Ranalli, Gina. 13 Thorns. Illustrated by Gus Fink. Seattle: Afterbirth Books, 2007. 240 pp. Paperback. $13.00. ISBN 1933929138.

De Profundis Clamavi

The world today is, to use a line by Charles Baudelaire, "a world completely sad, where the low sullen skies seem about to rain pure horror from above." It is the perception of this idea that gives birth to books like Gus Fink and Gina Ranalli's 13 Thorns.

The first thing that struck me about 13 Thorns is the masterful artwork by Gus Fink. Fink creates a world that is suffused with melancholy; it seems to scream from some lonely place in the psyche.  His art embodies inwardness: to read his work is to penetrate dark, mysterious layers of human consciousness. One won't find much in Fink's work that resembles anything in nature. Heads are large and disfigured. Limbs are dark, hard lines, more like rose stems than arms or legs. Fingers are sometimes thorn-like. Eyes are small circles or black beads or furious slashes of ink. Mouths are small and tight as sphincters. As distorted his creations may be, however, there is a strange and terrible beauty in them.

Now for the stories … Ranalli's world is not beautiful and idyllic. Nor is it playfully weird. It is, quite literally, a nightmare — a world of grotesque transformations, vomit-inducing stenches, flesh schlupping from dry bones, skies caked with gray and gloom, and monsters with voracious appetites and hideous, yellow teeth.  Ranalli makes it clear that she is taking you into the shadows, down a long dark tunnel with no light at the end.

This is not to say that her stories are obscure. Far from it. Ranalli's stories are vivid, so vivid I thought I was watching a movie. They are clear and linear, each story told in three acts with plot points and smooth transitions and twists and image-systems. There is confrontation and resolution. But what impressed me most are her characters. They are all alive; they have resonance and complexity. For instance, Jeff, in the story "Fat Kid," is at once fearful, lonely, brave, angry, sympathetic and pitiful. He is an emotional polyphony.

Some readers may be tempted to dismiss these stories as nothing more than sick and twisted. But Ranalli is a capable satirist who fabricates a shrewd critique of modern society. The sickness of these stories is the sickness of the world today: mothers suddenly turned predatory on their children, social outcasts rendered loveless by isolation, children driven to the dark side of their personality after years of being tortured by their peers, millions in sheep-like docility going about their unexamined lives ...

13 Thorns is the world made flesh ... or the other way around. Whatever the case, Ranalli's book is an entertaining as it is insightful and provocative.

— Jason K. Moore