Reviewed by: Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn Phillip Garcia (bio) Monica McFawn. Bright Shards of Someplace Else. U of Georgia P. Monica McFawn’s debut story collection, Bright Shards of Someplace Else, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, but I don’t think that’s the only reason McFawn’s writing makes me think of O’Connor. In O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Misfit famously says of the grandmother, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” McFawn takes the proverbial gun and aims it straight at her characters—not in order to make them into “good” people but rather to expose their failings. A feeling of dread permeates McFawn’s stories. She dangles a sense of impending doom over her characters like the sword of Damocles, and we, right along with them, are waiting for the blade to drop. That feeling of dread takes on a human form in the shortest (yet perhaps most haunting) piece in the collection, “A Country Woman.” In the story, the titular country woman plagues the narrators. She seems to appear everywhere, and while there’s nothing directly unpleasant about her (at least not a fault of her own), her appearance magnifies the faults of whoever sees her: [End Page 159] Whatever you lack, she will exemplify in your view—that is, if you are slothful and prone to depression, she will be whistling and weeding in the single place in her yard that you can see from the recliner you have not left since last night. If you are needy and rattled when alone you will catch a glimpse of her through her window sitting down with a three-course meal she made for herself. The neighbors begin going to great lengths to avoid her, keeping their shades down, investing in heavy drapes and locking blinds, and even planting tall hedges so they can “avoid seeing the country woman in the few steps from the driveway to the front door.” Soon after, though, she disappears, and what should be a great relief from tension actually heightens it: “One could avoid the country woman but not her absence. It was more here than what remained.” It would be easy to compare the tone and the third-person plural point of view McFawn employs in “A Country Woman” to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” but it would be a mistake to cast McFawn as a simple imitator of the Southern Gothic style. McFawn puts forward a distinctly contemporary form of bleakness; the central premise and clever brevity of “A Country Woman” is actually more akin to Lydia Davis’s “The White Tribe” than anything Faulkner wrote. One of the strongest stories in the collection, “Key Phrases,” perhaps illustrates this modern morbidity best. The narrator is a manager at Journey’s End Memorials, a company that produces memorial videos for funerals, and he’s burdened by an unpleasant task: firing an incompetent employee named Mol. There’s an irony, of course, in seeing a man comfortable with overseeing the production of films of dead people not want to do the relatively innocuous task of firing a bad employee. But this is in hindsight; in the story, we too get caught up in the narrator’s dread as he tries to bring himself to commit the unenviable deed: The firing—the inevitability of it—it seemed something apart from me or my actions, something that hung above us, something that so altered the scene between us that I no longer knew how to think or act; and indeed, thinking and acting seemed beside the point when there was only a single possible outcome. This sense of inevitability is pervasive throughout the story and throughout all of McFawn’s characters. They find themselves with an inability to control their own situations, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. In “Key Phrases,” the narrator keeps procrastinating, pushing off the inevitable, though it is predetermined by the higher-ups that Mol will be fired. In another strong story, “Dead Horse Productions,” the main...