The Naming of Moths by Tracy Fells is a short story collection with a generous heaping of magical realism. Every piece is relatively short, usually coming in at somewhere between ten and twenty pages, but each one packs its own punch.
One of the fascinating things about the collection is that no two pieces are the same. One is about grief and motherhood. Another has elements of environmentalism. Many of them are about endings. Some are about beginnings. Fells inhabits a range of voices effortlessly, and across all ages – you wouldn’t expect a story about a monster under a bed from the perspective of a child in the same collection as one about a woman who traps her husband in the shed, and with such different tones, but Fells pulls it off.
Fells is clearly experienced in prose – each piece has a very mature tone, but there is no element of forced elegance. The writing is polished without seeming too rigid. Rather than aspiring to one authorial voice Fells matches a voice to each character – the mark of an experienced author. Each story is also the perfect length. Exposition isn’t skipped on and the plots don’t feel overstretched. We see just enough of each character’s life to be invested in them – Fells introduces us to each of them right after they have endured some sort of difficulty in their life, and then shows us how they escape from it or sink deeper into it.
These stories don’t feel like fables, either – there are no clunky allegories or morals to be hammered home. Plenty of these characters do bad things and make dubious choices and it is left to you as the reader to decide whether they should have, and whether things might have gone better or worse for them otherwise.
Many characters’ decisions are tinged by deep loss. In one story, ‘Coping Mechanism’, struggling mother Hannah still mourns her sister after many years and gets her back in an unexpected – and perhaps unwanted – way. In other stories it is the loss of a home or a family. The collection showcases how powerful grief is as a motivator. In another story, ‘Octavia’s Grave’, the loss is of a project two archaeologists are working on, hijacked by their male colleagues in the field. You begin to notice similarities between Octavia and the skeleton she is helping to uncover, buried with an unborn baby, and think you have predicted the end of the story already. Often, though, Fells subverts our expectations – a specific parallel we observe within a story turns out not to spell out doom, but something else.
A strong element of the collection is its female-led stories. Many of the protagonists deal with the same issues most women do in real life – despite the insertion of magic into the stories, they often feel like something many readers could have lived themselves. Tracy Fells has a certain understanding of the complexity of the human mind and heart. Rather than trying to sanitise her characters or paint them solely as victims to justify the choices they make, she has the courage to explore why they do what they do rather than placing a moral weight onto them.
For those enjoyers of classic short story authors such as Raymond Bradbury, Fells is a refreshing modern voice who knows how to convey a whole narrative in even ten pages.
Words by Casey Langton
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