It has been over a century since Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams into his insectile nightmare of being late to work, and over 50 years since the Latin American “boom” gave us Jorge Luis Borges’ indelible image of an infinite library containing infinite rooms with infinite books; Julio Florencio Cortázar’s house taken over, room by room, by a mysterious force; and Gabriel García Márquez’s very old man with enormous wings dragged into a village by a storm. The uncanny and fantastical literary short story has become its own subgenre; the jacket copy writes itself: “A girl finds that she can communicate with her houseplants. A town is overwhelmed by laughing gas from a nearby volcano. A horse jockey befriends a minotaur at the Kentucky Derby. In these ten stories…”
Whether in a mode of whimsy or horror, whether aiming for an unsettling atmosphere or the understated wonder of magical realism, the risk of pitfalls has also intensified. I consider it cowardly, for example, for an author to evoke weirdness for its own sake and duck out on the reader before any explanation is required. On the other hand, misguided attempts to give a story depth can overburden uncanny figures and events with metaphors (usually for death) that they cannot convincingly sustain. Familiar characters from fairy tale, fable, and legend come with the baggage of the ages, and then there are the many pop culture reboots that must be contended with somehow.
In Exit Zero, a collection of stories of both strange and magical, Marie-Helene Bertino mostly sidesteps these perils with a light touch and jaunty American style. There’s a story with a unicorn, one with a ghost, another with a vampire. Floating balloons bearing cryptic messages appear every night in a woman’s garden, and ex-boyfriends rain down on another character on a difficult walk home. (Here I go with the jacket copy.)
But in Bertino’s world, the unicorn (in the wonderful title story) isn’t a simplistic symbol, nor does it fulfill our expectations of ravishing wonder. Save for her navy-colored horn “with flecks of glittery mineral issuing out from an active, spiraling core,” the creature looks like a frustrated donkey to the perplexed narrator, Jo. The unicorn is one of her estranged dead father’s possessions, which Jo has come to clear out from his ranch-style house in New Jersey. The unicorn is a living, breathing animal, eating things unexpectedly and then later defecating in equally unexpected places, vulnerable to abuse by mean-spirited teenagers, with a personality both willful and tranquil.
At the same time, Bertino wisely lets the world outside the story—unicorn lore from medieval times to the present-day sparkly T-shirts of little girls—subtly fill in the blanks. Jo ponders what her father was doing with a unicorn. “Was it a gift meant to ease her grief? Was he holding it for someone who will show up to collect it–a wizard, or…?” She has named her Jasmine, a name a little girl would choose. Yes, the unicorn could be a metaphor for a father-daughter relationship lost to time, but the relationship between woman and animal emerges as the most palpable and moving element in the story. Manifesting a legendary creature is not an easy reach for a compelling subject; Bertino’s unicorn believably inhabits our real world of Econo Lodges and old, sad childhood Polaroids, and gives some succor.
A similar fusion happens in “Viola in Midwinter,” about a Swedish woman who was turned into a vampire by her female mistress in 1917, and who lives out the present day in a small town in the western Catskills. Bertino doesn’t linger on vampire logistics—the conversion process, how Viola subsists on animal blood—instead preferring to unfold a melancholy, droll rumination on female middle age. Viola, forever 49, in a perpetual state of perimenopause, embarks on a relationship with a kindly EMT she meets at the Shop & Save parking lot after spending many years alone. The love affair eventually fizzles, and she becomes thoughtful about changing societal perceptions of women over time:
Hemlines and mothering trends advanced and receded. The tendency of women to wound their own. The child became the nucleus of the house, they even had their own room for toys. It sickened Viola to watch mothers be controlled by toddlers. At the turn of the century, the idea of youth broadened to include the forties. Viola’s body seemed newly valued. Men’s gazes, once trained solely on college-age asses, lingered on hers.
Bertino understands she needn’t do too much to evoke the heady, sexy atmosphere we inevitably attribute to the vampire, thick as it is from the decades of longing and brooding and necks proffered, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the teen angst of Twilight to the gothic Nosferatu revived by A24. Viola knows and secretly enjoys that the townspeople call her “the Dark Lady.” It’s a witty remix of the familiar elements that keep us coming back to stories of these creatures of the night—sex and blood and death, plus alienation, conflicted feelings, and world weariness.
In other stories, Bertino flips the script on magical realism, and plain old reality functions as the startling thing, as in the story “In the Basement of Saint John the Divine,” in which a young boy who was born blind grapples with understanding the sight of a tree after an operation restores his vision, and, less successfully, in “Flowers and Their Meanings,” wherein a moment of bonding between a young woman and her mother proves more startling than an escaped tiger in a clothing store dressing room. My favorite in the collection was “Can Only Houses Be Haunted?,” a very funny ghost story, about haunted peaches and a failing marriage. It sounds like a difficult premise, but it works, offering another refreshing subversion of both the ghost story and narrative expectations. The sheer range of invention, perspective, and style on display in this collection makes it a complete and satisfying whole, full of distinct characters and vivid atmospheres that linger in the mind.
FICTION
By Marie-Helene Bertino
FSG Originals
Published April 22, 2025
