Biddy by Caleb March

“Biddy” caught my attention this month with its confident voice, textured prose, and the way it quietly paints violence as not a shock to the reader or a glorification, but part of one character’s struggle to be the kind of person he’d like to be. It’s a nuanced take on a fairly standard narrative, and so this month I’d like to talk about writing our version of the standards, trope reply, and how we tackle writing something that’s, beat for beat, a stock story.

“Biddy” lays out a very standard horror fiction plot: Someone is tormented for being different, they take a gruesome revenge, and the protagonist must stop it or succumb to it. There are versions of this story everywhere, in slushpiles, magazines, and drawers. And it’s the very standard nature of that story which highlights one of the interesting aspects of writing short fiction. Short stories are occasionally like jazz: Everyone knows the standards, but it’s what we do with them, as writers, that shows our grasp of our craft.

And “Biddy” shows off its craft well, from the very first scene. As well as setting the stage for the theme of the incident with Bethany, the story of the chickens establishes a fantastic and instant sense of atmosphere. The conflict is established in miniature: the protagonist’s viciousness, his understanding that it’s wrong, and his resulting shame. When Bethany and her siblings come on the scene, the parallels between her and that chick are instantly visible, and the question becomes whether history will repeat itself, or whether the protagonist will manage to find his way out of the moral loop he’s caught himself in. We know what the story is by the end of Scene One. Watching how it will play out in a higher-stakes situation is the source of all the tension through the rest of the story.

That tension is complemented by the prose and voice. There’s a lot of writing advice about writing in dialect—mostly on what not to do—but “Biddy” is a great example of a regional voice done well. The protagonist’s voice is natural and coherent, and his regionalisms are baked in: the rhythm of his storytelling voice, the expressions he uses, and the choice of metaphors all ground him in his time and place.

Combined with some ominously gorgeous imagery—I especially liked the ice-capped peaks of the mountains rose in great biting stony teeth above the tree line—the prose style serves to render someone who’s very much part of his landscape and family, very observant, very smart, and unashamed of any of those parts of him. Our narrator in “Biddy” is a three-dimensional character, complicated, regretful, thoughtful, deftly funny (“nothing under his hat but hair and a perpetual grudge” is great), and tangled in his own delicate social dynamics. What’s more, he’s layered by the fact that the story’s told from a later point in time. There’s an implicit character arc in the contrast between the protagonist’s actions at the time, and the shame his later perspective coats those actions with, making him even more nuanced. More than anything else, the way all these effects combine into a character that’s thoroughly real makes “Biddy” work.

That said, I suspect “Biddy” might still not be the easiest to place. It’s occupying an interesting space: a plot that’s perhaps too traditional for boundary-pushing markets, and a reply to the tropes of horror fiction might prove a little too much for the most traditional horror markets.

What, specifically, “Biddy” has to say for itself—what it has to say about the trope of the teenage girl turning monstrous and taking revenge, and the handling of guilt that horror concerns itself with—is extremely subtle. While I hesitate to say it, because “Biddy” is very much a complete story in and of itself, and I’m not sure if tinkering with it at this point is the right decision, it might be too subtle for the editors who would appreciate what it’s quietly saying about the response to having done wrong.

There is so much to be said for the fact that the protagonist forgoes his dreams and gets stuck, just like every single one of the boys who tormented Biddy; just like Biddy herself, and her siblings. His college education doesn’t get him where he’s going, because of where he’s from and how he speaks and the money he doesn’t have. He ends up scarred and back on the ranch for life. And yet it’s what he does with that disappointment that’s so fascinating to me: In a school full of mean boys and a town full of drunk and gossiping adults, our narrator never gets mean. Instead he considers the rifle, and sets it aside. He takes responsibility. He grows up.

It’s a powerful take on how to handle the question of guilt and violence that horror discusses. It’s a thing worth saying. And while I’m suggesting it with reservations, because again—the fabric of “Biddy” is so well woven that I’m not sure it’s worth disrupting—it may be worthwhile to experiment with bringing that idea just a heartbeat more forward, making its clues just a touch stronger and easier to catch. In the question of how to get around the reflex of oh, same old story, I’m pretty sure this is the answer, but done delicately, with tweezers.

So: I do apologize for how inconclusive this critique has ended up. It’s hard to speak helpfully on a story that’s well done, but that I suspect, just by virtue that it’s been done, is going to be hard to place. If the right editor doesn’t connect with this piece, after a dozen or twenty markets tried, I’d rewrite with an eye to what makes “Biddy” new: what advances the conversation this trope is having, what it has to say, what it’s putting forward.

Best of luck!

–Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (2015)