Bennett Sims’ fiction is populated by zombies, werewolves, and ghosts, but the essential horror lurking in his work is that trust—of oneself, of others, of the world—may be impossible. Almost to a person, his characters find themselves unable to fathom others. They are racked, as the title of his most recent book suggests, by the problem of other minds, the name philosophers have given to our collective inability to directly access any other person’s mental life. We cannot know for certain what anyone else is thinking or feeling; in this sense, our minds are defined by a fundamental privacy. Sims’ characters experience this limit to knowledge as an ongoing existential threat. Consequently, they’re afraid of everyone.
The lesser stories in Other Minds and Other Stories fail to render this threat persuasively. They read like haunted houses by numbers. “A Nightmare” opens with its unnamed narrator happening upon a row of shopping carts stretching across a field, off into a forest. Without explanation, he clambers onto this weird installation and begins advancing toward the trees, though with about a page to go—the entire story is just over three pages long—he has a change of heart and runs back to a nearby abandoned house. There, he hears “a howling sound” coming from inside: “like a tornado siren: the terrified baying of bloodhounds.” And that’s it. (What am I missing?! I wrote in the margin.)
But elsewhere, Other Minds and Other Stories is genuinely startling. When I first read “Unknown,” early one morning, I had the urge to pause and make sure the rest of my family was still asleep—solidly present in their beds, in my life. At its outset, the story’s protagonist (also unnamed) has just purchased his spouse (“A”) a new phone when a distressed stranger asks to borrow his. He agrees, and she begins snarling at whomever is on the other end of the line: “I escaped, he thought he heard her say, or, It’s too late. You’ll just have to find someone else.” The man begins receiving voicemails from unknown callers in which he hears snatches of conversations he’s recently had with A, who soon leaves him. At the end of the story, frenzied with paranoia, he answers a call from an unfamiliar number and hears A’s voice, repeating the words of the distressed woman from the beginning of the story.
I’m failing to do justice to what’s most compelling about “Unknown”: its anxiety-dream logic, the many queasy recursions whereby Sims inspects the petty Ahabism of disappointed men. Sims has employed a dogged style of description in all of his work, beginning with his novel, A Questionable Shape (2013). But in contrast to his earlier regionalism—A Questionable Shape teems with evocations of the weather in Baton Rouge—in Other Minds and Other Stories he adopts a more austere style, abbreviating proper names and stripping his stories of explicit references to social and political conditions or identifiable settings. In “Unknown,” the result is a mystery in which the case remains uncracked, since no one can fill in all the mind-haunting blanks.
“The Postcard,” which appears near the end of the book, presents yet another mystery. And in keeping with the rest of Other Minds and Other Stories, the world inhabited by the story’s characters is inscrutable. For once, though, it is not hostile, or doomed. Perhaps trust is impossible here, but perhaps not. The narrator, a private investigator, has been hired by a client who has received a postcard from Ocean View, a fogbound resort town where he honeymooned long ago. All that’s written on the back of the postcard is a motel room number and the initials of his deceased spouse. The narrator flies out to Ocean View but cannot get a handle on the case. “With mounting disorientation I drove deeper into the fog,” he writes, until, in the story’s final pages, he encounters a woman who fits the description of his client’s spouse, and, to his own initial surprise, embraces her. “I could feel the walls of my own name weakening,” the narrator says. But contrary to what Sims has by now trained us to expect, this is not a calamity. After so many stories that end in alienation, the fear that pervades the book lifts, and Sims veers off in another direction entirely. I’m not sure how to characterize it, even: something resembling deliverance. “Oh it is you,” the woman says. “It’s really you, you came.”
Other Minds and Other Stories, by Bennett Sims. Columbus, Ohio: Two Dollar Radio, November 2023. 202 pages. $18.95, paper.
Jonathon Atkinson mentors with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and lives in Northern California.
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