In her second story collection, False Bingo, Jac Jemc delivers 20 compact, disquieting stories that are starkly realistic yet tinged with a sense of otherworldly menace. Her first collection, A Different Bed Every Time, blurred the lines between reality and fantasy in short, unconventional tales. False Bingo continues this exploration of the intersection between tangible danger and unknown fears.
"Any Other," the first entry, acts as a warning to readers that they should be careful about believing what they read. An encounter in a coffee shop between a man and a woman leads to the kind of unexpected plot switch of which O. Henry would approve. "The Principal's Ashes," dark and funny, takes place in a Catholic elementary school. Mrs. Sayer, a second-grade teacher, begins her year by predicting which of her students will kill the class frog. She teaches Alan Ginsberg's Howl, and has the students re-create part of Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. Her goal is "to expose them to experience and knowledge beyond their years" in order to prevent their purity from delivering her the same fate that befell the principal.
As in The Grip of It, Jemc's novel of everyday fears bleeding into nightmarish scenarios, she conjures a house that seems haunted in "Don't Let's." A woman, hobbled by a broken leg, rents a house by herself near a swamp in Georgia. "I think I hear things in the house," she says to a neighbor, who laughingly tells her she has a "boo hag": a night monster who comes to steal one's breath. She's unsure if the boo hag is real, but after increasingly disturbing events, decides to give herself up to the idea, thinking the boo hag "took your energy if you were still, but stole your skin if you struggled."
Jemc's ability to build an undercurrent of threat in mundane situations is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and, in fact, "Half Dollar" is subtitled "After Shirley Jackson." Two young girls play a cruel prank on a widow, leading her to believe that they saw the spirit of her dead husband. Margaret, less enthusiastic about the prank than Patty, realizes that she has no idea to what lengths Patty will go, and "doubt fell over where it was I should have laid my trust."
Reading the brief story "Loitering," about a young woman at a bar deciding how to make an important decision, is like peeking through a curtain at a small but major event. The more expansive "Maulawiyah" tells the story of Raila, a young woman attending a wellness retreat. She hopes someone will "force her to be disciplined," and becomes unwillingly entangled with another resident who forces eerie familiarity. In all her writing, Jemc displays dexterity with characters and precision with words and sentences, creating small worlds that satisfy even as they disturb. Fans of Daisy Johnson and Helen Oyeyemi will relish these stories of mistrust, danger and regrets. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.
Shelf Talker: False Bingo collects disquieting stories of everyday life overshadowed by paranoia and marred by dark edges.