Rattlesnake Daddy: A Son's Search for His Father
Copyright © 2011
by Brent Spencer
The Backwaters Press
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When the salvage crew finally arrived, they found the dead man and a half-sunken sailboat overflowing with receipts, journal pages, letters, lists, school notes, decrees, certificates —
a lifetime’s accumulation of paper. Later, the woman’s body would be found, a fiancée no one in the family had known about. Brent Spencer’s father died as mysteriously as he had lived. Armed
only with the soggy scraps of his father’s life, Spencer began a two-thousand-mile search for the man he never really knew. Rattlesnake Daddy is the account of that journey —
a powerful, heartfelt, and often funny meditation on the bonds that unite and the boundaries that divide all fathers and sons. — from the publisher
Powerful and moving. Spencer writes like a bruised angel. — Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World and
Writing the Sacred Into the Real
Brent Spencer’s Rattlesnake Daddy paints a wonderfully vivid portrait of a chaotic, colorful, venomous man who was the author’s absent father.
— Dinty Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire and The Accidental Buddhist
"A father is the mystery his son never solves,” Spencer writes. But in this haunted and haunting memoir/detective story, he comes as close as he can without actually crawling into his father’s
rattlesnake skin. — Robin Hemley, author of Do-Over! and Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness
Rattlesnake Daddy is unforgettable for its clear-sighted contemplation of the sins of the father, and in their wake, the complicated yearnings of the son.
— Lee Martin, author of From Our House and The Bright Forever
Rattlesnake Daddy is amazing. Alternately horrifying, funny, analytical, and heart-wrenching, it skillfully and affectingly tells a father-son story like none I've ever encountered:
of a cruel and menacing psychopath who managed to seem not just sane but admirable, and of a son who overcame endless varieties of torture to write this stunning memoir of good riddance.
Out of what Brent Spencer calls his father's "catalogue of mysteries," he has crafted a literary form of exorcism that is nothing less than a masterpiece.
— Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Exiles
A brilliant, sometimes funny, travel memoir. Spencer is precise, insightful, and incisive. — Kirk Zebolsky,
Examiner.com
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Are We Not Men ?
Copyright © 1996
by Brent Spencer
Arcade Publishing
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"The defining moment of your life isn't even from your life.
It's from the movies. But then, your
whole life has never been more than a string of B-movie
moments, so what's the difference?"
So begins Brent Spencer's Are We Not Men?,
which Carol Muske Dukes calls "one of
the most hilarious, bittersweet, and brilliant collections of
stories to come up the fiction pike in
years."
The B movie in the title story is the 1932 classic Island
of Lost Souls. Charles Laughton
plays a sadistic scientist whose experiments in the House of
Pain have turned a tropical island's
wild animals into a tribe of beast-men. Laughton tries to
strengthen his piteous creations'
tenuous grip on humanity by leading them in pep rallies.
Their eyes frantic with a hunger for
conviction and approbation, the beast-men repeat the refrain,
"ARE WE NOT MEN? ARE WE
NOT MEN?" You don't know if you should laugh or cry.
Spencer's stories make you do both. In a review of his
first novel, The Lost Son, Kirkus
declared Spencer "achieves what most debut writers merely
attempt: He gives personal
experience universal meaning and makes small-town tragedy
profound." Whether the setting is a
failing farm, a prison yard, a leaky apartment complex, or an
overflowing canal in Venice, these
thirteen stories offer the full range of Spencer's gifts, establishing
him as a master of the form
and one of our finest comic writers. No one else could make a B
movie not only profound, but
profoundly, achingly funny.
All of Spencer's characters painstakingly construct their own
Houses of Pain. Yearning
for conviction and approbation, seeking the defining moments of
their lives, they are "victims
and perpetrators of a patriarchy in flux," as Marly Swick describes
them. A few stories echo The
Lost Son in their devastating yet redemptive
depiction of blue-collar
angst; others are exotic,
urban, even urbane. What they share is Spencer's ability to
make us care passionately about
men and women fumbling with their self-delusions and
self-discoveries, lost souls learning to do
the best they can with the beast within." — from the jacket
Enter at your own risk — Spencer is addictive reading.
This collection creates 13 distinct portraits of quintessential
America. ...
One after another, Spencer's characters negotiate tortuous and comic twists
of fate. "At last you love your life," Spencer writes at the end of his
first story. His talent is that you also learn to love their lives.
— Stanford Magazine
Fictionist Brent Spencer's second book, a collection of short stories
titled Are We Not Men?, begins with an epigraph from
The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells: "What could it mean? A locked
enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled
and disoriented men?"
