The Miniature Wife: And Other Stories

"Manuel Gonzales is a Texan writer who lived in Austin for many years. He’s a very literary writer, but he mines fantasy and science fiction tropes for their narrative value. There are a number of different kinds of stories collected in The Miniature Wife. The title story is about a man who in the course of his scientific experiments accidentally shrinks his wife. You have seen that in movies, or the converse where she’s a fifty-foot woman. He takes this science fiction trope and turns it into a relation story about what happens when relationships go bad. That’s essentially what he’s doing with all of these stories. He’s taking seriously what we might think of as conflicts that you might deal with in a literary short story. There are two zombie stories in the collection that I think are worth noting. One is told from the perspective of the zombie. We rarely get that perspective because, traditionally at least, the zombie is an unthinking non-sentient being whose only impulses are to feed. But there are some characters, for example in the Marvel Zombies , where they have sentience but they are also affected by this powerful overwhelming hunger. That’s what Manuel Gonzales does in this story told from a zombie’s point of view. “We rarely get the zombie perspective because, traditionally at least, the zombie is an unthinking non-sentient being whose only impulses are to feed” In some sense, it’s a sort of workplace romance: he’s in love with the woman in his office and he’s a zombie. He wants to love her and yet he is constantly fighting these impulses to eat people’s faces. It’s funny, charming, and heart-breaking. Perhaps the most important story in this collection is ‘Escape From the Mall’. It takes us back to the Dawn of the Dead story and the remake, both of which are set in shopping malls. The narrator in this story is just an ordinary guy who is caught up in the zombie apocalypse. He and a couple of other people have escaped into a janitor’s closet. The zombies are outside pounding to get in. He is talking with this guy who is the leader of the group and the guy has told him that he thinks that one of them is a zombie. So, you’ve got the enemy outside and the enemy inside. At the end of ‘Escape From the Mall’, the main character has a long monologue where he says that he thinks that we need the end of the world because without it we can’t know who we are and how we are supposed to be. It’s similar to Tolkein’s idea of the eucatastrophe where the world has changed but people who have survived have changed along with this disaster. Now, perhaps, we can be the people that we are supposed to be in whatever this new world looks like. Yes. It’s one of the things that lets me watch Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead even knowing that there are going to be casualties along the way. This is not precisely how Tolkien means it because in ‘On Fairy Stories’ he’s thinking largely about cosmic change: the new heaven and the new earth, in terms of the Christian understanding of what the apocalypse brings. But the simple fact of being presented with these incredible challenges allows characters to grow and change and become something that they could not have been when they were sunk in their zombie-like lives. One obvious example is Shaun in Shaun of the Dead . It’s made clear early on that there is very little difference between Shaun’s circle of friends and the zombies who are going to show up later. Shaun’s girlfriend says that they’re not really living but do the same thing over and over again and they are stuck in their lives. In that story, because of the apocalypse, Shaun becomes the friend, the son, the boyfriend and the human being that he’s supposed to be. There are a couple of things that he’s chalked on his note-board in the kitchen and one of them is ‘sort life out’. So, Shaun of the dead stops being Shaun of the dead and becomes Shaun of the living. That’s true of many characters who live through the zombie apocalypse. When we’re first introduced to Daryl in The Walking Dead , he’s violent and brutish and a loner. But during the course of the story, because of these challenges that he’s faced with, he becomes a friend, brother, leader, and a compassionate person. Cultural critics talk about the idea of a reboot. Robert Kirkman says of The Walking Dead that in a world where the dead walk, we have to learn to live. We can think in terms of a cosmic reboot as well. It’s not enough for us just to be sunk in our unthinking mindlessness and it’s not enough for us to consume. We’ve got to become truly human. The great Christian thinker Irenaeus talks about the glory of God as a human being fully alive. You don’t have to be a religious person to understand that that’s our calling. And that’s what happens in these zombie stories when we don’t all die."