The Gone Dead-A Novel by Chanelle Benz - 2019

The Gone Dead-A Novel by Chanelle Benz - 2019

Website of Chanelle Benz

An electrifying first novel from "a riveting new voice in American fiction" -  (George Saunders)

It was this quote from Gerorge Saunders that got me initially interested in The Gone Dead.  I lesrned Benz studied with Saunders in the very elite University of Syracuse Creative Writing Program.  The Amazon description sounded interesting and the Kindle edition was only $1.95 so I acquired it. I ended up so drawn into her vision of the Mississippi Delta region.

The Delta is home to The Blues.  By every demographic measure it is one of The lowest ranking areas in the country in terms of poverty and education.  The population is about a fifty fifty mixture of descendants of slaves and white people.

Racial dramas dating way back still Play out.  Black men are still at risk of being killed for acting “uppity”

Billie James, the narrator and key character, has just returned to the Delta prompted by inheritance of a broken down house and $5000.00 from her paternal grandmother.  Her father was an African American poet highly admired for his work on life in the Delta.  He died under mysterious circumstances  four years after she was born. Her white mother was an accomplished medieval scholar.  She lives in Philadelphia worlds away from the Delta.  Mixed relationships only grudgingly accepted even now in  the Delta. She has passed also. She raised Billie alone.

Billie wants to find out did her father die in a fall while drunk, kill himself or was he murdered by the police for stirring up the African Americans.  

Benz for sure creates a poverty ridden area, with a few rich.  Billie contacts her father’s brother, who is his literary executor, an old girl friend, and a white man who was his childhood friend. Everyone including Billie carries a gun. She has an old dog named “Rufus”.  She asks a lot of questions about her father’s death. She is attacked by white thugs who tell her go back to Philadelphia.  She starts a relationship with a white evangelical Christian.

The violent confronation that solved The mystery was very exciting.

Thanks to Gerorge Saunders I have another marvelous writer to follow 

”.

Two Short Stories by Chanelle Benz,from The Man Who Shot Out my Eyes, her debut collection

The Diplomat's Daughter

James III

Website of Chanelle



Based on the advance press on The Man Who Shot Out my Eyes, the debut short story collection of Chanelle Benz, my expectations were very high for the two of her short stories that I was happily able to find online. Both are included in the collection which I hope to read and post further upon in May.  I loved both stories and do not at all hesitate to endorse purchase of her collection.  It is good to see such great stories by a new writer.  Interestingly both of these very different stories comply with Frank O'Connors famous dictum that the deepest Short Stories deal with loneliness, given voice to the marginalized, speak for the mute.  In both these stories Benz dramatically  presents the consequences of loneliness and marginalization.

I will just talk a bit about each story as I do not wish to spoil anyone's first read.  I read each story twice and will hopefully reread them in May along with the full collection.

"The Diplomat's Daughter" focuses on a young woman, once kidnapped away from the home of her American diplomat father.  It is a fast moving story, beginning in a terrorist cell in the Kalahiri Desert, Beirut in the time period 2001 to 2011.  The woman is under the sway of a man who uses her for sex and to commit terrorist acts.  It is evidently the Stockholm syndrome impacting her.  Then we flash back  to Lynchburg, Virginia in 1997 where we see her as an adolescent, insecure about her weight and being a typical difficult at times teenager.  There are segments in Mexico City, back in Beirut, and in Washington, D.C.  As I read the story, told mostly in very skillfully rendered dialogue, it reads almost like a play, I tried to ponder what terrible emotional lacuna could I discover from the conversations of the young woman with her siblings and her Columbian stepmother.  In a away I'm inclined to see her as somehow suggesting the father of the terrorist own repudiation of America but maybe this is pushing things.  This is a beautiful story that will more than repay repeated readings.


"James III" is set in the rough poverty ridden inner city of Philadelphia.  It is narrated by a twelve year old boy, he has just been mugged, his shoes have been stolen and it
a very cold winter.  The boy's father is in prison, his mother has a boyfriend.  He decided to take the train to his aunt.  We subtly are shown he is not just your ordinary inner city boy when he makes a reference to Mr. Brown low, Oliver Twist's benefactor.  He goes to a Quaker school, tuition paid by his aunt.  He reads the sonnets of Petrach.

Much of the plot action is carried by dialogue.  The boy lives in a rough world where showing any weakness is a mistake.  We go along when his cousin takes him to visit his father.  We learn how he came to be James III.

"“And I’m named after my father, your granddaddy. Now that man? That man was born evil and done stayed that way. But because he was named James, I got named James, and your grandmomma said you got to be named James, that way at the end of the day you got his hard and my heart. You James the third.”

"James III" presents a very intelligent young msn, he was in the state spelling be finals, forced to be wise beyond his years.  We get a sense we are in The Philadelphia inner city.  We hope for the best for James.

These are two first rate stories.  As mentioned, I hope to read the full collection in May.

Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta.com, Electric Literature'sRecommended Reading, The American Reader, Fence and The Cupboard, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. She received her MFA at Syracuse University as well as a BFA in Acting from Boston University. She is of British-Antiguan descent and currently lives in Houston.  From chanellebenz.com

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