reading, an old review of the missing girl

The "flaunch" for SoFloPoJo was fun today. I added "A Bartender Named Destiny" to "The Chair," my first time reading "Chair" and I think the audience got the contrast between the italicized refrain-with-variations and the unfolding narrative without seeing it on the page. Second time reading "Bartender" (first was at Jon Sindell's) and it's fun to read. Francine will post a Youtube video and I'll post it here.

Also, I just ran across a review of The Missing Girl that I missed when it came out. Makes the writing seem pretty visceral, but maybe it is. I got so many reviews, especially considering it was a chapbook. I think it may have come out at just the right time, when #metoo stories and awareness of male violence was just coming into public consciousness .

Here it is:
Spencer Dew, “A Review of The Missing Girl by Jacqueline Doyle,” decomP, a literary magazine

He's got interesting comments about a number of the stories. This passage about the girl who wakes up to see "slut" written on her body interests me particularly:

Doyle, in this disturbing collection of stories of violence, of sex crimes, uses this image—the woman waking up from her violation to read a story about it on her own flesh—to remind her readers just how narratives work.

There is a power in contingency: the mystery of the speaker’s identity and reliability, in the razor-like divide between that which is said and the darkness of what is unwritten, which our struggling minds must necessarily imagine, reading as implied, rendering doubly horrific as that the details for which we provide from our own fears and for which the narrator, however callous about or even proud of his vicious acts, remains unwilling to elaborate. A story, according to one famous metaphor, should feel like that tiny crest of the iceberg, the bulk remaining below the waterline. Doyle is interested in the slosh, the suck, there where the frigid depths lap and pull at the slick steep incline. In Doyle’s stories, the readers scramble for a grip only to realize they are in the process of drowning, that they cannot possibly survive.