~~ the following is a piece I did for the 2013-14 school year of "The Ram Pride," Ringgold High School's school newspaper ~~
Scott Snyder is best
known today as one of the biggest names in contemporary comic books, but there
was a time when this wasn’t the case. His first published work was a short
story collection entitled Voodoo Heart,
which gained quite a bit of traction when it released back in 2006, including
ringing endorsement from Stephen King.
As a fan of Snyder’s comic book work –work that includes American Vampire, a series that was
originally co-written along with King – I noticed that Snyder’s style of
story-telling didn’t change much once artwork was thrown into the mix.
Something else I noticed is that this is a brilliant, quirky bit of fiction,
which nails the crisis of having a strongly feeling and conflicted heart.
Voodoo Heart
is a collection of seven short stories, altogether two-hundred seventy-eight
pages in length. Each short story is memorable and smartly put-together due to
Snyder’s keen ability to characterize, and to showcase drama associated with
love. The characters he creates are thought-provoking in their intimate
relatability, forcing me to self-analyze as I read. In the first story, called
“Blue Yodel,” we read about Pres and Claire, two lovers with a fondness for
airships. Claire runs away from him and flies off on one of the very things
they bonded talking about. That is great situational drama, but the way he
writes it is even better. The main thrust of the story takes place in the
present, following Pres madly driving around looking for the airship, but
flashbacks are sprinkled throughout. These flashbacks deliver beautiful
accounts of their relationship when things were good, which actually hurt
because of the context.
Snyder also likes to do
something with these stories that he also likes to do in essentially all of his
comic book work, which is tell a small story that is seemingly unrelated to the
main plot, all for the purpose of thematic connection. An example of this is
when he writes of a former racehorse who seems to wish he wasn’t so physically
shackled by his enclosed home, which is thematically similar to the main
character’s feeling of being emotionally shackled in his life due to a feeling
of not fitting in.
What’s truly neat is that he manages to do this on a much
larger scale, with the entire book. My favorite short story is definitely the
one with the same name as the collection, “Voodoo Heart,” which is – most
likely intentionally - right in the middle of the book. This is the story that
strongly reveals a thematic connection that all of these stories share, with a
powerful, clever ending that takes a bit of thinking to decipher. Besides the
thematic angles, there are also other, more subtle similarities to them all.
These stories generally all have something a bit weird about them, whether it
be a lead character who defends a garbage can with a harpoon, or a couple that
bought a huge mansion for cheap because it’s next to a white-collar women’s
jail.
I have a few quibbles.
One story, “Happy Fish, Plus Coin,” which is very interesting (and probably the
most beloved from this collection, actually), is about a loving friendship
rather than a romantic relationship like all of the other stories. This is fine
in a vacuum but fits in this collection a bit jarringly. Also, most of the
endings to these stories are pretty vague, which is a double-edged sword. On
one hand, it allows the reader to enjoy feverishly thinking to fill in the
gaps, but on the other hand, it can be a bit dissatisfying to have build-up to
something that isn’t conclusive. These, again, are quibbles.
Voodoo Heart
is brilliant. Snyder manages to actually hurt with beauty. He is able to make
readers think about themselves and ponder whether or not they too have voodoo
hearts, but plants novelties throughout to add some fun. Scott Snyder is able
to write about more than Batman, folks; Voodoo
Heart is a thoroughly worthwhile collection of short stories.
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