Before Sid Stone kills ten hospice patients to restore their “dignity,” author Carolyn Geduld introduces readers to a loving but bizarre relationship with Stone’s mother, who is over 90 and with whom he has lived since birth. Long ago, she repeatedly joked that he should “take me out the back and shoot me” if she developed dementia. Now she has severe memory loss and is nearly mute.
TAKE ME OUT THE BACK is divided into 30 stories — each capable of standing on its own — with generic titles based on key roles or traits of central characters. Although Geduld includes tales about a broad range of people affected by the massacre, the sense of community is weak because the stories are too independent making the overall book less cohesive than its parts. But Geduld’s writing is spare, successfully foreboding, and occasionally lightened with a dash of dark humor, such as in “The Certified Nursing Assistant” when the grandmother in a verbally violent family hands her husband a beer “before he had to curse her to get her to do it.” As the omniscient narrator quips, “Everyone was getting along.”
Geduld is well versed in the far-reaching emotional fallout of mental illness, due to decades of work as a licensed clinical social worker and the ten-year dementia illness of her late husband. But the author, who didn’t begin writing fiction until age 76, never gets didactic and TAKE ME OUT THE BACK has a creepy, (Alfred) Hitchcockian feel.
The book opens with Sid’s story (“The Maintenance Man”) in which he pretends to talk with his mom and speaks for her in a falsetto voice calling himself a “good boy” who will “do the right thing” for her and the hospice patients. He isn’t the only person in TAKE ME OUT THE BACK who is driven by invented conversations gone awry. Other characters who hear include nonexistent voices include an insecure teen (“The Copycat”) who imagines encouraging conversations with Sid about planning a high school massacre.
One of the longest and most powerful stories (“The Family”) focuses on an over-achieving teenager, Rachel, who grieves the nursing home shooting of her grandmother, Edith, by conversing with her during dreams. Rachel receives advice about cooking chopped liver, running the household, protecting her brothers, and changing locksets to oust her falling-apart parents who have virtually abandoned their children.
TAKE ME OUT THE BACK is a taut, engrossing and talented debut novel that provides a mosaic of perspectives on a mental health horror story.
~Alicia Rudnicki for IndieReader