Red Ant House: Stories (Paperback)

by Ann Cummins (Author) "The first time I saw this girl she was standing at the bottom of the coal pile..." (more)
Key Phrases: low bar, grease monkey, stove door, Miss Adams, Charlie Alexander, Mystic Mike (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Cummins is less circus ringleader than freak-show barker in this debut collection of 12 stories, as she entices patrons to peek at the secret lives and survival skills of the downtrodden and disenchanted. Her dark, offbeat style and ability to make the reader uncomfortable are on full display in the title story, in which two loner neighborhood girls-one scrawny and homely, the other mouthy and mean-form an alliance and plan to strip naked for money. Cummins often perches kids in peril, with unreliable guardians who are as ineffective as the mumbling, rarely seen adults in a Peanuts cartoon. In her more accessible tales, the enemy is visible: Karen, a white girl living with her family on an Indian reservation, is tormented by a Navajo girl, Purple, in "Trapeze." In "Crazy Yellow," unsupervised eight-year-old Pete meets his new neighbor, an off-kilter man who is "not in control of his circumstances." And in "Headhunter," a drunk driver on a steep mountain pass forces Ginny into a dangerous game of chicken. In her more surreal stories, fear is less tangible, lurking somewhere between dream and reality: a supernatural force weighs down on a young brother and sister in "Blue Fly"; a sinister hypnotist begs his client to "give me something you truly value" as he eyes her teenage daughter in "The Hypnotist's Trailer." Cummins doesn't always create convincing alternate universes-her deliberately off-kilter prose sometimes falters and her attempts at interior logic aren't always consistent-but these are mostly clever and entertaining experiments.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In her debut short story collection, Cummins details the lives of characters that exist on the periphery, whether it be geographically, socially, or economically. An unpopular student at an Indian reservation school joins the gymnastics team to become more outgoing, only to forge a combative relationship with her spotter; a torn dress predicates the end of childhood for turn-of-the century siblings; an anonymous factory piece worker details the events of her day. Cummins clearly relishes taking the reader into the unfamiliar, and we get glimpses into the unknown worlds of an antelope reserve, the mysterious interior of a hypnotist's trailer, and the thought process of a young girl as she waits to meet the sexual predator who has been calling her. Throughout, Cummins refuses to condescend to her characters, instead creating full-blooded portrayals despite their unsympathetic actions or the bleak circumstances in which they find themselves. Her work has gathered praise in previous appearances in the New Yorker and McSweeney's, and Cummins will deservedly gain more appreciative fans with this finely wrought collection. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (April 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618269258
• ISBN-13: 978-0618269259
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #828,578 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a Georgia OKeeffe painting put to words, December 15, 2003

By	Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

These stories of drifting, down-and-out, disenfranchised characters searching for redemption read with the bleakness of the landscape of one of Georgia O'Keeffe's Southwestern paintings - which is no coincidence as that is the setting. The circumstances of each of these stories are odd, a fact that adds to their drawing power. We get to peek behind the scenes within a hypnotist's trailer as well as within the mind of a child waiting to meet a man who may be a pedophile.
Author Cummings' stories take place in the realm of endless deserts and bleached skies, and her brilliant prose sears with the power of a relentless sun.
Super-fine.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid, Sturdy Stories From a Genuinely Talented Writer, May 29, 2003

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Ann Cummins sets most of the twelve stories in her debut collection, RED ANT HOUSE, in small desert towns and reservation communities that dot the American Southwest --- locales surrounded by "miles and miles of sand" and not much else. This extreme setting, which she evokes through tactile details, informs almost every aspect of the book, creating an atmosphere of hostile uncertainty, determining the course of characters' actions, affecting and even invading them: "The inside of the cab felt like sand, and so did the inside of her mouth," Cummins writes in "Headhunter." "The tops of her arms had separated into hundreds of little lines, and her hand, when she touched it to her tongue, tasted like salt . . . The absence of moisture gave the landscape an edge, like glass."

Cummins, who studied and now teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University, uses this jagged terrain to create tension in her stories and evoke the desolation of its inhabitants. She renders this landscape in rough-hewn prose that bursts with short, targeted sentences and blunt declarations of brutal insights. The result is a collection of textured stories that are shorn of all unnecessary words and details: they are rangy but precise, unpredictable but seemingly ineluctable.

Several of the stories here, including "Bitterwater" and the standout "Trapeze," are about whites living on reservations, "company people" who feel like outsiders and who chafe at the wide-open boredom of the desert. They feel constantly on their guard, never at home in their own homes, and always looking beyond the horizon for a means of escape.

Theirs is an anywhere-but-here mentality. In the short "Dr. War Is a Voice on the Phone," Dina abandons her sick aunt and her uncle snoring in his chair to join a man who called her out of the blue. For her, strangers like Dr. War are preferable to family, and the unknown --- despite its threats and dangers --- is more attractive than the known.

Cummins writes persuasively about this need for escape, which is strongest and most artfully pronounced in the stories narrated by young girls just reaching or still suffering through adolescence, frightened by the demands of adulthood and the larger world. In "Where I Work," a young woman cherishes her new apartment and dreams about how she will furnish it, yet she cannot hold down a job to pay for it. In "Bitterwater," Brenda rushes into a teenage marriage to a Todacheene Indian named Manny, only to watch him grow from an idealistic young man into a jaded drunk.

"Whatever's happening inside you," a cancer-ridden mother tells her son, Peter, in "Crazy Yellow," "remember that you are about to change. If you feel like you're in a well, you're about to climb out of it. That's the nature of life." She doesn't warn him, however, about the terrors that await him on the surface. Left alone while his mother undergoes more tests, Peter stirs up more trouble for himself than he could imagine. The tragic inevitability of climbing out of that well makes this and the other stories in RED ANT HOUSE so devastating.

Ultimately, these characters long for "one sweet moment" away from the world and all its troubles. Few of them get to enjoy it, but their dreams of something more than the wasteland around them enliven these solid, sturdy stories and reveal Cummins as a genuinely talented and immensely sensitive writer.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, moving, intense collection, April 21, 2003

By A Customer

If you like impeccable prose combined with the dark details that make us all human, mixed in with a little surrealism, this collection is for you. Ann Cummins is a masterful writer--no wonder she gets the great quote from Dave Eggers!--and I will look forward to her future work. Each one of these stories packs a very powerful punch and will leave you emotionally affected, no matter how tough you think you are. :)