Skeletons in the Swimmin' Hole is a collection of six short horror stories set in Disney World. Three of the stories have been previously published in various magazines, and three are new. The author, Kristi Petersen Schoonover, is an editor of Read Short Fiction ([...]).
The namesake story is about a woman artist whose specialty is taking photos of dead animals. It speaks well for the quality of writing that such an apparently repugnant brand of art comes across as hauntingly beautiful, in the woman's point of view--so much so that when her husband acquires the ability to sense the last thoughts of the dead, her desperation from having to abandon her art is palpable. When she meets a strange man, one of the avid fans of her art, she cannot help but fall for him, forming an unusual love triangle. But she's soon to discover the dark side of the fascination with death, darker by far than her own.
Miss Reyna Gets Her Comeuppance on Flash Mountain is a very short story about a young woman who is deathly afraid of rollercoasters yet works for one. Why? It turns out Miss Reyna has reason enough for both in her past. One of the best stories in the collection, it ends in a resolution that's happy and tragic at the same time. The language is hypnotic--again, easing the reader into the main character's decision.
In a striking, but less haunting, parallel, Charlotte's Family Tree also features a woman who's afraid of one particular attraction in Disney World, so much so that she denies her daughter the fun of visiting the place. But when she's finally pursuaded by her husband, we discover what had happened between her and her mother at that same attraction when she was a little girl herself. But the darkness is resolved through the main character's daughter--and, surprisingly, her dead grandmother.
In All This Furniture and Nowhere To Sit, the genders are reversed. This time, it's a man whose father, dead by now, didn't let his young son visit Disney World, believing that his son was better off learning the practical things on the farm. Now, the main character's wife suddenly acquires a very expensive obsession collecting relics of the now-dismantled attractions and refashioning them into new furniture for their house. Soon, they end up sleeping in a 1964 Small World boat for the bed. Oddly enough, the relics "whisper" something into the man's mind. This time, though, it's the dead's turn to find atonement.
Perhaps the funniest in the collection, Doing Blue is about a drug-like high inflicted by the Blue Line attraction on a weird group led by a Jesus impersonator (earnestly believing he's the real deal). This gives much opportunity for related humor. But the highlight of the story is the atonement found while "doing blue" by a new member of the group, tormented by her crimes.
On the weirdness end of the spectrum is Romancing the Goat, about a teenage girl having trouble adjusting to her new adopted sister. She does make mistakes. But I wonder whether it was possible to get along with Angelina, the way she's portrayed--for she's no angel. The story is open-ended, with the sense of inevitable horror coming the main character's way. But I felt that the girl acted younger than her age.
With the possible exception of that story, I find atonement to be the overarching theme of the collection. Worth a read.
