Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza

An exceedingly underwhelming collection. The cover and title of Carribean Fragoza’s debut collection succeeded in making me want to read it. After reading the first three stories, however, I found myself feeling rather underwhelmed by Fragoza’s storytelling. I, later on, decided to give this collection another shot, hoping that I would find the other stories in it to be more to my liking but alas no such thing happened. The stories in this collection struck me as the product of a creative writing assignment; they weren’t necessarily bad but the way these scenarios are presented to us struck me as contrived. The language tries hard to impress its importance on us, often through the use of showy metaphors that did not come across as particularly imaginative or clever. The prose has a sticky cloying quality that I find particularly unappealing but may very well appeal to other readers.

Many of these stories have domestic settings and centre on Mexican-American characters. These stories are permeated by an oppressive atmosphere. Characters feel trapped by their home life, the presence of their families and or friends does little to abate their fears and anxieties. Quite the opposite, in fact, these people often pose a threat to their physical and mental well-being. Through these stories, the author explores alienation, loneliness, paranoia, and otherness.

While I appreciated the themes that dominate Fragoza’s storytelling, I was unable to fully ‘immerse’ myself in her stories. Her affected prose irked me and I found the weird and grotesque elements to be predictable and not particularly engaging. Perhaps readers who haven’t read a lot of collections of horror stories be able to appreciate this debut more than I did. These stories weren’t as morbid as Mariana Enríquez’s Things We Lost in the Fireor Brenda Peynado’s The Rock Eaters. They lacked the surreal humor that characterizes Shirley Jackson’s work and the prose wasn’t as solid as say Samanta Schweblin’s in Mouthful of Birds. Some of the imagery succeeded in being grotesque but I did not find any of these stories to be particularly disturbing. This collection basically reads like a lite version of Enríquez’s’s ones.

my rating: ★★☆☆☆

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