There’s a wolf on the cover of duncan b. barlow’s Awry, stylized in red and black, a signpost that seems to signal a collection of nightmarish short stories, some, presumably, centered on the image of the wolf, all, presumably, dark and bloody.
This cover is a misdirection of sorts. There are animals scattered through Awry, sure, but most of them are secondary within their stories, and all of them are tame, not wild: the stories in Part I contain farm animals, pets, and a pack of pretty amicable coyotes—nothing akin to the monstrous wolf gracing the cover. Only in Part II do we find our wolf; in the story “In the Swamp Between the Cities and the Shore, a Girl,” the titular girl draws a wolf during art therapy and names it Amber, after herself. The only true wild animal in Awry is a drawing of a wolf meant to represent a human being.
In Awry, barlow reveals human behavior as violent, wild, inconsistent, and animalistic, oppressed by the configuration of their world and unable to navigate relationships with other human beings. This study of humanity exists in contrast with the animals scattered through his stories, who live inside sensible structures and display consistent behavior. barlow deftly does not provide any explanation for the strange human behavior he presents in Awry; instead, the behavior he depicts is beyond our scientific comprehension, beyond any type of syndrome we might associate with “humanity.” The only evident root cause for this animalistic madness in Awry is a change or breakdown in interpersonal relationships between characters; the severing of these relationships is usually preempted by a random, uncontrollable instance or accident.
barlow looks at two types of interpersonal relationships in Awry, which, when broken, cause a spiral of strange human behaviors. This short story collection is divided into two parts, with Part I consisting of six short stories that focus on the relationship between humans and their progeny, and the resulting effects when something goes awry. Part II has five short stories that deal instead with romantic relationships. At the end of Part II comes a Russian translation of the second short story in Part I, “Of Flesh and Fur.”
Part I concerns itself with familial relationships, and thus introduces a theme that spans Awry: the ways in which a human name can be gained or lost—a name being something a parent assigns to their children; a uniquely human ritual. The first story here is “Phone Etiquette,” and our protagonist is an unnamed woman reeling from her young daughter’s death. She soon begins receiving phone calls from a mysterious man, who is either her husband, her daughter Kimberly’s killer, or both.
In an attempt to regain Kimberly, the narrator returns to the site of her death, contracts an illness from the nearby insects, and begins to lose parts of herself. Interestingly, Kimberly is the only character with a name in “Phone Etiquette”—and, because she was given that name by her mother, the narrator, Kimberly represents a human tendency (to name and be named) within the narrator, and after she dies, that human tendency dies with her.
Names will continue to hold importance in Awry; our individual names distinguish us from wild animals, and put us in a category similar to tamed animals. Continuing in Part I, “Of Flesh and Fur,” sees a lonely narrator create a clone of himself to raise as a child; unfortunately he gives this child his exact name, “Leopold,” and from that moment on, the narrator has created a wild animal without its own name; the “Leopolds” become no different from the “coyotes” outside. The story “The Fine Set of Teeth” names as many characters as possible, and thus breaks down when Gavin, the protagonist, cannot assign ownership (and names) to a set of teeth.
Part II of Awry continues to play with names; however, since it follows human beings in romantic relationships, these stories do not tend to investigate the process of being given a name like the stories of Part I; they more so look at the use of language within and without a partnership.
This second part begins with “The Light for Both of Us,” and follows a couple living in the post-apocalypse—life is assumed to continue as normal in other parts of the world, but their society has experienced total “Breakdown.” The narrator, one half of the couple, uses only pronouns to refer to himself and his spouse: “I,” “You,” “We,” “Our.” As his spouse becomes increasingly weak and unable to resume (or create) normal society with the narrator, the language used begins to change—“We” and “Our” become fewer in number, until only “I” and “You” are used.
The next story, “In the Swamp Between the Cities and the Shore, a Girl,” a doctor treats a girl who was found wandering the Everglades, clutching human bones. All we (and the doctor) know about her is that she calls herself “the girlfriend,” and she was found holding the aforementioned bones. As long as she stays “the girlfriend,” she is safe from the police and her crime (the murder of her boyfriend) is impossible to track, but the moment she reveals her real name, Amber, by assigning it to a drawing of a wolf, the doctor is able to learn her past.
The standout stories in Awry are “Of Flesh and Fur,” and “In the Swamp Between the Cities and the Shore, a Girl,” but every one of barlow’s pieces display his talent; Parts I and II are less a list of stories and more a conversation between narrative, a conversation that reveals the separations (and lack thereof) between animal and human, between the rituals of the wild and the rituals of the tamed.
Awry, by duncan b. barlow. Jacksonville, Florida: Bridge Eight Press, April 2025. 212 pages. $20.00, paper.
Ria Dhull is an artist and critic living in NYC. You can find her weekly film reviews at Spectrum Culture and her other writing spread across the web. Her animated short film Seraglio Row is forthcoming.
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