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The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories
Living in Washington, D.C., New York City, Fort Bragg, Muncie, and Rome, the educated, world weary, wise-cracking women in Jane Gillette’s collection The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories show both seriousness and levity as they deal with the inexorable march of time. Gillette is concerned with her characters’ lives and with the odd and remarkable moments when everything comes together in a way that is not limited to the mundane world. She finds epiphanies that point beyond in surprising fashion. Her stories are compellingly honest about the nature of memory and personal history, moving freely in time and discovering the long view. Her prose is sharp, even lethal, as she strips away facades leaving these characters to find their truer selves. Advance praise for The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories places her among the pantheon of great literary short fiction writers. Of Gillette’s collection Alix Ohlin, author of Inside and Signs and Wonders, writes “Jane Gillette’s stories are laced with mordant humor and sharp insights about the realities of sex, race, and privilege. Her voice, reminiscent of Grace Paley or Edith Pearlman, is strong, smart and wholly her own.” May-Lee Chai, author of Dragon Chica and The Girl from Purple Mountain, says, “Whether dissecting racial anxiety or class resentment or various forms of jealousy and disappointment, Gillette's stories fearlessly expose the human heart beating beneath our civilization's many veils.”
- GenresFiction
156 pages, Paperback
Published October 24, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 2, 2018
The introduction to this book does offer an interesting correlation of Gillette’s style to Alice Munro—the variable timelines, the sense of how a short story can encompass a lifetime—and Gillette also brings to the table a level of wicked humor you don’t see as easily in Munro, but I wish this style pulled me in more than it actually managed to. There is a clear, deliberate hand at work, but tended to lack the hum of brutal honesty with me, leaving me in the mode of thinking, “Hurry up, already!” as its reasoning played out.
And just a note that applies much more to the publisher—two things that soured me from the layout of this book were 1). combining the table of contents with the acknowledgments page and 2). the hyperbolic introduction. Both combined made me feel like I was walking into an infomercial set.
And just a note that applies much more to the publisher—two things that soured me from the layout of this book were 1). combining the table of contents with the acknowledgments page and 2). the hyperbolic introduction. Both combined made me feel like I was walking into an infomercial set.
January 23, 2018
Gillette's writing is easily approachable but deeply complex. She tells a story that is entertaining, gripping, exciting, and makes you want to continue reading. And when you reach the end, you realize that there's so much more to the story: It's about history, perception, who we are as people and how we choose to look at others. Loved Gillette's voice, and can't wait to read more of her work.
January 23, 2020
This was given to me by a friend, and I thought I'd try it. I found most of the stories in the first half to be a bit dry and sometimes plodding, though the second half was more engaging. Don't think I'm Ms. Gillette's intended audience. Well written, though.
November 29, 2017
Amazing debut fiction collection!
March 22, 2022
Jane Gillete has a distinctive voice--dry, intelligent, hilarious--and writes compelling stories about so many things, including stories.
February 23, 2026
A lot of meandering stories with little direction and almost no plot. She uses the benefit of past tense and reflection to add intrigue but the subject matter doesn’t offer much substance
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November 17, 2018Jane Gillette says she began writing stories in 1962 for a creative writing class at Vassar College. The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories, published in 2017 collects eleven of her stories, all of which were published in literary reviews—The Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly, Missouri, Zyzzyva, Hopkins Reviews, Antigonish—and most of them published since 2010. The Missouri Review's editors were impressed enough by Gillette's writing to make this book the first in the publication's new imprint.
Gillette grew up in Muncie, Indiana (which appears in a couple of the stories), where her father managed a shoe store. She says she been an adjunct college teacher of freshman composition and a writer for association magazines devoted to historic preservation and landscape architecture (and Amazon lists a book called The Most Beautiful Gardens Ever Written: A Guide by a Jane Gillette who I am going to assume is the same person). She says about her personal history, "I more or less ran a press devoted to landscape architecture. Spacemaker published books and a bi-monthly magazine and I anonymously wrote lots and lots of things for them."
