Barrelhouse Reviews: Particularly Dangerous Situation, by Patti White

Review by Emily Webber

Arc Pair Press / January, 2020 / 148 pp

Patti White’s experimental novella, Particularly Dangerous Situation, creates a disturbing and harrowing atmosphere, both literal and figurative. White’s novel, told in a rotating chorus of voices, captures the bizarre and haunting feeling of a destructive weather event and how quickly natural disasters can take away our carefully constructed lives. I’ve lived in South Florida all my life, where every year, from June to November, the threat of monster hurricanes looms. When one is about to hit, there’s the frenzy of preparation that borders on outlandishness, the hunkering down while consuming the 24/7 news cycle, and the feeling of isolation during and after a storm hits. What White captures best is the illusion of safety and how that crumbles in the aftermath of a disaster, leaving one with growing fear, disorientation, and the sense of being cut off from the world.

Each of the nine short sections offers glimpses into the moment massive storms with tornadoes hit Alabama, and then move into the aftermath. Mississippi has been totally eradicated, and in Alabama, everyone is cut off from news, and infrastructure is broken. Told in short vignettes the novella cycles through eight different characters, including a woman strapped to a dentist’s chair, a violent real estate agent, a distressed weatherman, and an Army Colonel tasked with maintaining order and delivering aid. Periods of quiet, while the characters wander around and try to piece together what happened, are punctuated with storm activity. There’s a fierceness to the observations and visceral details, and there’s an underlying surrealism:

Then a call came in about the mannequins. Someone had stacked a bunch of mannequins in the parking lot at the mall, and someone else claimed to have seen one move. Said it got up and walked away. When a patrol car got there, there were no mannequins, nobody in the parking lot, just SUVs with broken windows. Then more calls. Invisible people with invisible blood. Shiny things coming out of the bushes. Something flapping in the wind.

The book begins and ends with the voice of the weatherman. Each of the book’s nine parts starts with him issuing warnings that are both serious and wacky, which sets the tone admirably:

When I tell you it is a Particularly Dangerous Situation, that means you should prepare for a disaster in your town today. That the dew point is high, the atmosphere soupy, the rotation factors off the charts. That soon the sky will lower and swarm and spin and you will be unable to stand in the face of it. Buildings will disappear. Water will be contaminated. The social order will collapse. So when I say hunker down, you must go to your safe place and pull a big thick blanket over your head.

The language the weatherman uses is graphic at times, no holding back about the seriousness of the situation, but it is also melodic, with a rhythm that sweeps the reader along. Weirdness eventually surfaces in all the voices and brings forth the incomprehensibility of living through natural disasters.

Making this situation more haunting is the total isolation of each of these characters as they wander through endless days of confusion, destruction, and loss. The characters have no direct interaction with each other, despite being in what seems like a small town. At times, they seem like the walking dead:

I heard the sirens again as I neared the shelter and el gato muerto put its claws in my neck and I felt it but did not feel it because the claws were dead but it hissed at the soldiers at the door and they did not see me. Their eyes were a thousand miles away. I did not speak to them.

No clarity appears in any of these voices. Even the direct and authoritative voice of Colonel Stanton offers no clear picture of what is happening. In the face of the truly bizarre, he attempts to stick to his checklist, but as the hours pass, even his words become laced with the fantastical.

While different characters’ voices blend together in tone, small details carry through each of the characters’ vignettes. A woman longs for news from her daughter, while another’s love of books is the lens through which she sees the disaster:

The thing about books is you can put them down. Come back later. What I keep thinking about the tornado is that there’s no stopping it, nothing that turns it aside, no way to mitigate or negotiate the effects. That it was so relentless, so deliberate. As if it were motivated. As if it had a map and a list. As if it were a plot untwisting itself across the landscape and all the characters were already dead and didn’t know it.

This melding-together of voices heightens the rush of trauma one feels while reading this book. The same terrible thing is happening to all these characters at the same time, and they feel the same sense of panic and confusion. Yet these tiny sparks of individuality peek through to remind us that these are real people and not a faceless, nameless crowd.

The structure of this short book does a lot of work to heighten the sense of urgency and panic present in a natural disaster. Some sections are only a sentence long, but later in the book, that sentence will start a longer section, and the reader gets more information. How information is revealed in this way seems particularly apt for what the characters are going through. Linear, coherent thought has escaped them, and information comes in bits and pieces broken up by storms and disorientation and loss.

Some readers might be unsatisfied by the ending, of which there really is none. At first, I was frustrated, because I wanted to understand what White was building toward. I expected a traditional ending. But White delivers something more powerful: space where we can imagine these characters endlessly wandering and searching. The weatherman has the last word, and he warns us that this is not a battle we will win—that we are at the mercy of something bigger and out of our control. That we are tiny specks on this planet, we are fleeting, and that’s an important thing to remember in the face of catastrophe.

Emily Webber has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer magazine, Five Points, Split Lip Magazine, Brevity, 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.