Erin Emily Ann Vance’s debut novella Advice for Taxidermists & Amateur Beekeepers is a haunting, dreamlike book that is more an atmospheric experience than a linear, conventional narrative. The inciting events are the mysterious deaths of Margot Morris, her two daughters and her unborn child; however, this isn’t a murder mystery or a procedural crime novel but rather a thoughtful exploration of the psychology of Margot’s surviving siblings in the aftermath. It is also an oblique commentary on the supposed dated-ness of fairy tales and a suggestion that the world of the Grimm brothers has not, in fact, been left behind us today.
Fairy tales are weirdly and inexplicably compelling, especially the older versions. They often seem to have a total lack of logic and cause-and-effect that, coupled with their sudden bursts of brutal violence, make them disorienting and separate them from the strategies we typically use to parse “reality.” And yet it is impossible to look away from them. At the centre of Advice is the fairy tale compiled in the Grimm collection under the title “Fitcher’s Bird.” It’s a variation on Bluebeard, with a sorcerer who kidnaps girls to try and make them his wives, providing they obey a couple seemingly nonsensical rules: do not damage a pristine egg, and do not look in a particular room. Of course, all his victims look in the room, where they typically drop the egg in shock at the basins full of blood and the dismembered limbs. While the egg doesn’t break, it does become hopelessly stained bloodred. Their transgressions obvious, they are then killed themselves, until the youngest daughter in a family of girls outwits the sorcerer, reassembles the pieces of her sisters’ bodies, and resurrects them. She then disguises herself as a bird in a tree until her family shows up and kills the sorcerer. It’s a macabre and brutal tale that operates with the logic of a nightmare, not of reality. And yet, as Advice reminds us, if you scratch even slightly below the surface of today’s society, you will quickly uncover the very same threats, brutality and senselessness that pervade the world of fairy tales. That Advice inhabits the same conceptual world as fairy tales is clear from the amount of violence, grotesque details and strangeness in the novella, even leaving the facts of Margot’s murder entirely aside. Near the beginning, Sylvia, one of the surviving sisters, drives towards the mountains (the setting is a small town near Calgary, Alberta) in order to release a litter of unwanted newborn kittens for wild animals to kill. As she explains to her uncomprehending and crying baby in the carseat with her on this trip, “‘The coyotes are fast and hungry. They won’t suffer.’” Agatha, the other surviving sister, is the titular beekeeper, and one of her duties is to periodically requeen her hives by removing and killing an old or underperforming queen. Agatha, however, goes a step further than most beekeepers by pinning the queen’s body to a backing and hanging her in an ever-growing display of dead queens over Agatha’s bed. Teddy, the surviving brother, is the titular taxidermist, just as the Morris’ father was originally. Teddy’s trade leaves him conversant with some of the same techniques a mortician would use, and after he hears about Margot’s death, he reads a book on preparing human bodies: |
“If the person who died wore a wig or toupee, the mortician has a much easier job with styling, so long as it remains intact or a similar one can be ordered. In cases where the body suffered from a degenerative illness or an injurious accident, cosmetic reconstruction may be necessary.” Teddy wonders if his sister will need cosmetic surgery, or his nieces … “Undertakers can do most anything: reattaching heads, sewing up gunshot wounds, waxing over burns.” At least he knows his sister and her daughters were not decapitated.
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It’s not coincidental that Teddy is the one who loves the story “Fitcher’s Bird,” so much so that he basically has the Grimm version memorized.
The funeral itself provides more content for visceral horror. The funeral director, for instance, is reminded by the dead children of the time he slipped and dropped two “baby boxes” outside a hospital, spilling the bodies out onto the ground; at the funeral, townspeople speculate about why there are four caskets instead of three: |
“Why is the fetus in a casket and not in the mother?”