Spencer himself is an extraordinary vivisectionist, dissecting the damage
of lives gone astray. ... The stories are filled with loss, but there is a
Raymond Carveresque sharpness to them, and they are not without
redemption. Across the landscxapoes of Pennsylvania mining towns, Spencer
reminds us of the pathos of personal destruction. — The Penn
Stater
Brent Spencer writes with heart-breaking
compassion and jolly good humor about life at the
tail-end of our trashed-out century. He's what you'd
get if you crossed Russell Banks with Groucho
Marx — tender, intense, and terrifically funny. — Paul Ingram,
Prairie Lights Bookstore
Reading Brent Spencer's rich and impressive
collection, the reader wonders how one writer in
one body could possibly inhabit so many distinct
fictional worlds. Few contemporary short story
writers can write with such convincing accuracy and
depth of feeling about
both rural and urban, blue collar and white collar
America. These are beautifully realized, painfully
funny stories. My heart goes out to this beleaguered,
bedeviled motley crew of perpetrators and victims of a
patriarchy in flux.
These are real men, trying to figure out what real men
are. — Marly Swick, author of The Summer Before the
Summer of Love and Paper Wings
In the film Island of Lost Souls, Charles Laughton
leads Bela Lugosi and the
Beast Men in an impromptu pep rally, whose fierce
interrogatory refrain is:
Are We Not Men? And Brent Spencer (not Robert
Bly) answers this question
once and for all in one of the most hilarious, bittersweet,
and brilliant collections of stories to come up the fiction
pike in years. Read it! Embrace it!
Are you not readers of whatever gender who wish mightily
to be amazed
by extraordinary literary talent? — Carol Muske Dukes, author of
Dear Digby and Saving St. Germ
"Are we not men?" chant the B-movie
creatures who emerge from the mad
surgeon's experiments in Island of
Lost Souls. To one of Brent Spencer's
characters, seeing that classic 1932 film
is "the defining moment" of his life. But
the half-menacing, half-pathetic query
of the beast-men echoes through many
of Mr. Spencer's other stories. "I am a
man of mild manner," says a group-therapy
client whose wife has left him.
"But lately I've been a little unwell, a
little punk, a little — you know — crazy.
Not Patsy Cline crazy. Not thrill-kill
crazy. Just crazy crazy." In
"Babyman," a convict is transformed by the
news that his girlfriend is pregnant. He
becomes his cell block's expert on
infant care. Even when he finds out that
the baby doesn't exist, that the girl-
friend has lied to get money from him
— even when the beast within him
resurfaces in a violent rage — he can't
quite abandon his relationship to his
imaginary child. Mr. Spencer makes
this sort of edgy comedy work in a
variety of settings,
with both simple and sophisticated characters. And he also
makes it clear that despair isn't the
only note that can be sounded in these
stories of people stitched together by
the mad surgery of modern life. — Michael Harris,
New York Times Book Review
From its jacket, adorned with taxidermied horns and two shotguns, to its
all-male cast of narrators, this collection might seem a celebration of
manhood, but most of Spencer's men are too self-aware, too funny, too
smitten with love or devastated by its loss to cut out for
the wilderness and spend time with the guys. ... Spencer's wit and swift
prose cut through the pathos of even his most tragic stories. ... Brent
Spencer has crafted this startling collection of
epiphanies lost and found from the recycled material of
middle-American men, which makes his narrators'
shifts in voice from humdrum to revelation all the more alchemical.
Not that his cast of characters is ordinary to begin with:
one narrator defines his life according to a scene from a '30's
B-movie, Island of Lost Souls; another, a convict, starts
a newsletter on child rearing and subscribes to Mothers'
World;
in a waiting room, an insurance salesman watches dark clouds
through the window while a woman dozes and he wonders,
"How can she do that? It's the most frightening thing I've
ever seen. The woman asleep and the weather coming, coming."
What links these men is monotony and the chance to disrupt it.
Spencer effortlessly shifts from the pensive to the hilarious,
and the missing link between his characters' blindness and insight
makes these well-honed tales ample spaces of possibility. The
book's title begs the question, but the stories revel in the
absence of an answer. — Village Voice
Reverberating with echoes of Raymond Carver, the 13 stories in
Spencer's (The Lost Son) first collection chronicle, with
rueful wit and a gritty photo-realism, the anger and loneliness of a
mostly blue-collar cast of Midwestern men. These tales of
degeneration, decay and emasculation are played out in hospitals,
prisons, dive bars and seedy apartments, whose inhabitants, trapped in
failing or failed relationships, drink to escape or just to avoid intimacy.
The dolefully funny, eponymous, lead story, told in second-person
vignettes that resemble cinematic dissolves, describes a man who takes
refuge in movies (identifying in particular with the beast-men of the 1932
H.G. Wells adaptation, Island of Lost Souls), while his marriage
hits the skids. "I flunked Prozac," laments Ned the dyspeptic narrator of
"This is the Last of the Nice," who reluctantly enters a men's support group
after his wife runs off, but storms out in a fit of anger and self-pity.
Anger
and frustration in these stories are often diverted and re-expressed in
ugly
ways,
as in "Haven't You Ever Seen Cary Grant?" where a college professor
exacts a nasty revenge on a recently widowed neighbor who accuses him of
stealing car parts. Especially poignant are stories about children who fail
to
bring parents together, and whose lives are destroyed in the process, as in
"The Small Things that Save Us," about a struggling one-armed farmer named
Easy, and "All I Ever Wanted," in which the narrator's estranged girlfriend
sells her baby to Gypsies. The writing sometimes grows flat and sentimental,
but the whole collection possesses a harsh and wrenching agnosticism.
"Despair I can handle," says a divorced philosophy professor of a weekend
binge with her out-of-town boyfriend in one story. "It's hope that
kills." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A powerful and varied debut collection, sharing a theme of loss
and alienation, from the author of the highly
praised novel The Lost Son (1995).
These 13 stories, some of which have appeared in The Atlantic, GQ,
and the Antioch Review, could have been titled "When Bad Things
Happen to Good People." Well-meaning people down on their luck press on,
but keep getting hammered by fate.
Spencer's heroes, like the man in the title
story whose wife has just left him, are the shy types who, as children,
"were
always good at hide-and-seek. Too
good." In many of these places, wives leaves
their husbands. And in two, "Encantado" and "All Along the Watchtower,"
Spencer's men watch desperately as their wives lose their minds and are
institutionalized. In the grimmest selection, "The Small Things That Save
Us,"
a crippled hard-luck farmer must watch as his cattle slowly freeze to death.
Luckily, Spencer has a deft touch, and his stories never slide into the
maudlin;
he catches the perseverance exhibited by ordinary people battered
by life, trying
to make yet another go at love, marriage, children, or a job. In "This is
the Last
of the Nice," the hero's wife leaves, ostensibly to go rafting, then sends
her
husband a postcard saying that she's not coming back. Driven by that blow
into group therapy, he looks around and reflects that "It's
Junior High. We're
backed up against the gym wall, knowing we'll never get invited to dance."
These lucid, wry moments are sprinkled throughout Spencer's work. When he
indulges in comedy, as in "The Hazards
of Poetry," in which an aspiring romantic
poet moves to Venice only
to find fetid canals and noisome tourists, Spencer can
be devastatingly funny. There are no easy answers here, and no quick fixes.
An engrossing collection filled with vulnerable, decent human beings,
by a talented observer of decent, taciturn people leading lives of quiet
desperation. — Kirkus Reviews
Fictionist Brent Spencer's second book, a collection of short stories
entitled Are We Not Men? begins with an epigraph from
The Island of Dr.
Moreau by H. G. Wells: "What could it mean? A locked enclosure on a
lonely
island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and disoriented men?"
Spencer himself is an extraordinary vivisectionist, dissecting the
damage of lives
gone astray. ... The stories are filled with loss, but there is a Raymond
Carveresque sharpness to them, and they are not without redemption. Across
the landscapes of Pennsylvania mining towns, Spencer reminds us of the
pathos of personal destruction. Even for the farmer whose life was falling
apart, the small things would save him: "Days of sun and sweet breezes.
Late afternoons full of birds streaming into trees. And other shadows on
other nights, as deer climb down from the high ground to the stream in
moonlight." — The Penn Stater
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The Lost Son
Copyright © 1996
by Brent Spencer
Arcade Publishing
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Powerful gusts from family fission sweep us
into The Lost Son. Having decided men's
problems are too far gone for help, Ellen has
left Redmond, her lover of twelve years, and
Nick, her sixteen-year-old son, and struck
out on her own. Redmond was a wide spot
in the road, Ellen repeats to herself, nothing
more. Leaving him was as clean a getaway as
a getaway gets. On the other hand, what she
should say to her son is beyond her, so when
she calls up and Nick answers, silence does the
talking.
Blaming each other and stranded together,
Redmond and Nick struggle along without
Ellen — mostly on microwaved burritos and
avoidance maneuvers. The dishes in the sink
pile up, tensions run high. Appearances shatter
when Nick accidentally jolts Redmond by
switching on the electric fence at the wrong
moment and Redmond responds by nailing
shut the chicken coop with Nick inside.
Peace is not at hand: Redmond is too haunted
by a nightmarish childhood, and Nick too
pistol-whipped by adolescent rage. Most of
all, they are too much alike — lost sons both.
Pushing his characters to the wild edge
of themselves, Brent Spencer allows their
voices to tell an unsettling and unforgettable
story. Ellen, Redmond, and Nick are the
exploded American nuclear family, crucifying
one another for all the things life didn't
deliver, blaming each other for every
wound — including the self-inflicted ones — and
hopelessly tangled up. The terrain
Spencer explores will remind readers of the
finest works of Sam Shepard and Raymond
Carver. His novel also draws deep from the
well of comic relief, particularly in the character
of Jack "Titty" Teague, a scheming
developer and middle-aged dreamer in an
unending battle against the local zoning
board, chaired with efficiency and zeal by his
ex-wife. And when Nick gets his revenge on
a sadistic football coach, the heart soars with
the glory and hilarity of a bit of "ugly fun."
The Lost Son trucks with competing
forces, mixed motives, the poignantly ridiculous
extremes we go to in pursuit of intimacy
and then in recoiling from it. Yet the
characters' wildest selves only strengthen our
connection to their struggle between the
backward pull of a dark past and the driving
force of redeeming love. Spencer has the
reader looking in the roadside dives and rural
trailer parks where the American dream settled
down to get liquored up, and finding what
belongs to us all. — from the jacket
Brent Spencer's first novel, The Lost Son, is a taut exploration of
dysfunctional relationships and dreams gone sour. Nothing on Lloyd
Redmond's Pennsylvania farm works: the chicken coop is a pile of rotten
wood, the electrical fence has a short, and Redmond's lover, Ellen, a
self-loathing drunk, has run off, leaving behind her 16-year-old son, Nick.
Despondent and angry, Redmond is haunted by memories of his
miserable childhood. Nick has taken to sleeping in the chicken coop. And
Ellen is heading cross-country, ruminating on all the bad decisions that
have brought her to this point. The story, seen largely through the eyes of
these three characters, veers from shimmering scenes of parental cruelty
to bland depictions of rural life. Despite a sometimes flat tone, The
Lost
Son conjures up a powerful vision of
alienation and lost love. — Maggie Garb, New York Times Book
Review
With fearlessness, precision, and gallows humor, Brent
Spencer exposes the generational torments, humiliations, and
false pieties that have too often ruptured family life. These
bonds of blood are just that in this fine first novel: imprisoning,
painful, and murderous. The Lost Son is a haunting,
poignant, stunning American Gothic. — Ron Hansen
The Lost Son is a beautiful book — about destructive love,
unnecessary losses, and how to save yourself. Brent Spencer's
voice is sweet, manly, terrifying. — Lynne McFall, author of
Dancer with Bruised Knees
The Lost Son is hard, unflinching, bleak yet luminous.
Through it runs Spencer's deep compassion — call it love —
for his characters, whose wandering, stranded lives move
from the edges to the center of our hearts. — William
Loizeaux, author of Anna: A Daughter's Lfe
Brent Spencer explores the nature of men who love, men
who destroy, and men who can't tell the difference. Funny
and horrifying, generous and compassionate, The Lost Son
takes us on a visit to the dark places of the human heart. — John
L'Heureux,
author of The Handmaid of Desire
Brent Spencer's first novel, The Lost Son, is a story
of displacement, disillusionment, and dysfunction, with enough
fighting and drinking and loving to fill a double album of greatest
country hits. There's that certain belief it's in our nature to beat
ourselves up for love, and Spencer explores it thoroughly,
with enough dry humor to let us emphathize with his characters'
noble and pathetic attempts to connect with one another
without completely falling prey to despair. ... What Brent
Spencer does well is tell the stories of these poor creatures
in The Lost Son with such tenderness for their
weaknesses that he leads us grudgingly to accept both
his characters and their troubles as our own. — Kate Flaherty,
Prairie Schooner
Spencer achieves what most debut writers merely attempt:
He gives personal experience universal meaning and makes
small-town tragedy profound. ... Tender, skillful, and
true. — Kirkus Reviews (pointer review)
If Brent Spencer's taut and skillful first novel were a
self-help book, its title might be "Men Whose Fathers
Didn't Love Them (and Whose Women Unwisely Did)."
Fortunately, this is fiction instead. And although Spencer
cuts his slice of life fairly narrowly — tracing the effects of
child abuse through three generations of a Pennsylvania
family — his ear for dialogue, his feel for the region, his
spare but exact prose and his rich characterizations make it
much more than a case history. ... As self-help books seldom
can, Spencer makes us care. — Los Angeles Times
Impressive. — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography
