mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This is a collection of three very short novels or very long short stories. (I'd call them novellas, but Porter apparently hated that word.) I don't read much literary fiction, and really none from this era, so I'm not sure how good I was at reading them and I'm afraid there may have been a lot of symbolism and allusion that I missed. The prose is on the lyrical side, sometimes bordering on stream-of-consciousness, and there were times when I had to concentrate hard not to get lost. But I did find it absorbing and thought-provoking and it was refreshing to read something in a very different style than I'm used to. The stories are all pretty harrowing and deal with heavy subject matter—it gets heavier as the collection goes on—but I never felt they were negative for the sake of it. They just deal unflinchingly with the complexity of people and their communities.

Old Mortality

A girl grows up in the shadow of her aunt who died young and whose memory is worshiped by her family. As she gets older, she learns that her aunt may not have been the saint she was made out to be. The story explores how the narrative around a dead person can come to feel more real than the reality, as well as themes of lookism and the standards by which women are judged; one who is young and beautiful may have her behavior overlooked or romanticized in ways that aren't accessible to women who don't meet those standards. The main character here seems to be the same person as the main character in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, though I actually read the stories out of order so this ended up filling in her backstory for me!

Noon Wine

A mysterious stranger arrives at a turn-of-the-century Texas farm looking for work, setting in motion a chain of events that gradually unfolds into tragedy. This was an intense, atmospheric, and suspenseful read. It gave a vivid sense of the isolation and precariousness of rural life at this time. If the farm doesn't make money, there's no safety net—and if a man comes to your property with unknown intentions, all you have to face him with is your intuition and your gun. The narrative beats of classical tragedy are employed here with merciless precision and skill. (Content note: Period-typical racism.)

( Pale Horse, Pale Rider (cn: pandemic) )