Gabriel Carle : Bad Seed

Bad Seed: Stories
Gabriel Carle
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Houde
The Feminist Press

Pre-recovery, pre-therapy, the young, queer characters in Bad Seed, Gabriel Carle’s first collection published in English, have not yet sorted out their passions. Their lives are messy; their stories can’t be neat. The geographic center of these eight stories is the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, specifically the theater steps, where Carle’s narrators and their friends— “the Bad Decision Club”—meet between classes. A relatable crew, they are humanities students who study romance languages and literary theory. Some got kicked out of the house, some can’t make tuition, some do bong hits or molly then work it out on the dancefloor. Despite constant oversharing in the group chat, these young gay, trans, and nonbinary people suffer their problems alone. “I have no one to vent to,” says the narrator of “The Blunts That Bond Us.” “I’m not one to talk about my internal turmoil.”
     While the characters go quiet with each other, Carle’s prose stays loud, and we hear it all—desperation, nihilism, anguish, obsession—in language that swells to excess. Magical weed in “Casablanca Kush” smells “super-extra fruity, a mix of strawberry-orange-lemon-mango.” The narrator of “In the Bathhouse” imagines being “burnt at the stake and vomiting demons in a nameless, timeless forest and watching a tribe push a giant fireball out of the mouth of an erupting volcano.” Carle’s hyperbolic style conveys the bloat of overconsumption that their characters experience—of TV, games, social media, porn, drugs—but the piling on of words can be tedious.
     There’s excess in the storytelling, too. “Casablanca Kush,” starts as postcolonial magical realism, but devolves into Marvel-like fanfiction. In “Devilwork,” a metafiction, two sketched tales spiral into farcical porn—goats, college professors, ring lights—before we get to the third tale, the one that must be told, the one we want to read.
     Though each story in Bad Seed has a throughline that matters, this is too often buried by excess. In a sophomore collection, Carle might better amplify the voices of their characters by striving for precision: by giving us less, they might give us more.

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