Periphylla

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions 

By Garrett Ashley 

Press 53, 2024 

Paperback: $17.95 

Genre: Short Fiction 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

As I was reading Garrett Ashley’s new collection of short stories, Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions, a woman asked what I was reading. I told her I was reading a book to review, and she asked me what it was about. I must have hesitated, and she said, “Well, just tell me about something you’ve read in it.” I explained that I had just read a story, “Brother Swine,” in which some sort of vague war against terrorism is being waged in California, and massive starvation and conscious reincarnation is going on in this village in the east. A son/brother/fiancé has been killed in the war, and he returns home to his starving family as a pig. And, by the way, the pig’s human mother used to be a wolf and has never completely lost the “feeling of wolf-hood.” Conflict ensues. 

“Wait,” she interrupted. “Is this true?” 

And therein lies the power of Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions. The earnest and sometimes deadpan narrative voices Ashley so ably creates make the impossible plausible, and the bizarre becomes something to be blithely accepted. Garrett Ashley currently teaches at Tuskegee University.  The collection is a spectacular debut. 

The human characters in Periphylla…seem to accept a twisted fate; the nonhuman characters often seem to be trying to take back what was theirs to begin with. “I began to wonder whether regression to animal-hood was really regression,” says the brother in “Brother Swine.” “Maybe it was ascension.” The reader takes a leap of faith to make sense of a strangely familiar, weirdly elusive world that might seem to exist in a near future or even a distant past. Is climate change at play here? It is never stated as such, but existential crisis definitely looms. How is it possible that such threatening scenarios can be so beguiling? 

And squeamish. If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to have a very large spider lodged in your nasal cavity – while you’re also trying to be supportive of a very pregnant spouse – “Movements” is your story. A divorced dad searches for an appropriate way to tell his nine-year-old daughter that he was a yak in a previous life in “Once Was a Yak.” A depressed “protist,” passing as human, realizes that “my fingers were outgrowing my skin.” In “Last Stand of the Alligator Killers,” a family – stalked by lurking alligators – seems to be undergoing some sort of reptilian transformation. The narrator of “Beautiful Bird” stops shooting as he realizes that the pack of coyotes, hungering for the genetically modified, sweetly-scented turkey on his roof, “are just trying to live their lives, like everyone else.”    

“Cecile Beach, third year of the Leviathan” is the foreboding opening of “Riding the Waves of Leviathan,” a story displaying Ashley’s masterful ability to create and maintain tactile tension. Leviathan prowls the waters of a “poor and underdeveloped” seaside village with villagers who “smelled like the death of the ocean and our town and everything” in the wake of one of Leviathan’s titanic waves. 

In “An Execution,” the rare story without a species conversion subtext, Texas has adopted an “eye for an eye” method of criminal execution (of course it would be Texas). A father, whose son was murdered by having his head crushed with a rock and being drowned, must choose if he wants to execute the murderer by drowning him in a river or stoning him to death. The father struggles to compose an impact statement before he must personally carry out the execution. An “Animal Expert,” hiding a kangaroo in his shed, looks back at his life and realizes that “we live in an ecosystem of child-brained idiots.” 

Thematic threads may connect the stories in Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions, but Garrett Ashley creates a discrete narrative voice for each story and distinct environments in tales that finish, but do not necessarily end. In the often-macabre intensity of the stories, they also manage to celebrate the variety of a feral world and the cycles of life. One narrator describes himself as “paranoid and lonely … alone, alone, alone,” but, when it matters most, he embarks on a selfless act of escape, maybe redemption, or, more likely, just a change of scenery and threat. These stories triumph; they rise above the mire. 

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).