Liao Yiwu was born in 1958, when Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward launched 30 million starving Chinese peasants into their early graves, and he has spent his life trying to uncover the stories of the forgotten souls that have been left behind during China’s tumultuous modern history.

In The Corpse Walker, Liao Yiwu interviews the Chinese downtrodden, the Professional Mourner, the Leper, the Corpse Walkers, the Tiananmen Father, the Grave Robber, the Migrant Worker, and many others whose lives have been torn apart and obliterated by the Chinese authority.

Liao Yiwu’s interviews are pieced together from his memory and notes, some from discussions over time with fellow inmates when he was politically imprisoned, others from oppressed elders who have nothing left to hide.

Their stories are stunning, sorrowful, and spectacular all at once, and they offer a true glimpse into the mourning heart of a Chinese culture that few Westerners could ever understand and most of the modern Chinese society would rather forget.

Liao Yiwu unleashes the immeasurable scale of recent Chinese history through the words of the oppressed people that the Chinese government never wanted to be heard, and although these stories are all true, they are even more unbelievable because of that fact.

Words from The Professional Mourner:

In the old days, there were people who specialized in walking the corpse. They normally traveled in the evenings, two guys at a time. One walked in the front and the other at the back. Like carrying a sedan chair, they pulled the body to walk along, as fast as wind. They would utter in unison, “Yo ho, yo ho.”

If you looked from a distance, you would see that the dead and the living march to the same steps. They used gravity to keep the corpse walking to the same rhythm. It was hard for the trio to change gait and make a turn, never a sharp turn. If you happened to see a walking corpse coming, you got out of the way. Otherwise, it could walk right into you.

I saw this in 1949. A local merchant was accidentally shot by a group of army deserters in Jiangxi Province. This merchant’s name was Lu. I helped arrange his funeral. At that time, there was no easy means of water or land transportation to bring his body back home. His friends couldn’t bear to bury him in another land. They paid money to those professionals to get his body home. It took them over a week, and when they got there his body looked as if he were alive.

End quote.

Liao Yiwu still lives in China, risking his life to hear the stories that were never supposed to be told, and even while he is awarded for his efforts, he is persecuted just the same, as are those who would dare to listen.

Stephen Graham Jones explores the tragic magic of storms and serial killers in his hardcore crime novel, All the Beautiful Sinners.

Following the destructive path of tornadoes across the American Southwest, a sadistic serial killer plucks children out of their homes into thin air, sucking them into the eye of his apprenticeship to be the next generation of psychopaths that carry on his legacy.

Pursued by Deputy Sheriff Jim Doe across the path of tornado valley, the killer leaves a trail of bloody evidence that leads Doe ever closer to the realization that he is intimately involved with the murders.

Steeped in urban legend and modern mythology, All the Beautiful Sinners is a triumphant smorgasbord of desperation and destitution, where a serial killer seeks to create his legacy out of the offspring of those lost to the storms.

Stephen Graham Jones strength is his use of language and metaphor to twist sentences into steely slices that penetrate your skin and leave scars long after you’ve closed the pages.

Both complicated in its design and simplistic in its intention, Jones’ sinister novel details the path towards atonement we all must seek, regardless of our past sins or triumphs.

A passage from All the Beautiful Sinners:

The moon was shot through with the small bodies of blind sparrows.

Behind her, the boy looked to the girl. To Marlene. Marly. She was smiling, the soldering wire molded into her lips, the flesh of her cheek, the one dimple pulled through with a piece of thread, tied to her second molar. The scissors used to cut the thread would show up in a trashcan back at the campsite. Along with an empty can of the sealant used on her face. They would be in a stratum that would get labeled March 15th. There would be no prints on her, though, not in the shellac around her arms, where she’d been lifted, placed, not on her own fingertips, even.

The boy shook his head no at Marlene, no no no, but then when he stood to run it was into a denim shirt. Far above, a brown hat.

The girl looked around slow.

‘Father,’ she said. ‘Look what we found.’

‘Yes,’ her father said. ‘Good, good.’

The boy looked up at Him and hugged himself into a ball, still shaking his head no, and his father carried him back to the road like that, the girl trailing behind, holding the fingers of one hand in the other, behind her back, her smile fixed like the children’s had been, her eyes glazed with wonder.

End passage.

All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones is a journey into the violence of the American frontier, along all of the winding trails it entails, where children are lost to the howling wind and the memories of our past entwine with the dreams of our present.

Jerome Bahr’s stories of stark small-town life with hard-drinking morality and innocent desperation capture the moody weather and seasonal sullenness that overcast the Wisconsin consciousness.

Jerome Bahr was born under that cloud in Arcadia, Wisconsin, around 1909, and he studied at the University of Minnesota before working at several Midwest newspapers.

Bahr later moved to New York, and his first book, “All Good Americans,” appeared in 1937 when Earnest Hemingway introduced him to the American reading public.

Wisconsin Tales was published in 1964, but some of the stories first appeared in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Woman’s Day, and Story Parade.

The characters in Wisconsin Tales show both the self-destructiveness of their behavior and the quiet fortitude of the landscape that surrounds them.

In “And the Fishes Were Beautiful,” a drunken fury leads a man to drag a woman to the edge. “The Grudge” shows how anger can eat away our sorrow. The subtleties of racism in the North are explored in Ebony Intermezzo.

Jerome Bahr may have left the Midwest for New York City, but his heart still lived in the hills of Wisconsin, and his writing always reflected the will of Wisconsin’s people.

This will is reflected in this passage from “The Grudge”:

August stared out the window. The sun had begun its descent, offering surcease to the baking hillside; and along the banks of the river, tree-shadows spread and cooled the shallow stream. The entire countryside was relaxing. Only August, grim and determined, seemed to oppose the day’s decline…

Stories in Wisconsin Tales include:

The Grudge
And the Fishes Were Beautiful
Whisper in the Night
Canny Fanny
Ebony Intermezzo
The Correspondents
Olga’s Revenge
The Word Passer
The Baker’s Triumph
Bannon’s Pavilion
The Grandmother

Jerome Bahr’s Wisconsin Tales was published by Trempealeau Press in Baltimore, Maryland.

In Wisconsin Tales, Jerome Bahr speaks of what is small-town in us all, our dreams to expand, and the struggle between who we want to be and what we become.

Review by The MAG Zine.