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Newsletter
Rusting Chickens
reviewed by
Sometimes you can pack a lot into 97 wide-spaced pages. Sometimes that space between the lines seems to have been left there for the subtext. Gene O’Neill (Taste of Tenderloin, Shadow of the Dark Angel, The Burden of Indigo), knows subtext very well indeed.
Another subject Gene O’Neill knows is war and what it does to combatants. And their families. We tend to think of the horrors of war itself, and it is certainly horrific enough, but what’s experienced by survivors damaged physically and mentally often goes unremarked and unexplored. In this terrific, subtle indictment of war in general, O’Neill deftly switches from what happens to Rob McKenna while on duty in a doomed black ops mission deep inside Pakistan (where we aren’t supposed to be), and what happens to him after he survives it. Shot in the head, his personality affected and now raggedly controlled by pharmaceuticals and therapy, his quietly suffering wife trying to hold them together… the picture is a bleak one, and unfortunately realistic for thousands of the maimed and wounded we tend to forget. O’Neill does not let us forget – keeping us bouncing back and forth between what happened and what’s happening in the present. Rob is trying to outrun his past, but sometimes it all comes flooding back and in that instant he thinks he sees terrorists and insurgents skulking around the house… and his wife's metal shop out back. And he’s beginning to suspect something strange is going on with the metal-sculpture chickens out in the yard that keep changing position. Rob lives on an edge, and only his patient wife keeps him from teetering in either direction – and now Rob suspects she’s no longer patient.
Though concise, the novella is an exercise in subtle misdirection, and a particularly poignant one you will feel long after the pages have stopped turning. This is the horror genre acting as conscience for an apathetic people. Perhaps achieving even more effectiveness due to its concise and straightforward prose, Rusting Chickens is among O’Neill’s best work and deserves wider recognition (as it all does). This edition is limited to 125 signed copies.