Barrelhouse Reviews: Horse Show by Jess Bowers
Reviewed by Emily Webber
Santa Fe Writers Project / April 2024 / 180 pp
Editor’s note: Barrelhouse and SFWP have a longstanding friendship. This review was unsolicited and every attempt has been made to edit it without bias.
How many horses are too many horses? I thought Horse Show might test my limits, since each of the thirteen stories centers on the animal (along with a couple of mules). Suddenly, I'm thinking about horses more than I ever have. I’m captivated by each of these American stories, ranging from the late 1800s to the 1960s, which include a psychic horse, sideshow horses, horses in movies and shows, and working horses. In many stories, Jess Bowers often plucks an actual incident involving a horse from history and re-imagines the surrounding people, resulting in lively and innovative storytelling. Along with these lesser-known horse stories, she includes artifacts and photographs that sent me searching the internet for details on the real story. For many, there isn't much information readily available except confirmation that the horse did exist. It turns out Bowers's horse stories also entail examining grief, our complicated relationships with each other and with animals, and humanity's insatiable need for dominance. No matter how much technological progress occurs, it seems like the darkest parts of the human heart remain.
The collection opens with "The Mammoth Horse Awaits" in the 1800s, when traveling shows, often featuring animals, were popular in America. Mr. Carter's show has what he claims to be the world's largest horse. Displayed to the crowd, they describe him as "gentle as a lamb," but it isn't enough for people to look on in appreciation; instead, the horse is forced to pull an enormous weight. The crowd is in a frenzy of amazement until things turn bad:
In the next [moment], the mammoth horse sank, straining, to its knees. [...] Then came the eerie creak of failing wood, and it was as though the floor grew a great wooden maw and swallowed the mammoth horse down into itself, pig-eyed and thrashing. His enormous hooves plunged for purchase against the splintering planks, his mouth a pink tangle of tongue and teeth.
Similarly, a horse in "One Trick Pony" is forced to run off a cliff to his death so the director can film his ultimate scene in the making of the 1939 movie Jesse James. In "Stock Footage," famed cowgirl Lucille Mulhall treats her horses with cold indifference.
Horses working outside the entertainment industry don't fare well at the hands of humans either. Disaster awaits a working mule who kicks a general in the military. The general's plan in "Shooting a Mule" involves decapitating the old animal with dynamite and using newly developed "instantaneous photography" to capture it still standing but without its head. But Bowers provides a small bit of humanity as the narrator visits the mule the night before to give him a kind of benediction.
The mule I found alone, sequestered in a round pen beside the main barn, his great bullish head butting up against an empty feed drum, his huge brown eyes limpid, innocent of the drama that now surrounded him. He greedily lipped the handfuls of grass that I pushed through the fence and allowed me to groom the long black funnels of his ears, stretching his neck out so I could scratch them.
Another horse, in "The Lost Hoof of Fire Horse #12," is carrying men and equipment to fight a fire when its hoof gets stuck and then severed. The horse is immortalized for all the wrong reasons, the hoof spending part of its existence as a paperweight and a prop for a story. Even as the Fire Chief prepares to ditch the horses for fire engines, he loves to declare that a loyal horse will save your life in a way the steam-powered fire engine won't, telling people how the long-gone horse powered through its horrific injury to save lives. People are more reluctant to acknowledge that the horse couldn't stop running, even with a severed foot, because it was yoked to another huge horse powering forward. Then, having shown the cruelty, Bowers shows the kindness:
Jack Knox's own tender podiatry remains evident today, as the lost hoof of fire horse #12 sports the smooth groove of a phonograph record, strong rings of horn accreted monthly. Read like a palm, the hoof's surface indicates that up until that last awful second, the horse attached to it was well fed and cared for, maybe even a little bit loved.
"Two on a Horse" revisits how the steeplechase ride at Coney Island sometimes forced women into proximity with men while riding two to a horse: "The brown horse's springs shudder as he swings up behind her, his sweaty heft pressed close against her back. Dot can smell the gum in his mouth, sour mint, and dentistry. She thinks she should've worn the blue skirt. It would've covered her legs more." In the final section, the narration shifts to Pupetta, working at her father's pizzeria, her mother and brother dead. Her uncle has begun sexually abusing her. Yet the steeplechase ride offers her an escape; riding alone gives her a moment of pure joy and freedom. It isn't enough—she still must go back to her life—but the story offers hope that one day she will manage to get away.
Bowers weaves these small kernels of goodness into her stories in a way that isn't silly or sentimental, just optimistic. Even in one of the most whimsical stories in this collection, a funny take on the sitcom Mr. Ed from the point of view of Wilbur’s mostly unseen wife, Carol, Bowers offers Carol a chance to claim the wild and free life she imagined before being trapped by a man obsessed with his talking horse.
Each story in Horse Show is fascinating and slightly odd, as if Bowers is pulling back a curtain on a corner of horse history and opening its heart, both ugly and beautiful, to readers. Even when the stories display the worst of humanity's cruelty and indifference, Bowers finds our soul, and our interconnectedness with the history of the horse, for us.
Emily Webber has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer magazine, Five Points, Split Lip Magazine, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated, from Paper Nautilus Press. You can read more at emilyannwebber.com and @emilyannwebber.