Bonding
in a nutshell: A collection of barbarically human stories from a creative mind that grew up with access to the darker parts of the worldwide web when they were arguably far too young for that sort of thing, but it all more or less worked out fine.
main themes: Purposeful violence, emotionally stunted vengeance, a lonely childhood, still trying your damnedest, self-detonation, guts, small corpses, mundane destruction, and refusing to bend to the whims of the monstrosities in the backyard.
the vibes: Your child keeps talking to someone who isn't there but all children do that sometimes, right?; your skin has been shedding those weird flakes on and off but every time you think to show a doctor your skin clears up so it's probably nothing, right?; just cause you know you could get away with-- you're pretty damn sure you could get away with-- killing that one fucking neighbor, doesn't mean you're going to, right?
the writing: 3 pages into the first story I thought "Is this author trans?" And yes she is. Not that it colors all the stories, but it has a certain "fucked up"ed-ness that seems to be the delightful purview of my trans sisters. I wouldn't deign to try and definitively put it into words, but perhaps it's... like a vibe of defiantly, bitchily outlasting that which is hunting you (which is a theme of a handful of her stories here, now that I think about it.) Anyway, whether or not that fact is important is debatable, because what really matters is Siebert's ability to craft very strange, intimate horrors in small spaces. These stories are gross, bewildering, horrific, funny, and stubbornly human.
If still possible, you should know nothing about this book going in, as I did. Almost every story had me gleefully mouthing "what the FUCK?" as I tore through this demented collection. Grisly chainsaw murders, ritualistic backyard death brawls, kids poking at kid corpses, parents' willful ignorance of the depths of their child's strangeness coming back to bite them in the ass-- it's all here, folks! Though covering a wide swath, there is a binding thread throughout the collection, but everytime I thought I'd named it, it seemed to mutate in my mind until I convinced myself it was something else.
There are several stories whose traumas hinge on the strangeness of parent/child relationships. The protagonists, when children, are either just starting or very near puberty. There are no love tales here, but solitary individuals either left in the desolate waste of heartbreak's aftermath, or diminished by a long, slow retraction from social life. Change, liminality, the inability to truly know another person, the futility of moving on- these seem to haunt Siebert, and she knows they haunt us, too. She presents these fears of ours back to us, in some very interesting, bloody, and bizarre skins.
While I may not be erudite (try barely literate) thankfully there are far more intelligent people who have considered Siebert's magic, and why her works strike such a sharp internal note about being unbearably human in an unbearably shitty world. Philosopher Charlene Elsby wrote a fantastic piece on Bonding which deserves a look:
"Maggie Siebert's magic lies in her placing before you things that you had relegated to the underbelly of consciousness, things to which we tend to have a dual reaction - I know that's obviously true, and I wish to fuck it weren't.
In this case, it's the genesis of a universal from the repetition of particulars.
Like when someone declares out of nowhere, "Oh, this is a bad day." That utterance occurs only when someone has noticed that several things so far have gone awry. That what those events all have in common is that they're bad. And then instead of reacting to each of them, we intuit what those things have in common- that they are bad- and package them together, send them away into the abstract. And doing this brings a sense of relief. "It's a bad day" is now our explanation for why things continue to go wrong, for why upsetting things are still happening, a way of removing ourselves from the present, when the present is deemed to be objectively terrible. It's a generalization according to which we take our observations of the past and present and project them into the future, a fortification against the ongoing onslaught of bad shit happening- a denial of the present in favor of an abstraction.
An abstract generalization to save us from the particulars."
BONUS:
I highly recommend this interview with Siebert, she drops some good thoughts.