I grew up in a small Massachusetts town, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, and though I left my childhood home over twenty years ago — for college initially, and then work and marriage — whenever I chat with my parents, who still live there, my father makes a point to fill me in on the local scuttlebutt. So-and-so died. There was a dust-up at the dirt bike track. X was busted for manufacturing ghost guns. The town clam shack raised its prices again. I don’t know who or what he’s talking about half of the time, yet there’s a comfort in hearing these brief dispatches, knowing that the same bucolic nonsense repeats, over and over, seemingly forever. Protagonists change, but the situations remain. The community knows all.
Perhaps this recognition explains why I’m naturally drawn to fiction focusing on tight-knit groups: I look forward to spotting shimmers from my upbringing on the page. Thus, when I learned that Toni Mirosevich set her new linked story collection, Spell Heaven, almost entirely in a rural Northern California fishing town, where “fog barrels in from the sea” and tourists are nuisances, I was intrigued. The book seemed to fulfill my Podunk checklist. And having now read the collection’s 23 stories, I commend Mirosevich for her attention to detail. Throughout, she smartly captures both the daily grind of the lower-middle class and the chip on the shoulder attitudes that simmer within all small towns. Still, at 288 pages, Spell Heaven too often recycles plot points and structure, and as a result, while individual stories charm, the potency of the whole is unfortunately diluted.
Spell Heaven is narrated by an unnamed woman, a creative writing professor nearing retirement age who has relocated to the town of Seaview with her doctor wife, Stevie, some time in the early aughts. (Time is slippery in the collection, with references to the 2006-2008 Seattle Mariners roster in one story contrasted with living during the pandemic and Trump’s presidency in another.) The narrator is looking for acceptance in her adopted surroundings. Her father worked on boats in Washington state when she was a child; she feels as if she should belong.
Accordingly, the bulk of the collection serves as a study of those who hang around Seaview’s beach, the pier, and the local breakfast spot. “Every day … I come across found people,” the narrator explains, “those who others deem marginal on the margins of the sea. I want to be part of this gang.” She converses with the drug-dealing Kite Man (who, naturally, spends his days flying kites on the beach), Joan, a retired FBI agent, and a fisherman known as the Crab King. The opening story, “The Devil Wind,” drops the narrator at her writing desk, only for her to be interrupted by the wife of a fisherman who stops by to tell stories. In “Three Lessons, Four Scars,” the narrator sets her sights on a group of crabbers, including the aforementioned Crab King, and gradually wears down their gruff exteriors enough to be introduced to some of the regulars. “Feral Memory” sees the woman chatting up Henry, a man slipping away to Alzheimer’s, and learning that he was once a photography teacher. In “The Deposit,” a young surfer dies and the narrator watches as a makeshift memorial is erected to him on the nearby promenade. Before long, she questions the legitimacy of a cardboard donation box left at the shrine to cover burial costs and keeps an eye on small updates that appear: new photos, stuffed animals.
In these stories, Mirosevich’s greatest strength is her ability to capture her narrator’s personality through indirect means. Although the woman reveals sporadic personal histories to the reader — her past blue-collar jobs, her father’s death at sea, childhood friendships — the truth to her character is gleaned through her actions and reactions, which can contradict her words. When considering a grocery store worker in the story “As if You and I Agree,” the narrator thinks, “Maybe she’s an introvert like me,” yet to the mindful reader, such description seems inaccurate. While the narrator may see herself as timid, may even announce this to those around her, her determination to weave herself into the fabric of Seaview, either physically or via snooping, argues otherwise.
Mirosevich clearly takes the great pleasure in these sly reveals, which add complexity to the narrator’s goal of becoming part of her community. How can others accept her if she cannot fully recognize her nature? The author also crafts beautiful images and turns of phrase that help root her characters in their surrounding world. For instance, when encountering the ocean in the collection’s title story, the narrator observes:
“The sea, as usual, is making a show of it. Some days gray and moody, some days black and blue. Some days, mossy green — as if a lawn lay just beneath the surface — on others, the deep rusty brown of a red tide, a phytoplankton flash mob. Sometimes the wind tears white bits off the top of each wave, sending hundreds of surrender flags into the air, but today, it’s mild, baby blue, with round, roly-poly waves that don’t break so much as slide into shore, hesitate, reconsider, then decide to slide back out again.”
Likewise, small, planted flowers at the town gas station are described as:
“… the kind you now find at a lot of gas stations. Along with the flags and bright, cheerful signs like PAY, PUMP AND BOLT, the flowerbeds are meant to beautify, to dress up the place, to give the illusion that you’re pulling into a pretty little landscaped island. The planted meridians of daisies or daffodils or tulips are there to make you forget that what we’re dealing with here is crude, bubbling crude, the kind of Texas Tea that made Jed a millionaire on The Beverly Hillbillies.”
In passages like these, the author’s past as a poet (Mirosevich has published several poetry collections) twinkles through, and though there are a few clunker lines that slip by along the way (“the van rusts, his motivation rusts, his get-up-and-go rusts”), the language at play in Spell Heaven frequently delights.
And yet, smart characterization and vivid imagery can take a book only so far. As mentioned earlier, what works so well as individual stories doesn’t quite guarantee success as a linked collection. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, without spoiling too much, several supporting characters in Spell Heaven face identical fates. Second, Mirosevich relies on the same formula when structuring several of the stories which, like the repeated fates, diminishes the effect of the work over a book-length manuscript. An illustration of this comes in “The One-Second Sandwich” and “Lotería,” two stories that open in a similar way: the narrator sits in class, watching her students as they perform teaching presentations until she experiences something that propels the remainder of the story. In fact, many of the stories in Spell Heaven rely on one event triggering the narrator’s memory in order to manufacture deeper meaning. In “Our Lady of the Derby,” the narrator retreats to a motel to escape her daily life, and a knock on the door reminds her of a parallel experience with Stevie the previous New Year’s Eve. In the title story, a stroll on the pier sends the narrator into a series of memories of fishermen. And a friendly nod from a fellow walker spins the narrator into a recollection from earlier that morning in “As if You and I Agree.” There is nothing wrong with stories sharing structural qualities, of course, but when a reader encounters the same narrative technique several times over, the strength of the volume ebbs.
On my most recent call home, my father informed me that not much new had occurred in town since our last conversation: “Nobody on the road received newspapers this week. Otherwise, all is quiet.”
“That’s it?” I asked, befuddled.
“That’s it,” he answered.
He didn’t reach for another story, or rehash something from weeks past. Sometimes, it seemed, even the scuttlebutt must take a break. If only Spell Heaven followed this same course of thought, we might be discussing a new rural classic. Instead, we’re left with several memorable stories that never fully click as a whole.
In the end, this is a collection in need of a trim.
[Published by Counterpoint Press on April 26, 2022, 288 pages, $16.95 paperback]