MAESTRO OF THE BIRDS
& THE BEES
(AND THE FLOWERS & THE TREES)
by Andy Morton
Giron, Sephera. The Birds and the Bees. New York: Leisure, 2002. 340 p.
As a rookie reviewer for Necropsy, and as a relative newcomer to the horror genre and the horror scene in general, I am quickly realizing that it takes a talented author (see Tonys Jim's rant in Volume 8 for details) to catch my attention. I am not the type to be sucked in by cheap slash-n-gash tactics or bodice ripping romance theatrics. I like the classic stuff, late night episodes of the Twilight Zone and Night Gallery or the Big Man himself, Mr. Hitchcock. As for my favorite CLASSIC author, that would be the master himself, Poe. I like talent and a quirky twist.
Well I'd settle for one out of two on most occasions.
Sephira Giron's gothic novel The Birds and the Bees is one of those works that did catch my attention. I will admit that I am a first-time reader of Giron, but I immediately recognized her talent: I truly liked the way she created her characters. They had faces, and thoughts, and flaws. They came alive for me, as in this passage:
Certainly she made no more claim to pain than anyone else, but her pain was her own, rolled up tight and tucked away in the stone that thumped against her chest with steady persistence…
I mean, everyone accumulates grief and bears burdens. What single 30-something (or 40-something for that matter) woman couldnt identify with Giron's description of an emotional state? To put it bluntly, the characters spoke to me (or maybe that was just the voices in my head <damn, out of tin foil AGAIN!>). Some were stereotypical, but even those resembled that lot of human beings who fit into some sort of stereotypical category themselves.
I especially liked the way the protagonist, Gabrielle, was portrayed. She was believable, not too sappy or idealistic. She was REAL:
She could walk down the city street and pinpoint with a glance those who were lazy…. People who stayed in dead-end jobs for fear of carving a new path. People who stayed in dead marriages, since building a new relationship would take work, and why bother doing that when at least you knew what to expect from the same old nightmare that droned on day after day after day.
Moreover, Giron uses dialogue to make her characters speak as we would. Readers won't find any hoity-toity proprieties or 19th century semantics. Giron incorporates everyday use of bad grammar and even throws in a little cyberspeak. And, as for the sex, let's just say it worked for me. The lesbian scenes were not just homoerotic; they were erotic. Unfortunately, the hetero scenes seemed to be informed by a little more degradation than what is necessary for me. Sex sells. However, that is not the heart of The Birds and the Bees. Rather, it is what we southerners call lagniappe, that added little something that makes what is necessary interesting.
But what is sex without love? Coffee without cream. Maybe raw sex is drinkable, but it is much more enjoyable when it's diluted with the creamy, flavorful essence of emotion. Admirably, Giron gets that idea, too.
Then again, in all tragic tales, there was nothing so easy as love at first sight and happily ever after.... There was always a hurdle to jump.
And of course sometimes the cream sours. Love isn't all hearts and music and sighs of "aahhhh, there’s that warm fuzzy feeling." Giron's gothic tragedy ends more with a "ok…well that’s an interesting idea."
Gothic novels are supposed to be framed by the social ideals of good and bad as they are represented in human behavior. And like women in typical sentimental stories, gothic heroines are almost always stereotyped into the evil/good (virgin/whore) dichotomy, with GOOD and EVIL being easily evident. This dualism is less obvious in Giron's novel, where woman looks in the mirror and sees a fragmented version of herself.
And on that note, let me now talk about where my love affair with The Birds and the Bees ends. What I did not like about this novel was its blatant use of gawd-awful soap opera set directions. For instance, Giron commits the unpardonable sin of melodramatic landscaping:
Dawn bathed the land with warm orange light.
Ugh! Sephira, gag me with a 3-inch spiked leather heel.
You may be saying at this point, so Giron creates believable characters who speak like people and enjoy sex like most of us and suffer through the pangs of love…now what does she do with ‘em?
Kill them! What else?
Well not really. Giron makes them suffer first. They suffer through all sorts of human conditions: bad jobs, bad relationships, and bad hygiene.
I think that Giron understands the premise of the Gothic story. While she produces a complicated tale with intriguing characters and an interesting Hitchcockian premise, The Birds and the Bees eventually fell flat at the end. There was no quirky twist. There was no sense of "wow, I didn’t think of THAT." All I heard was the fizzling sound of a story falling short. But, then again, isn't that representative of life in general? We always expect more than we get, don't we?