“Coffin birth, maybe?” “What’s that?” “When the gasses in the abdomen of a corpse push the fetus through the vagina.” “How the hell do you know that?” “Watched a YouTube video.” |
That last detail about a YouTube video is also characteristic of Advice—the dark subject matter is cut through with equally dark, but effective, humor. Similarly, also at the funeral, the New Age-style substitute officiant (“Like a bloody toddler got into Stevie Nicks’ 1977 tour wardrobe, the undertaker thinks”) is defeated by one of the bees that buzz throughout the novella:
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Thyme stops, mid-sentence, looks cross-eyed at a large bee sitting on the bridge of her nose. She stops in horror. There is an audible squeak in the front row, Agatha and Sylvia huddled together, gripping their hands over their mouths and shaking with laughter. The undertaker’s eyes widen. Thyme’s knuckles whiten, holding onto the podium. Her mouth is a large, purple life-saver. Agatha hiccups loudly, unable to stifle her laughter, and the bee flops from Thyme’s nose, leaving a sting behind. Tears well in her eyes, and she stumbles off the raised platform. The undertaker rushes to the front of the room, and Agatha and Sylvia’s laughter falls into the occasional soft chuckle.
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The grotesque and the comical sit uneasily beside each other throughout this book, just as they do in fairy tales.
The structure of the book also supports its dreamlike content. The story is told in fragments that are presented in what is sometimes completely random order. It’s a disorienting reading experience—I had difficulty placing some scenes in the overarching timeline and had to flip backwards and forwards through the book to try and figure the sequence out. On the one hand, more narrative signposts would have been helpful; on the other hand, the resulting disjointed but also weirdly organic reading experience seems to mimic the lack of logic and of rational throughlines in fairy tales. You feel immersed in the book’s world, which contains equally disorienting and unexpected events for its characters. In this context, the kinds of women’s traditions that are usually dismissed as mere superstition make more sense. Agatha, for instance, has endured a horrific number of miscarriages and stillbirths, and has never given birth to a living child, despite her occupation as a midwife before turning to beekeeping. She remembers resorting to superstitious practices out of desperation: “She asked her second husband to bind together two branches and place it on her naked belly while they stood under the [shower] water.” When nothing else works or makes sense of her personal tragedies, old wives’ tales are as good a measure to take as anything else. I’d like to close by considering the novella’s title. What exactly is the “Advice for Taxidermists & Amateur Beekeepers”? This question makes about as much sense as asking what the “lesson” is in “Fitcher’s Bird.” There isn’t really any advice or lesson, per se, because advice just isn’t commensurate with the violent and weird events that can erupt into real lives: “Sylvia racks her brain for reasons her sister died … If it wasn’t God, then why? Chance, maybe, probably. Randomness; oddly specific randomness. Sylvia’s mind shifted to Jamie, his advances, her refusal to kiss him when he showed up at her home the week before.” As Agatha observes, |
One upon a time it was not safe to be born a girl. It is important to remember that time does not exist. Once upon a time, all of time, it was not safe to be a girl …
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The danger can threaten from any direction—exes, judgmental neighbors, even your own body. There are still bright spots and moments of gallows humour, but the danger is there, and it cannot ultimately be controlled or completely warded off. And in the end, nature resolves all plots through death:
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Mother nature will come for you, in the end. She will consume you. Like Istria before Agatha returned, the bees will use your body as a blueprint for their new home. Mushrooms will sprout from your eye sockets and your flesh and blood will feed beds of wildflowers. Lichen will cling to your bones and small animals will nest in your pelvis. Like Margot, worms will breed in you as decay sets in. Your body will glow and vibrate and sing as mother nature dines on you. She will perform her own kind of taxidermy on your corpse; the kind where you feed the forest instead of the pockets of men. Mother nature will come for you, and everyone you love and everyone you hate. She will reclaim you. All that will remain is a community garden, built on corpses and without the help of people.
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The only useful advice might be to start looking at our supposedly modern world and our supposedly modern lives through the eyes of the oldest fairy tales. Beauty, magic and violence still coexist, and it’s therefore worthwhile to think about why fairy tales attract us so much. Our lives aren’t as rational as we like to think they are, and Advice for Taxidermists & Amateur Beekeepers does an excellent job of quietly immersing the reader in this fact.
Amy Mitchell is The /tƐmz/ Review's social media editor (as well as a writing editor) and a college professor. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Western University. Her reading tendencies have been described as "promiscuous"; she is interested in a wide range of fiction and poetry, and particularly enjoys finding new and interesting works in translation.
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