Short Stories and a Film Called ‘Die’
Katie Boland‘s collection of short stories EAT YOUR HEART OUT found me quite by accident. A quote from page one got me hooked: “I was having my daily beers. [Says Rich, who is telling the story] I think I was on the third one, so I was feeling loose but I hadn’t heard the click in my head yet. The click tells me it’s time to stop. Time to go home. Some days the click is harder to get than others. This day the click was being a real mother.”
I bought the kindle edition immediately and continued to read. The first story’s title is Tragic Hero, and a bit further in, Rich says: “I was reading a book when I met her, The Sun Also Rises or something like that. I only read the classics. There’s too much shit people read today, that’s why they are so stupid. Makes me real sick when I get to thinking about it, so I’ll change the subject now.” Hemingway once said that a writer’s style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. Even if he didn’t know it was about him, Rich the underemployed newsman would have liked this story, and probably the rest of the book.
I devoured the first four stories in a day, but story number four, The Falling Action, was so jarringly out of tune with the first three that I needed to go away from it for a while. It would be several weeks before I got back to reading.
My return to the book was also accidental. After hearing that Emily Hampshire had been cast in SyFy’s remake of 12 MONKEYS, I went searching looked for Hampshire films to stream and found DIE, which is an extraordinarily strange bit of cinema, and it happened that Ms. Boland was playing a main character. The film’s title is a pun. The philosophy of its villain is that life choices should be determined by chance, and his selected victims are subjected to justice administered in doses determined by the roll of a die. DIE is not a pleasant film but it is a fascinating and well-acted one and Boland is terrific as Melody, and I wanted to stop watching (and tried repeatedly to do that), but I watched the whole of the thing in one sitting. Then I picked up the book again.
Katie Boland as Melody Chambers in DIE (aka ‘Six’)
The next story, Swelter, has a marvelously appropriate Bob Dylan quote, but you need to read it as part of the story to appreciate it. Swelter is easily the best story of the collection. The narrator introduces herself this way: “I’m Louise. I hate that name, but it’s not like I picked it. My other option is Sugar Tits, so said Colin. I chose Louise.”
The last of the ten tales is called Mama, and somebody should really make a movie out of that.
Boland told Caroline Leavittville: “Working on Eat Your Heart Out, I accepted that I liked living in the past. As a writer, it was okay to love what I had made up. In life, that’s not as true but now my nostalgia had a purpose. I took what was destroyed in my life and built it into my stories”.
In 2022, Boland published the short story The Fall. She and Emily Hampshire now host The Whisper Podcast.
The 2010 film DIE, directed by Dominic James, is not currently available.
**– Slightly revised. Originally published in 2013