The Maris Review, vol 113

The theme of the week is terrible men and the havoc they wreak!

What I read this week

In 2019 Catapult published Meander, Spiral, Explode, novelist Jane Allison's craft book on narrative structure and the classic hero's journey and how much fun it is to blow it up.

Last week they published a debut novel that does all of the verbs in Allison's book title and so much more. A Real Animal begins when Lucy is a college senior, reeling from a sexual assault that had happened over the summer. The beginning section culminates in an extraordinary scene in which Lucy, absolutely believes she is a leopard, and acts like one.

The rest of the novel follows Lucy as she moves around the country, makes a slew of bad choices, and suffers from PTSD and the agony of being in your twenties, of not knowing who you are or what you want or where you want to end up. This might involve convincing yourself that the things your new boyfriend likes are what you like, even if he is a sadist in just about every aspect of life and you are a bit of a masochist but maybe not in a sexual way.

This novel hurts. It hurt me to read it. Terrible things happen to Lucy often out of nowhere, almost breezily. But A Real Animal is also playful and daring and entirely unpredictable while simultaneously being so on point in depicting mundane emotions. In Lucy I recognized the self-conscious fear that the whole room is looking at you or talking about you behind your back, even when really no one is thinking about you that hard. Or the arguments you have over and over in your head so that by the time you speak out loud you're already exhausted.

Lucy is not always likable or rational, but oh how I ached on her behalf.

Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela Coloff

I've loved reading Pamela Coloff's writing for a while now, so how wonderful that her debut true crime book surpassed my high expectations. Catch the Devil is the story of a con man named Paul Skalnik and the destruction he has wrought. He is all id, the kind of guy who does what he wants whenever he wants and who will say whatever the listener wants to hear, no matter how untruthful or damaging or perjurious.

Skalnick pulled lots of scams over his lifetime, defrauding an array of people including all nine of his wives (no, he wasn't legally married to all nine of them). He did the classic con man thing. But Skalnik was also the absolute worst kind of miscreant: both a pedophile and a snitch. He was in and out of prison (although not for sexually assaulting children--he faced very few consequences for that particular crime) and when he did get locked up, he did everything he possibly could to get back outside. This mostly involved making up false confessions from fellow inmates and bringing them to the police, who were either too lazy or indifferent to question Skalnik's motives.

The book focuses on one particular man whose life Skalnik played with like a cheap set of cards. Jim Dailey was by all accounts a nice guy who went to Vietnam and came back broken: alcoholic and drug-addicted, unable to stay with his family. He began to hang out with some unsavory people, and in 1985 one of them murdered a 14-year old girl in Pinellas County, Florida. Somehow, and Coloff sifts through the evidence to get at what really happened but it's still too convoluted to explain here, Jim gets blamed for the murder. Enter Paul Skalnik, who makes up a bunch of random lurid details from a supposed confession from Jim, who is eventually sentenced to death (the other guy who actually did the murder got life in prison). This was back when Florida used the electric chair to commit murders regularly.

Jim then gets stuck in the justice system for decades, living on death row for the majority of his life. Even well-meaning, fired up lawyers who tried as hard as they could were unable to free him. And now here is Coloff's book to shed some light on all of this darkness. She advocates for a number of policy changes that give the ending of the book a small sense of hope. And holy shit, the book is a great reminder of how important investigative journalism is and how effective it can still be at righting societal wrongs.

We moved

My new bookshelves are very similar to my old bookshelves, and for that I am grateful.

Last week I wrote about culling my book collection for my column at Lit Hub. I donated about 300 books to the Rolling Library and it still didn't really make a dent. But I did learn a lot about myself while I was trying to figure out what to part with. I'm grateful to be able to take so many with me to our new home, and I'm pretty proud of how quickly I was able to reconstruct my primary bookshelves (this time with the help of some new Billys).