Written by Michael Hopping

review by Marcianne Miller

Looking for cheery, sun-dazzled stories for your vacation reading? Then don’t put MacTiernan’s Bottle in your beach bag. The collection of 13 short stories and an essay by local author Michael Hopping is not a throw-away item. It’s meant to grab your full attention, throttle you a bit, and convince you to read it a second time to catch all the subtleties you might have missed on your first go-round.

“…regardless of our poses,” Hopping writes, “who among us doesn’t dream of being understood?” Who indeed? The more accelerated life becomes, the more like an outsider many of us feel–and the more pressing is our desire to be understood. What Hopping does—in his lean, unpredictable, compassionate and edgy style—is tell stories that portray the often torturous paths by which human beings come to understand themselves. To do this and be entertaining at the same time is no mean accomplishment.

And not without risk—on the few occasions when one of Hopping’s stories might miss the mark, it still inspires admiration for the courage it took to attempt it. One tale of the 13 is thigh-slapping hilarious, two are heart-breaking, several are absolute gems, and all introduce you to characters you can’t stop thinking about.

A psychiatrist before he became a writer, Hopping no doubt found his muse by listening for decades to other people’s troubles. How else to explain the wondrous diversity of his tales? Among their locations are a snake-infested farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains (“Snakebit”), a cave in the Ozarks made hellish without a flashlight (“A Relic of War”), an abandoned barn that erases the past (“The Painter of Kitsch”), and a nasty house near the Des Moines river where a boy learns to defy his abusive parents (“Sphinx”).

In such an array of tales, it’s natural that readers’ reactions to any one of them can be poles apart. Case in point—in his January 28th review in the Mountain Xpress, Bill Branyon found the story “Thirty-Eighth Parallel” to be a “severe downer.” As a PTSD spouse, I felt the surreal nightmare set in wintry Kansas was brilliant and so evocative of the distortions caused by the war-induced affliction that it should be required reading at the VA Medical Center.

The title story, “MacTiernan’s Bottle,” is a soaring, complex tale, as haunting and visually arresting as a Hollywood thriller. Workmen in a remote western North Carolina community find a preposterously beautiful fresco hidden behind the walls in an old motel. It was created decades ago by a famous artist. How did he manage to make it with no one knowing about it? Why did he make it here, why hide it? And what tragedy does artistic beauty try to plaster over?

In “Complications,” Hopping channels his inner Feral Chihuahua in a side-splitting yarn about an honesty-challenged husband who gets a vasectomy to thwart his wife’s urge to fill her “belly hole.” In “Toasted,” a lapsed Methodist discovers an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in a loaf of burned bread, which inspires him to escape the earnest, cash-donating Latino Catholics who descend on him—and do something really Christian.

My favorite story is one that took me a while to figure out because I wasn’t sure all the time who was talking. In “Avatars,” a field biologist named Matt is on an airplane headed to North Carolina to testify against the U.S. Air Force in a zoning war. As if that prospect weren’t enough to unhinge his equilibrium, next to him sits a beautiful brunette “with aquamarine eyes.” Matt would love to chat her up, but Luie, his “avatar,” the”irritating skullmate” who lives inside his head, can’t keep his comments to himself. The poor scientist has quite a headful of problems trying to get to fertile ground with his lovely seatmate.

The last piece is an erudite essay, fascinating and impressive, but a tad incongruous among the short stories. “Afterword: Literature as Magic Theatre” ranges through history and literature to discuss the division between writers who want their work to have social impact, and those who write as art.

Hopping’s memories of being inside Newgrange, Ireland’s ancient monument to the yearly return of the winter sun, are so thrilling, they warrant their own story. A triskele, a Neolithic symbol of three interlocking spirals, decorates the cover of MacTiernan’s Bottle, as if hinting at the timelessness of the stories the reader will find inside.

Bottom line: An exciting collection of new stories by a mature local voice.

MacTiernan’s Bottle, written by Michael Hopping; Pisgah Press (2012); 237 pp.; $14.95; www.pisgahpress.com.

For more information on Michael Hopping visit www.michaelhopping.com

Michael Hopping reads from his collection of short stories, MacTiernan’s Bottle. Saturday, June 23 at 7 p.m. Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café, 55 Haywood Street, downtown Asheville. For more details call (828) 254-6734 or visit www.malaprops.com.

Marcianne Miller is a local writer/reviewer who is completing her first novel, about spiritual communities in Asheville.