On March first, Suzanne Hudson was awarded the Truman Capote Prize for distinguished work in the short story and that award was richly deserved. To commemorate the occasion, Joe Taylor at Livingston Press put together this collection of Hudson’s work: a generous selection of stories, three excerpts from novels and a pair of personal essays.
Reading through the volume, one is first struck by the duration of Hudson’s career. She won the Penthouse magazine prize for fiction with “La Prade” in 1977. Her story “Deep Water, Dark Horizons” was written for and published in “Alabama Noir,” 2020. With this book, she is now in her 48th year of publishing. In that time, besides the three novels she published two volumes of stories, a fictional memoir, and edited or coedited a series of collections by Southern authors.
She is certainly best known for her stories of what we should not call low-lifes—violent, mostly ignorant and cruel people. These are dark stories, stories of murder, alcohol and drug abuse, infidelity, sexual cruelty, even incest, and often take place in honky-tonks, drive-ins and the back seats of cars. “La Prade,” written when she was hardly more than a girl herself, tells of a teen-age girl who already has one child by her demented father, and keeps him on a leash around his neck tied to a fencepost.
Several are stories of marriages, relationships gone wrong, usually because the husband is a no-good. But in Hudson, often the wife or betrayed girlfriend has her revenge and it is not pretty. In this world of limited possibilities and means, some of the women view their sexuality as currency to be used, spent judiciously if possible, for maximum advantage.
These people are not living the good life, but some aspire to it or pretend to gentility they do not have. There is the club, with lady food and nice clothes in “The Bonita Street Bridge Club,” but these arrangements are fragile. The women are often gossipy, fierce in their competition for small advantage.
But, I have found several of her stories to be very funny, sometimes in a slightly twisted and sardonic way. I love “All the Way to Memphis” in which a perfectly proper lady, Clista Juniper, described as “meticulous,” in all beige suits, matching coral nails and lipstick, discovers her husband is unfaithful on the internet and immediately shoots him in the head.
Another favorite is “The Seamstress,” in which Hudson ventures into Michael Knight territory, the Mardi Gras revelers of Mobile. Here she explores some very fine distinctions between the newly rich, avid social climbers who might deceive themselves into thinking they have achieved entry into the local aristocracy, and the Real Thing, the old families who quietly keep to themselves and keep the arrivistes out.
In Hudson’s work, there is humor and also rawness, sexuality, mayhem, poverty and deception: not for the frail.
