These aren’t your normal family values, hopefully. Reading Joe Baumann’s short fiction story, “Family Values,” is a braided psychological experience of murderous fantasy, sexual discovery, and the minutiae of life. The main character is on the cusp of leaving adolescence behind and experiencing his first sexual encounters. But his sexual discovery is tragically marked by the sudden death of his parents while he’s at camp, and so begin the vivid and gruesome fantasies that intrude upon his life.
The first words of the short story subvert the title’s traditional connotations. “I’ve killed my uncle four times now, and he simply refuses to die.”
It’s chilling for the matter-of-fact simplicity. The opening line sets the violent tone for the rest of the story and introduces us to the twining of reality and fantasy. All this packed into one sentence, it’s fitting that when these words first came to Baumann, they inspired the construction of the rest of the story.
“As with many of my stories, I started with the opening sentence (or at least partial sentence). I was struck by the notion of someone who's killed their uncle four times, but said uncle keeps coming back to life. That was the genesis, and I then wandered around in the material until I ended up where I wanted to be.”
Wandering around “Family Values” during its creation led Baumann to some dark places – particularly in the killing scenes. The ordinary suddenly twists to violence, when the uncle drowns in the pond after being wallopped with an oar, a 12-gauge explodes his sternum onto the wall, an axe digs into his skull, and the fatal ache of rat poison macerates his innards.
The violence is primal and striking, but it happens with all the irreverence of a sociopathic narrator, a type of character Baumann admits has been a struggle for him to write in the past. The narrator’s emotional distance keeps the story from entering pure gore fascination territory. There is no languishing over the brutality – the incidents are recounted in a controlled manner, and the narrator moves on.
For all the heart-pacing urgency of the violence, Baumann then sedates the reader and anchors us back into reality with piercing detail of ordinary life. The bourbon caramel ice cream on Thanksgiving, the “sang and twang” of his uncle’s banjo at night, and his aunt’s orange neoprene dumbbells she uses for workout videos. These small details, written without pretense, connect us all to the life of the narrator, even after the horrific fantasy. A balance is struck between the typical and the terrifically homicidal.
“One of the things I tried to do was use those bits of very specific scenery and detail to help brighten those everyday moments (talking about BOURBON ice cream rather than just ice cream or dessert, for example) to create a sense of specificity and vibrancy. It's always easier to make the dark or grotesque more memorable than the normal and perky, I find, and so trying to balance the equation with those sharp details is always important to me.”
“Family Values,” is no allegory. There is not a moral message or lesson. Baumann trusts the reader to accept that the human condition is not neatly bound by either goodness or badness. If anything, the story is an exploration of tensions felt, both after a tragedy and during the process of self actualization.
“Even I'm not quite sure what that tension "means" for the narrator, but I think it's grounded somewhere in a latent worry about his own sense of self and sexuality. He is obviously attracted to other men, and his life's circumstances haven't provided him many outlets for how to explore and understand and talk about that in a way that feels safe and comfortable; as such, I think that has warped how he responds to his impulses and urges, both sexual and otherwise (in this case, murderous) and also affects what those impulses and urges are.”
Joe Baumann has a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and currently teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at St. Charles Community College in Missouri. In between lectures and seminars, he continues to craft his own creative work in a state of flux, usually working on a multitude of projects simultaneously.
“I tend to write several things at once in small increments, rather than focusing on one project; that is, I'll usually write about a page of three or four different things on a given day. I realize that approach is nuts – people often look at me like I'm off my gourd when I admit that, but, hey, it works for me, so I'm okay with being off my gourd, I guess.”
Read Baumann’s “Family Values” in Sum’s second issue, available online now.