Bad Houses is a rich collection, with many of its finest stories playing out in the greater Midwest, grounding fantasy in a regionalism that rings true in its tone and its observation. My encounters with Stintzi’s work had previously been limited to brief pieces shared on their social media, but these snippets could not have prepared me for the high quality of their short fiction.
Take “Foundations,” the last and longest story in the collection. The story hit home for me, very literally (it’s set in Kansas City, Missouri, where I have lived for ten years), but the story’s examination of gentrification and the way it uproots neighborhoods and people applies to many cities. The central character, Lea, is ambivalent on the issue — she’s got to live someplace. But she is also aware that, as an artist, her presence is another step in the gentrification process. That ambivalence extends to her partner, Cress, and the not-quite-true story of their relationship the two of them tell, and tips over into despair as Lea faces both the very real historical violence she follows in the news, and the irreal violence wrought by new constructions that come to life in the night like Transformers. When Lea throws herself into one of her lightning-rod sculptures, choosing death-by-artwork in the face of all this, is she doing the right thing? Stintzi offers no easy answer, because it’s not an easy question. The story “Engagement” is a distinctly trans twist on the classic doppelganger theme. I am usually not unsettled by doubles, but here, Stintzi filters the idea through the lens of social media and its distorting effect on the self in a way that spoke deeply to me as a trans person, both in the Midwest and on the internet. As the narrator cedes place in their own life to the intern they hired to manage their social media, their perception of the world, and of their own being, becomes horrifically warped.
Other stories, like “Blueness” and “Moving Parts,” orbit around a sense of self that is locationally bound: in “Blueness,” Margarita moves impulsively to Kansas City, and finds herself isolated from her peers by remote work — but not from the mold that appears in her building and, ultimately, binds her there. In “Moving Parts,” the narrator moves to college and begins losing pieces of themself — literal body parts: first a finger, then an ear and so on — only to find the pieces rematerialized on their family’s farm, where the narrator themself cannot stay. These reflections on place and how it operates on the self are well-observed — I liked the note in “Moving Parts” about other students in the writing program interpreting everything the narrator writes as about their missing pieces — while making space for the oneiric process of self-formation.
A few of the stories are narrated by children, and Stintzi ably evokes a child’s psychology. In “Grandpa’s Bag of Bubonic’s Brood,” they explore the overwhelming quality of childhood encounters with guilt and the narrator’s magical worldview that develops out of that guilt. “The Troll Patch,” in a similar vein, uses its fabulistic trappings to reflect on seven-year-old Elsie’s encounters with systemic inequality.
As in any short story collection, not all of them are to every reader’s liking; personally, I found “Elephant” and “Pathetic Fallacy” a little on-the-nose in their explorations of their titular ideas. I can’t say I am sure what “Of Ropes and Islands” is doing, either — the concerns of the story felt obscured by the layers of myth-making in its fantastical setting. These stories felt somehow out of step with the others in the collection.
I would be remiss not to touch on Stintzi’s delightful illustrations. Supple brush-pen lines and rich but delicate black fields punctuate the collection, one at the opening of each story and, in some of the longer pieces, further illustration on the theme. Figures have a nice weight to them, and Stinzti’s illustrative style, at least here, seems to tap in to both Surrealism and the kind of ominous wriggling that characterizes early cartoons. The seeming naivete of the style and the content of the illustrations work well to support the overall complexity of the collection, harmonizing with Stinzti’s smooth, slightly reticent prose style.
The stories in Bad Houses circle questions of home, questions of relationships, questions of viewpoint and privilege — circling them, but leaving the reader to arrive at answers for themself. Those questions never overwhelm the stories they are telling, balancing big ideas with closely observed character moments and delightfully weird turns. Although I was initially hyper-conscious of possible comparisons to other authors’ work, they ultimately proved less than useful. Stintzi is doing something distinct here and doing it with a singular style. I am delighted to have welcomed Bad Houses into my home.
