Review: Devil’s Trumpet

Datura, or nightshades, include the devil’s trumpet, a plant with irresistibly gorgeous flowers that are highly toxic. Simply brushing against the blooms can trigger headaches and ingesting even a small amount of the leaves can induce hallucinations or convulsions. Beautiful and imperiling: that just about sums up the lives of the characters in—as well as the reading experience of—Tracey Slaughter’s newest book of short fiction.

Devil’s Trumpet is a collection of stories that run the gamut from bracing flash fiction to carefully constructed long-form narrative, from intimate first-person to more arm’s length third-person narrators, from numbered lists of rapid-fire impressions to sustained, traditional story-arcs. But what binds each of these formally disparate pieces is the riveting language, imagery and tone sustained throughout.

The narrator of each of these stories is different, yet the precision of the wry, bitter, whip-smart language remains the same during the course of the book. As we read passages like, “…the memory reminds him now of spoke-sound, his old bike in the spin of cool-down, their makeout full of the ticking music of time crisscrossed in his steel-string wheels….the semi-puffs that were her clearing the feathers of her fringe out of her drowsing eyes,” or “In the Formica-fronted drawers we turned up the usual tackle of can-openers and steelos, and handy wipe-clean bedside bibles, commandments shrunk into a font my conscience couldn’t decode, ultimatums from a cut-price god,” and,“Nothing in the lobby was allowed to wilt and the staff were apparelled in seamless neutrals. I felt followed by their 360-degree smiles,” we are lofted into prose that pulls us up short with its arresting accuracy.

Slaughter’s prose is biting while at the same time blunt. Reminiscent of Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion and Charles Bukowski’s transgressive fiction, Slaughter’s striking stories will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.

Devil’s Trumpet contains stories about the thrum of sexual attraction, the allure of what we want and what we cannot yet admit to wanting. The collection includes vignettes of young love, ribald stories of marital infidelity and of all-consuming attraction. There are vivid, visceral stories of families, particularly mothers and sons, husband and wives. Slaughter’s stories cut to the quick, yanking us up and out of the comfort we might look for in fiction. Devil’s Trumpet asks us to look, and then look again, at what we thought we knew about ourselves, about family, about love, and about desire. Slaughter’s writing cuts into you with precise, devastating beauty laced with a devil-may-care attitude. These are gorgeous stories, and you get the feeling as you read them that Slaughter does not need us to tell her that.

Reviewed by Maggie Trapp