So she's an interesting writer, if hardly a household name. She's been working in a very special vineyard, the world of literary magazines. I like to think of myself as well-read, but I'm afraid I'd never heard of any of the people who praise the book: Daphne Kalotay, Anthony Varallo, Tina May Hall, Nancy Zafris, John J. Clayton. That I'd never heard of them no doubt says more about my limitations than it says about Gillette. (For one thing, it gives me a list of authors and works to investigate.)
Because Gillette apparently writes slowly and carefully, the stories are worth savoring and studying. She often makes it clear that what you're reading is a story; it's not pretending to be life. The title story begins, "This isn't a very nice story, but I feel I should tell it because at the time of the assault I lived six houses away from Dawn, and she has so much to say I thought I'd never hear the end of it." The Ghost Driver begins, "Let me tell you a story about how we became the success we are today." And Meditation XXXI: On Sustenance begins, "Since there's only one scene in this story and it takes place at McDonald's out on McGalliard Road in Muncie, Indiana, I'll first kill a little time discussing food."
By allowing the reader to see backstage like this, Gillette risks decreasing the story's emotional impact. We know Othello doesn't really kill Desdemona. At the same time, Gillette is skillful enough to engage the reader even as we know what she's telling us only a story about made-up people and invented places (Muncie, Washington, DC, Vassar). And she manages to dramatize how actual events, memory, and myth slop into one another so that not one is entirely real or true.
Let me quote from Speer Morgan's Forward because his observations about what she's accomplished are better than what I could say. In the story A Preface for Mrs. Parry, Gillette's suggests that "not only do relationships and even marriages become insignificant over time, but some of our most important personal memories may be so affected by self-mythologizing as to represent desire more than fact." She tells the story Divine Afflatus from two points of view and indicates that "personal tragedies become the sense through which we see the world and about how the world may refuse to soften, even for the suffering." Not a cheerful message, but a necessary one.
Gillette grew up in Muncie, Indiana (which appears in a couple of the stories), where her father managed a shoe store. She says she been an adjunct college teacher of freshman composition and a writer for association magazines devoted to historic preservation and landscape architecture (and Amazon lists a book called The Most Beautiful Gardens Ever Written: A Guide by a Jane Gillette who I am going to assume is the same person). She says about her personal history, "I more or less ran a press devoted to landscape architecture. Spacemaker published books and a bi-monthly magazine and I anonymously wrote lots and lots of things for them."
So she's an interesting writer, if hardly a household name. She's been working in a very special vineyard, the world of literary magazines. I like to think of myself as well-read, but I'm afraid I'd never heard of any of the people who praise the book: Daphne Kalotay, Anthony Varallo, Tina May Hall, Nancy Zafris, John J. Clayton. That I'd never heard of them no doubt says more about my limitations than it says about Gillette. (For one thing, it gives me a list of authors and works to investigate.)
Because Gillette apparently writes slowly and carefully, the stories are worth savoring and studying. She often makes it clear that what you're reading is a story; it's not pretending to be life. The title story begins, "This isn't a very nice story, but I feel I should tell it because at the time of the assault I lived six houses away from Dawn, and she has so much to say I thought I'd never hear the end of it." The Ghost Driver begins, "Let me tell you a story about how we became the success we are today." And Meditation XXXI: On Sustenance begins, "Since there's only one scene in this story and it takes place at McDonald's out on McGalliard Road in Muncie, Indiana, I'll first kill a little time discussing food."
By allowing the reader to see backstage like this, Gillette risks decreasing the story's emotional impact. We know Othello doesn't really kill Desdemona. At the same time, Gillette is skillful enough to engage the reader even as we know what she's telling us only a story about made-up people and invented places (Muncie, Washington, DC, Vassar). And she manages to dramatize how actual events, memory, and myth slop into one another so that not one is entirely real or true.
Let me quote from Speer Morgan's Forward because his observations about what she's accomplished are better than what I could say. In the story A Preface for Mrs. Parry, Gillette's suggests that "not only do relationships and even marriages become insignificant over time, but some of our most important personal memories may be so affected by self-mythologizing as to represent desire more than fact." She tells the story Divine Afflatus from two points of view and indicates that "personal tragedies become the sense through which we see the world and about how the world may refuse to soften, even for the suffering." Not a cheerful message, but a necessary one.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews