Maloney’s empathetic, laughable men bumble through life with humour, pathos

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This article was published 25/01/2025 (625 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re looking for aspirational fiction where protagonists make positive choices based upon an unwavering moral compass, you might want to pass on Horse Girl Fever.

But for readers who enjoy the darkly humorous pratfalls of hapless male protagonists who wouldn’t know a good life choice if it bit clear through their Birkenstocks, Kevin Maloney delivers a tidy package of short, autofictional ditties that is sure to please.

Author of American indie-lit classic The Cult of Loretta and 2023’s spiritual successor The Red-Headed Pilgrim, Maloney plumbs familiar depths with this collection while exploring the myriad ways in which we can fail ourselves and our loved ones — or they fail us, in turn. While Maloney’s strong narrative voice — a potent cocktail including one part slapstick humour, one part pathos and one part enduring empathy, peppered with plenty of Gen X pop culture references — owes a debt to Denis Johnson, to be sure, he hoes his own row throughout.

In Ghost, a husband discovers his wife cheating on him; he goes on a bender, at the tail end of which finding himself at a Halloween party, hiding under a stranger’s bed sheet, before stumbling off to join a parade of zombies as they walk the streets at night.

In The Informant, a drug run goes horribly awry, leaving two hapless felons with an opportunity to start things fresh — but can you ever truly leave the past behind? In King of the Pit, an 18-year-old experiences a drug-fuelled stage-front epiphany at Lollapalooza while watching Alice in Chains perform.

Although the autofictional bent to Maloney’s fiction gives the reader the impression they’re hearing these tall tales while tipping a few cold ones back at a dive bar in Portland, Ore., the often-wild struggles his characters encounter are, at heart, universal for anyone trying to live a life of meaningful work in the face of late-stage capitalism and the ongoing climate crisis.

In 1776, Independence Day is celebrated during the twilight years of the American dream. “We are the last people in this experiment,” the narrator surmises towards the end of the brief story, which first appeared in the online journal Had. “Everybody else is dead. You can tell from their eyes. They look hopeful.”

Maloney’s characters often struggle with male fragility and the unrealistic expectations patriarchy places on gender roles. Many are divorced or deadbeat dads who, try as they might, get in their own way with each passing, half-assed effort at escaping their own arrested development.

In Pergola, our protagonist struggles with a simple home improvement project as a means of projecting his own failures and the grief he feels at the loss of his father onto his handiwork — or lack thereof.

“I’m building a pergola,” he tells the reader. “A crooked one. No one will find their way in.”

Yet despite the failures, the trauma, the struggles of these characters, Maloney’s stories are imbued with a deep empathy and humour that will have readers laughing out loud while wiping at a tear or two as they read through this slim collection. Count Horse Girl Fever as more evidence that Maloney is among the most endearing, downright enjoyable voices in American indie lit writing today.

Sheldon Birnie is a Winnipeg writer and author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand, a collection of short fiction published by Malarkey Books in 2023.