“I lived.” So opens the title story of The Living, one half of Campfires of the Dead and the Living, a twin collection of stories by Peter Christopher published recently on 11:11 Press. In a book notable for its inventive, muscular and often maximalist prose, the sentence is perhaps the simplest. Yet within the simple declaration lies every thrill and heartbreak, every lingering regret, even the inevitability of death itself, but most of all a stubborn pride. In spite of everything, I lived.
The two parts of the collection are presented backwards, with Campfires of the Dead—Christopher’s debut originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989 and now out of print—preceded by The Living, an unpublished collection of work written between 1990 and 2004, before Christopher’s untimely death a few years later. Much of the older work was written under the tutelage of Gordon Lish, a fact it wears nakedly and mostly for the better (if occasionally for the worse). The newer experiments further (a four-story meta-story told through titles and printed receipts?), and manages to be at once warmer and more cool. But ultimately both are linked in their affinity for people existing on the edge of things. Be it the dumpster diving protagonist of ‘Lost Dogs’, the third wheel chicken sexer turned cow manicurist of ‘The Careerist’ or the driver and passenger sharing a flirtatious heart-to-heart via the mirror of a bullet-pocked taxi cab.
Stories plagued by the pain of life, and by the desire for it all the worse. “There is, I know, loneliness in this world so great that you can see IT and hear IT in the ticking hand of a watch,” he writes in ‘Hunger’, where a death row killer writes to the cook of his final meal. “ALL THAT, then how it was again when our time together got almost too good.”
Campfires of the Dead and The Living is out now via 11:11 Press.