Mike Maggio’s Letters from Inside
Review by Lauren Woods
In Mike Maggio’s new collection of short stories, Letters from Inside, bizarre things happen to ordinary people. “M,” while crossing Washington’s Key Bridge, finds himself unwittingly at the center of a scandal that sweeps the city. Mr. Maxwell, a civil servant who wants nothing more than his pension, finds himself stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare. Then there is Dr. Pierce, a simple professor, who finds himself on the wrong end of a wave of fundamentalist fervor.
Maggio’s stories, a collection written over three decades, are in turn odd, trippy, disturbing, funny. There is a talking fish, a sentient flower, a roach-to-human transformation, and one from man to a pig. Maggio not only transgresses the laws of nature. He obliterates them completely. But it’s all for a larger purpose: to illustrate our society, and its systems, are corrupt. These stories often contain a dystopian twist-proof that dystopian fiction, unfortunately, has a long shelf life.
Sometimes Maggio’s critique of societal systems is broad and sweeping as he tackles a deeply authoritarian society. Sometimes it targets specifics, like religious fervor run amok, or no one looking after the children in society, or a failed health care system.
The stories are compelling because somehow, the more bizarre they are, the more they illustrate something fundamentally wrong about the world we live in. Who could fail to appreciate, after all, the darkly funny symbolism of a man with swine flu, who unable to afford insurance, is treated as an animal and eventually becomes more animalistic as the story progresses?
Maggio’s stories range from the downright disturbing, like “The Keepers,” and “Beasts”—stories so unnerving they won’t fully leave my mind—to the rare heartwarming one, placed conspicuously near the most disturbing ones, as if to give the reader a little respite.
But as unsettling as the stories are at times, Maggio never disturbs for the sake of disturbing the reader. There is always a deeper reason. His stories, nearly all political in some regard, function as a mirror to our society. They disturb because we ought to be disturbed if we aren’t already.
There are nods to Kafka woven throughout, from the man known only as “M,” with his own modern-day absurd fate, to Metamorphosis II, an uncomfortably close connection between a roach and a candidate for Senate—which tells you everything you need to know about Maggio’s feelings about those who create the systems the rest of us have to inhabit.
As with Kafka, at times, the bizarre situations can loom larger than the characters at the center of them, leaving the characters a little underdeveloped by comparison. But for the most part, Maggio’s characters are complex and compelling—particularly the characters in his stories who inhabit the grayest areas of their ethical conflicts.
There are few fully evil villains throughout these stories. There are some, but the worst of them, the majority in fact, are complex everyday people—most horrifying because they feel like real people—the sanctimonious religious fanatics who lead a charge against a local professor, the prison warden who gives a kind smile and then looks the other way. These, even more than the supernatural beasts that inhabit some of the stories, disturb us. Perhaps it’s because these ordinary villains are all products of corrupt systems. It’s safe to say that this concept rises to an obsession in these stories, which is what makes the stories so compelling.
Maggio’s stories rarely spell it out though. He makes the reader work. Maggio rarely underestimates his audience. He expects the reader to figure it out on their own, or at least to come along for the ride if they don’t fully—and I didn’t always—get it. But the ones I did get, I enjoyed all the more for having figured it out myself.
As the stories progress, the real and surreal start to blend together. Are the characters living in reality, or simply paranoid? At times, it’s difficult to tell. Is Caspar Crump truly hearing his name over and over from successive strangers, or is it his own unreliable mind at work? It seems Maggio is fascinated with the area between paranoia and a simply bizarre world.
I would have liked to see a little more variety in the women who inhabit Maggio’s pages. There are some stronger female characters, especially the woman at the heart of “Underneath the Griffin Tree.” But more often than not, the faceless bureaucrats who inhabit the pages are men, the heroes struggling against the system are men, and women often appear as jilted or wrongheaded wives, rarely having agency.
Although most of his stories focus on the larger systems, Maggio’s stories also delve into the deeply personal. One of my favorite stories—and it was difficult to choose—was “Atalier,” which involves an artist who seems to take the very identity away of his lover after he captures her in canvas after canvas, until he has finally exhausted his desire to capture her likeness.
Never afraid to take risks, never afraid to use his subjects to the utmost as the instruments of his genius, Collin Spears strips her bare, Catherine Whittaker, innocent country girl, goes to the very heart of her, transforms her into lines and colors, planes and shapes until the canvas becomes her—that spot a tear, that angle a heartbreak, that splash of red a deep deep passion that longs to rise up. Until Catherine Whittaker becomes the canvas, her body capsulized into the two-dimensional space, her personality deconstructed, interpreted, transformed, her soul diffused into light and shadow.
Here, as elsewhere, Maggio captures so well, and richly, the cruelties that people can inflict against one another.
The epistolary story “Letters from Inside” is signature Maggio and an apt title story. It’s about a man inhabiting a prison in a dystopian reality, writing to a woman named Mary, and hoping his letters will reach her. It’s one of the stories that makes me realize how much I enjoyed this collection, how well these stories lend themselves to discussion and debate, and one of many that sticks with me. Why, the story seems to ask, do we have the urge to write in the face of injustice? And does it matter who reads it?
Now I’m writing this letter. I don’t know why or how I came to be doing this. It’s part of the process, Dr. Schwartz says. My farewell to malady. What does she mean? They’re all waiting around silently—Danny with his torch, Dr. Schwartz with her cold, expressionless face, the warden with his kind smile which makes me feel unsettled. It’s as if they want me to write to you, as if this is the reason they have come.
“Letters from the Inside” is a story for these disturbing times. And this collection of stories, written over three decades, is a book that eerily anticipated and speaks to the erosion of liberal democratic norms in the United States and elsewhere. You can almost imagine Maggio penning these pieces, like the story’s prisoner, thinking of the systems in our society, prisons in a sense, which we have constructed for ourselves. If the characters the protagonist letter-writer is reaching out to are his lifeline to the outside, people who can witness what is happening, so too are Maggio’s readers. The question then is who is listening and how will they respond.
Upcoming reading SATURDAY 10/19/19: One More Page Books
2200 N. Westmoreland Street
Arlington, VA 22213
Saturday, October 19, 2019 - 2:00pm
Find more Mike Maggio author events HERE.
Buy Letters from the Inside from Vine Leaves Press or Amazon.
Mike Maggio has published fiction, poetry, reviews and Arabic translations in journals and anthologies in the United States and abroad. Currently, he is the Northern Regional Vice-President for the Poetry Society of Virginia. He is also an associate-editor at Potomac Review and recently served as a judge for the Oregon Poetry Association’s annual poetry contest. He is the author of Your Secret Is Safe With Me, an audio collection of poems, Oranges From Palestine (and other poems), two collections of short fiction, Sifting Through the Madness and The Keepers, and a full-length collection of poetry, deMockracy, a hard-hitting, poetic critique of the Bush administration. He has also published a full length novel, The Wizard and the White House, and a novella, The Appointment. Find him online at www.MikeMaggio.net.
Lauren Woods is a DC-area based writer. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Wasafiri, The Offing, The Washington Post, and others.