I Want to Show You More

December 10, 2012
The stories in Quatro’s debut range from realist gems to macabre nightmares, exploring love, faith, and marriage in the contemporary American South. Fantasies of infidelity structure the work with interlocking tales about a wife and mother who has an unconsummated affair with a long-distance lover (“Caught Up”; “You Look Like Jesus”; “Holy Ground”; and “Relatives of God”). Disease, sex, and death are persistent muses: in the gothic fantasy “Demolition,” a rogue mystic turns a church congregation into a sex cult after the destruction of their church; two teenagers with mysterious illnesses find solace in one another in “Sinkhole”; and in “Better to Lose an Eye,” an embarrassed teenager attends a pool party with her quadriplegic mother. Here and elsewhere Quatro strives for a dreamlike atmosphere, which leads to some heavy-handed fare, like “Decomposition,” in which the corpse of a woman’s lover decomposes in her marital bedroom. In a more subdued mode, the tragic stories “Here” and “Georgia the Whole Time” follow a family as it deals with a mother’s cancer and struggles to grieve after her death. Quatro’s dark imagination unfolds in spare, minimalist prose that strives to shock with its decadent themes and frank sexuality, an outré effect that wears thin, despite fine moments of horror, humor, and genuine tenderness. Agent: Anna Stein, Aitken Alexander Associates.

December 15, 2012
A debut collection of short stories by Quatro that's more confusing than profound. A married woman tells her mother about her phone-sex relationship with another man; the same woman returns home with her husband to find her dead lover in their bed and watches as her husband lies down beside him; a grueling race is held in which each entrant must carry a metal statue with an erect penis; a woman dying of melanoma struggles to survive, and her husband wrestles with his conscience; an old woman, determined to mail a letter to the president, embarks on a final journey to the post office; the married woman winds up having phone sex and ignores her children; a young girl, embarrassed by her quadriplegic mother, is forced by her grandmother to go to a pool party; other stories center around a deaf man who becomes a cult leader and a young man who has a sinkhole. Quatro's stories range from the ridiculously strange to the seemingly normal, but there's certainly nothing ordinary about this darkly themed, graphically sexual book. The stories, set in the area surrounding Lookout Mountain, Ga., rip apart the moral, familial and religious conventions of modern society. Nothing is sacred to the author, who possesses a prolific imagination but fails to connect with the average reader. The stories are interwoven in a manner that makes it extremely challenging for the reader to link the events and the characters, and the writing is often stilted and difficult to follow, at best. Readers who appreciate avant-garde prose and odd humor may find the stories appealing, but the author's meandering style and strange content will prove too unconventional for others. Bizarre.

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October 1, 2012

This first-timer has amazing credentials--Katherine Anne Porter Prize finalist, 2011 American Short Fiction Story Contest winner, and Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2013
Prizewinning Quatro's highly anticipated and deeply intriguing first book, a subtly metamorphosing short story collection, shimmers with touches of Flannery O'Connor and George Saunders. Her bifurcated setting, Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, gives rise to inquiries into the opacity and intimacy of marriage, social hypocrisy, and the divide between what is verifiably real and what we imagine. Jocelyn, a recurring character, is struggling with the consequences of virtual adultery. Do romantic e-mails and phone sex constitute an actual affair? In one spooky story, her lover's corpse occupies her marriage bed. Quatro examines complex questions of heritage and tyranny in a stealthily devastating tale about a marathon traversing a Civil War battlefield in which runners must carry statues, many of them erotic. In another haunting tale, 89-year-old Eva, whose son was killed in Vietnam, walks along a highway to mail a letter protesting the Iraq War to President George W. Bush. Cancer, addictions, the curious dismantling of a church, and the birth of a cult also fuel compelling moral dilemmas that yoke bizarreness with authenticity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2013

There is a recurring theme of cheating wives in Quatro's debut collection of short stories, though often mere emotional unfaithfulness is enough to induce crises of faith and/or conscience in her deeply religious characters. A young mother dead or dying of cancer also makes an appearance in a few of the stories. Though most of the work here is traditional, "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement" has a dystopian/sf bent and reads like an homage to Shirley Jackson's classic "The Lottery" crossed with The Hunger Games. While interesting, this and the more experimental "Decomposition" are the weakest pieces in the collection. However, they are more than balanced by Quatro's unforgettable small family dramas, which lay her characters bare. In the exquisitely told "Tennessee," an old woman goes to mail a letter to President Bush in what turns out to be the last hours of her life. A teenage boy deals with severe anxiety, faith, and first love in "Sinkhole," a breathtaking story told entirely from his perspective. VERDICT Quatro has created a series of gorgeously crafted, deeply felt tales. These are small stories with large impact.--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.