A Review of Red Lagoe’s Impulses of a Necrotic Heart
By Alec Faiman
Red Lagoe’s characters are plagued by personal demons in her short story collection, Impulses of a Necrotic Heart (Death Knell Press). Reminiscent, sometimes, of writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen Graham Jones, Lagoe’s stories are populated with characters suffering from the torments of psychosis, suicidal ideation, debilitating guilt, and calls to vengeance. Lagoe notes in the collection’s introduction that the extreme turmoil her characters suffer from is a unifier across stories: “Collectively, I think there’s something different about these stories compared to my previous works. There’s more heart in these characters. There’s more loss and tragedy and despair.”
Cover by Red Lagoe
And loss, tragedy, and despair are crucial to Impulses of a Necrotic Heart. Lagoe is adept at crafting these emotions and actions on the page rather quickly. Unlike long-form horror, these stories open in the midst of the characters’ turmoil. Torments like the pain of a spouse’s death after decades of love (“Infectious Glow”), the guilt of a parent who falls asleep when they should have been watching their child (“Dogwood”), and the traumas of sexual abuse ('“Blood Bogged”) and harassment (“Don’t Make It Weird”) are just a few of the very real-world horrors this collection gets to the heart of.
Perhaps Lagoe’s greatest strength lies in imagery—both vivid description and the black-and-white illustrations (created by the author too!) found throughout Impulses of a Necrotic Heart. In evocative language and often cutting detail, she depicts eardrums popped by pencil erasers, pools of menstrual blood, sinkholes carpeted with hordes of spiders, and more in the collection’s fifteen stories.
Illustration by Red Lagoe
The story, “Don’t Make It Weird,” contains some truly emotional imagery—made even more impactful once the reader arrives at Lagoe’s end notes which reveal this piece “takes a real-life experience of mine from the mid-90s and turns it into a horror story.” Thirteen-year-old Hannah faces sexual harassment when she plays football with a group of chauvinist boys—and, after being forced to stop playing because she gets the wind knocked out of her, she considers the stretch marks around her breasts. Hannah runs her fingers along a scar: “the skin parted at the seam, flesh strung apart like melted mozzarella […] She examined the exposed layers of fat and pink underneath the open crevice. Something moved inside. She’d felt it before, squirming just below the skin. A snakelike structure writhed within. With trepidation, Hannah placed a finger into the lacerated skin and touched the thing moving inside, but it retracted. She inserted her finger deeper. A coiled, ropey thing wrapped around her finger and squeezed like a boa constrictor.” During the next day’s football game, the snakelike creatures make an indelible impression on the group of boys in a revengeful twist.
Illustration by Red Lagoe
“Don’t Make it Weird,” as with many of the stories in Impulses of a Necrotic Heart, comments upon the urgent social issues of misogyny and ongoing discrimination. Environmental concerns crop up in the apocalyptic “Fourteen Gallons,” and child trafficking is central to the events of “Tangerine Sky.” Because Lagoe prioritizes character, these topics—rather than serving as convenient plot points or easy devices of emotional manipulation—feel earned and emotionally true.
Lagoe bookends the novel with “Impulses of a Necrotic Heart” and “The Haunting of Swan Lake,” connected stories of parental relationships and familial trauma. In an ode to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Lagoe’s protagonist, Danny, hears a tune apparently whistled by his dead father whose corpse lies in the wine cellar. Like Poe’s protagonist, Danny is driven to madness by the insidious whistle. Not unlike the necrosis that invades the hearts of these stories, of the characters within this collection, Lagoe’s writing invades readers and refuses to leave, even after closing the book and walking away. Impulses of a Necrotic Heart is ever attentive to that which threatens to consume—the heart, and us.
Alec Faiman (he/him) is a Creative Writing Ph.D. student at the University of South Dakota. Alec primarily writes fiction and tends to work in the cozy horror genre, though he sometimes indulges in realism. [This is his first published book review!]