Monthly reviews of books written by Indiana authors are made possible by the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards and Indiana Humanities. Opinions expressed in this review are solely those of the reviewer, not any affiliated entity.
A forest where the trees have eyes and remember what they’ve seen in the mass of their woody bodies. Babies, or creatures that look like babies, captured in the wild and sold to couples struggling to have a child of their own. Spontaneous pregnancy and out of season fruit in a rural town ruled by the factory egg farm. These are some of the settings and scenarios readers will encounter in Christian Moody’s forthcoming collection of short stories, Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds.
Speculative fiction of this kind is written to magnify elements of what makes us human – our feelings of loss, of shame, of desperation – by placing characters in worlds that are like ours but for one difference, one bent rule that begs we suspend our disbelief and instead zero in on the crux of the conflicts in order that we ponder the “what ifs.” Of the five stories in his collection, Moody is at his best in the opening and closing pieces. The aforementioned Go Seekers is, at its heart, about intimacy, letting go, and what we owe of ourselves to those who have been by our sides for as long as we can remember. The main character’s longing is well delivered, even if his circumstances are a bit silly. In Ray of Golden Yolk, we follow a man whose job is to inspect eggs at frightening speed for a corporate chicken farm that is high on state of the art science and low on the “nature” it claims to provide its stock. The biological oddities that begin piling up will resonate with anyone who has anxieties about real life technological developments that seem to come online with too little precautionary principle applied.
While never rising to the comic heights of Vonnegut, and without his more overtly obvious moral lessons, these stories nonetheless have elements that will be recognizable to his fans, and the straight faced delivery of preposterous circumstances Moody presents will certainly be appreciated by those who enjoy Charlie Kaufman or even Terry Gilliam. Like Kaufman, Moody can verge on the allegorical and the surreal, and like Gilliam, the visuals are often of our reality but with the volume turned up on some of their more unsettling attributes.
Across all five pieces included in the collection, Moody’s writing is serviceable. He never quite swings for the fences when it comes to the prose, but that’s probably a good thing in that he is already stretching the imagination with the content he presents and doesn’t distract from the heart of his stories with cumbersome or showy sentences. Readers who need mimetic recreations of real life in order to find themselves drawn into a story might struggle here, but those who can set aside their nagging questions about how such things could be (or readers who prefer to!) will enjoy playing in the melancholy, symbol laden worlds of Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds.
Christian Moody’s stories have appeared in Esquire, Alaska Quarterly Review, and in the anthologies Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy. He received his MFA from Syracuse and PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and spent years as a creative writing professor. He now works as a brand director and lives in Indianapolis with his two kids and his wife, memoirist and illustrator Margaret Kimball.
A native of Chicago and current resident of Bloomington, Ind., John F. Duffy spent his twenties and thirties exploring America, and his travels now greatly inform his writing. His short fiction has earned him a Pushcart Nomination, and his debut novel, A Ballroom for Ghost Dancing, was a National Indie Excellence Award finalist and a Gold Medal winner for Best Midwest Fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Award. His second novel, Where When it Rains, will be available in December 2024 from Picket Fire Press.
