Ball

Starred review from September 7, 2015
The synthetic blond, the berserk lover, the horny teenager—Ison delves into the minds of these characters and others in this captivating and disturbing collection of stories: think Mary Gaitskill or Miranda July, but more demented. Ison writes about sex as the undercurrent of all adult life. Past abuse, current relationships, future encounters—none dispel the magnetic tug of human sexual attraction. The erratic narrator of the title story is just as annoyed by her dog’s obsession with playing ball as her boyfriend Eric is annoyed by her obsession with the dog. Eric breaks up with her, but she can’t break up with the dog. Or can she? In “Fish,” the main character waits for her dreaded uncle to die so that she can quietly feed his remains to the fish at a botanical gardens. Another story dramatizes the wig shopping one friend must do for her friend dying of cancer. The resentment between the friend builds to a startling climax with a pair of tweezers. Ison’s (Rockaway) straightforward style belies a deeper, parallel truth hidden in each story. These stories find a strange sweet spot between the mundane and the horrific. They may shock but they also provoke, with many leading to an unexpected, and not always happy, ending.

September 1, 2015
Elegant, creepy short stories with a horror-film sensibility. If you look at the table of contents of Ison's (Rockaway, 2013, etc.) short story collection before you read the book, you will see a column of innocent-looking nouns. Cactus. Ball. Wig. Fish. Apology. After you finish, the same list shimmers with evil portent. That classic horror-movie elision, from friendly normalcy to nauseating terror, is made by most of these beautifully written, often first-person narratives. The title story is named for a game of fetch played with an ugly little dog the narrator halfheartedly adopts but then falls for utterly. "I loved her so much it was numbing, and sometimes, to jab a feeling at myself, I fantasized about her dying." The relentless, autonomic neediness that drives the dog to insist on playing ball is mirrored in a sexual affair the narrator is conducting with her best friend's neighbor, who is a "wonderfully alpine six-feet-four" and is "brusque and unsheepish, as fearless of sex as a porn star." This attitude toward sex characterizes the narrative voice itself as it describes the man's penis and the dog's vagina with equal precision. The tale ends with a horrible betrayal and the surreal violence of a campfire ghost story. Betrayal is a central theme in many other stories as well. In "Wig," the narrator lovingly cares for her best friend who's dying of cancer while carrying on an affair with her husband. In "Apology," a wife resorts to gothic self-mutilation to win back her husband after he walks in on her with another man in their bed. Sexual degradation and abuse is everywhere: in an after-school job at a bakery, in the hospital where an old uncle is dying, on the website of an Internet dominatrix. And bizarre, extravagant death-by cactus, by knitting, by famous boyfriend-is never far away. Freaky, nasty, highly original, and unforgettable, whether you like it or not.

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