Stories Within Stories Within Stories

by Tony Fonseca

08/02/2005

Bailey, Michael. Palindrome Hannah. Bloomington, IN: Unlimited Publishing, 2005. 319 p.

Experimental fiction does not always work, but when it does, it tends to be delightful and memorable. Such is the case with Michael Bailey's first novel, Palindome Hannah. If you saw Memento, you will have some idea how this novel works: in essence, you could say that Bailey tells the story backwards, so that the information you receive at the end of the book actually makes you rethink the beginning. Bailey adds an extra twist as well, in that he tells five related tales, and the minor characters in those tales slowly become the focus of the story, even though they are never the focus of any individual tale. You could say that Palindrome Hannah works like a puzzle that has a few missing pieces, but whose image is clearly discernible if you step back far enough and see everything in context.

Of course, a novel's being experimental in its structure does not automatically guarantee a good story (take for example the ponderous House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, which has so many tangential digressions that the story gets lost, so that only the most dedicated of readers ever finishes the book). Bailey, however, avoids creating a work which tempts readers to say "interesting," right before closing the text and going on to the next read, by telling stories which work both as genre pieces and as good mainstream fiction. His characters are well-drawn, and his prose flows well. Despite the fact that he is writing something which challenges the usual formulae of horror, the novel does not come across as being "academic" or pontificating.

But what makes Palindrome Hannah fun is that Bailey experiments with five different subgenres of horror in the tales. A psychological piece, "Reflections," opens the novel. Here, a cursed mirror acts as a portal to another dimension, and ultimately drives its owner to solipsism and suicidal behavior. "Pumpkin Carving" follows, and gives readers a sense of Bailey's mastery of the splatterpunk serial killer format. Where "Reflections" may leave you wondering whether or not the horror was all in the mind, "Pumpkin Carving" plays to the real horror of being preyed upon by a psychosexual sociopath, and will have male readers wincing in its final few pages. "The Whiteness" draws readers' attention back the main character of "Reflections," giving them a sense of what was in that other dimension behind the looking glass. It reads more like a Twilight Zone piece—not quite horror but psychological and dark nonetheless. Here, an elderly man recounts his time in the orphanage from hell. This tale gives new meaning to the phrase "revenge is a dish best served cold." "Finding God" is similar to "The Whiteness" in style, but it is more tongue-in-cheek, less dark. It asks the question, what if God ended up in a mental institution? Finally, "Inside/Outside," a gory childhood revenge tale, takes us back to a couple of the characters first introduced in "Pumpkin Carving."

Throughout all five tales, we are given glimpses into the life of nineteen-year-old Julie and her daughter Hannah. It is their strange story that ultimately the novel relates (and I have to wonder if maybe they will be the actual subjects of Bailey's next work). It seems that Hannah, a precocious and somewhat strange little girl, is the product of an unholy union, perhaps even the child of a demon. We are never told in uncertain terms exactly what makes her unusual, but enough hints are given that we can piece together where she came from, and where she might be headed in life. Perhaps the best touch of the entire novel is that Bailey does not make Hannah angelic or demonic, so we see her as a work in progress. Thus, Palindrome Hannah avoids the polemic and ultimately just tells some damned good stories.

It's always easy to become too quickly enamored of a new writer when that writer shows a certain maturity and sense of form and purpose in a first novel. Like anyone else, I am always prone to making rash judgments like "this is the next Stephen King," so I will refrain from such gushing praise here. But I will say that in the last three years I have read only three rookie novelists (I suppose an average of one per year isn't bad) who have struck me as being authors we should all watch out for, and I count Bailey foremost among those.