Beauty and the Beast
Fiction from the 1970s, early stories of loss and obsession, voices from another century, another planet, voices exploring themselves, both innocent and haunted, a time capsule, message in a bottle from a forgotten present, memory of the future. Or simply a collection of stories, an old collection, early successes and failures, the young writer this older writer used to be.
Reviews:
“What struck me first about this book and has never ceased to hold my admiration is how unubtrusively but strongly it is written. Exacting, excruciating realism is Beauty’s mode, its initial focus the hippie lives of the Vietnam Era—heedless promiscuity, welfare menages, drugs, lost children, psychic refugees, futile attempts to regain a wrecked equilibrium, a bereaved search for the rebirth of wonder, a mettlesome under-class amid the ever-accelerating consolidation of American power.... Beauty and the Beast deserves and should grandly reward a substantial readership.” —R.D. Skillings, Provincetown Arts, 2013/14
“I would never have guessed the short stories in Catherine Gammon’s engaging 2012 collection, Beauty and the Beast, were ‘from the 1970s.’ Sure, there are a few references to Vietnam, the death of Mao, and Pope John Paul I, as well as a lack of Internet or cell phones. But the prose is fresh enough to feel risky, innovative, and new. The characters might have sprung up in a ‘simpler time,’ but that makes neither them nor the stories in which they’re planted simple.” — Jennifer Vosters, Grab the Lapels, July 6, 2017