosen destinies ("Graveyard Days," "The Haunted Woman"), or actually contrive an escape, such as the "Anonymous Girl," or the widow beset by what seems "The Poltergeist" of her dead younger husband---yet whose rational "solution" perhaps does not cover all the manifestations she endures. The title story ingeniously honors the writer called "the peacock lady" by re-imagining her signature tropes---quirky keenly-observed characters, dramatic shifts of viewpoint, a burst of unforeseen violence---while being highly entertaining in its own right. One almost expects Flannery O'Connor's obnoxiously precocious visitor, an eleven-year-old towheaded boy, to be unmasked as a time-shifted Truman Capote---until he starts talking. (No wonder Johnson was named Georgia Writer of the Year not once, but twice.) Readers versed in Sylvia Plath will recognize the title "Double Exposure," and find, in this uncanny summoning of times past, "the rising of the dead almost painful." The words are those of Virginia Woolf, subject of an impish jeu d'esprit set during a car ride in 1936---in contrast to "First Surmise," which recounts a carriage drive with Emily Dickinson, whose progress proves eternal. The two most striking tales portray quite different women. "Bitch" is the unspoken noun Miriam Freeman will not assign herself, depicted with brilliant hysteria while she Christmas shops for in-laws she loathes. And what on earth did Barbara Weston's husband mean by his dying word, "Oahu"? She prides herself on knowing, until a chance meeting at his gravesite rips certainty away. The cogent empathy and wit of these fourteen intense investigations leave one's vision widened and sharpened. Make this collection your first encounter with Greg Johnson's fiction, and it will not be the last.