Karen Brennan Review: The Rat Story

I’m not alone in having a rat story.

The protagonist of Karen Brennan’s “The Rat Story” endured the telling and retelling of an unnamed male speaker relate an experience he had with a rat in a teriyaki restaurant.

For a one-page story, we learn little of the female protagonist (I had to go back and check if the story was in first-person point of view or third-). Given her reaction to the story (“her laughter felt automatic and insincere”), she seems beaten down by the speaker, presumably by similar actions as those as he describes doing in the rat story. While other diners fled at the sight of the rat, he demanded a refund from young restaurant employees who weren’t authorized to give one.

It’s not explicit but it seems likely that the protagonist is married or similarly attached to the speaker because he tells the rat story to dinner guests.

Brennan, like A.L. Snijders, is a writer of what Snijders calls “zkv’s” (zeer korte verhalen–“very short stories”) but her style is much different from his. It’s hard to tell from one story but, judging that her collection is titled Monsters, her writing seems darker and more oblique.

“The Rat Story” reminded me of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, not in subject matter–they are completely different–but that the three stories of The Fifth Head of Cerberus hint at a hidden fourth story that the reader must piece together.

I know this type of crypto-storytelling infuriates some readers but it’s something I enjoy.