At the beginning of On the wild sideby Tiffany McDaniel, a news item including the author of the remarkable Betty was inspired. Between 2014 and 2015, six women went missing in Chillicothe, Ohio. Two are still missing. The bodies of the other four have been found, but their murders remain unsolved. Things will probably stay that way. Their deaths left the community in indifference. They were on drugs. They were prostitutes.
As a child, one of these women went to school with the writer and poet whose first novel, The summer when everything meltedforeshadowed the best. On the wild side confirms this. In this cruel and intense tale, the only magic is that of a writing which, like the omnipresent river here, dazzles with its beauty as much as with the muck that it brings to the surface of things and people.
In Chillicothe, a small town where everything and everyone reeks of the smell of stationery, the witches have red hair, but no power other than that of escaping in dreams or in the vapors of drugs. Their names are Arc and Daffy. Twins with wild eyes, raised for a time by their grandmother who nourished their fertile imagination with stories where moles are butterfly eggs and where little girls, all little girls, could one day obtain a crown, become queens.
The other side
The little girls will need these stories when they return to live with their mother, who prostitutes herself to be able to pay for her next dose, and the next, and the next. Unending. And then there’s the spider. This man who comes for their mother before joining them in their beds. “Who can you denounce demons to when the demons are the very ones you are going to denounce them to? » will think Arc, the narrator of the novel.
In short, both children live on the wild side. The one of disorder, the one “that suits the mood of the monsters and all the things they play with”. They grow there. Young women become there. Weave links there. Do not escape their environment. Nor the spider. The other side, the beautiful side, they will only brush against it. The time for parentheses as short as they are rare. On the wild side is in fact such a solid black that light cannot pierce it. And if she succeeds, it is only to be quickly chased away. A tunnel with no light at the end.
But, beyond the sordid reality it presents, this social novel is immensely beautiful. A tribute and an outstretched hand to the real missing people of Chillicothe, telling them — through the fictional fate of Arc, Daffy, Thursday, Violet, Indigo, Sage Nell — that they are not forgotten. And then, Tiffany McDaniel has the art of making the tongue dance even in the darkness. Her characters, these queens in the making, express themselves in this poetic language rich in knowledge that she has put in their mouths and minds. Raw realism thus takes a step aside and, on the reader’s side, the unbearable becomes (almost) bearable.