“Hold off the Night: Short Stories” by Teresa Burns Gunther

by Elizabeth Bruce

HOLD OFF THE NIGHT: Short Stories by Teresa Burns Gunther, published by Australia-based Truth Serum Press, gives the reader twelve achingly beautiful, poignant stories of adults and children walking the edge. Filled with strained situations and emotional pivots, these stories will hit your gut and your heart and spin you around and around. Terese Burns Gunther brings unflinching insights into the turbulence of human existence, with revelations rolling in all directions.

The opening story, “Where Are You, Really?”, brilliantly chronicles the implosion of a middle-aged mother and wife who had chosen “profession second, motherhood first,” only to be shunned by her school-skipping teenage daughter. After failing to make partner, again, at the same law firm where her globe-trotting husband has soared, Eveyln has had it. She grabs a bottle of red wine and heads to the tree house where her teenage kids left their weed. Then the police arrive.

One of my favorite stories is the taut and terrifying “Wake,” the double meaning of its title one of its many precisions. Molly, trapped in a violently abusive marriage for 15 years, sits numbly at the wake after the sudden drunk-driving death of her husband.

“Only once,” we learn, “did Molly dare confess her need to leave Paul, fearing he’d kill her. ‘Now, now,’ Father Thomas said, his breath whisky-sour through the dark confessional screen. ‘You mustn’t let emotions cloud your thinking. Losing that baby was hard, I know.’ He knew nothing. ‘These things happen to test our faith.’ He called it ‘God’s will’ and reminded Molly to be ‘subject in everything to your husband to achieve a state of grace.’ Be silent in the flock, he meant, be fixed like a prie-dieu for Paul to kneel on.”

Thankfully, Molly’s friend Brenna is beside her at the wake, “the only one in this crowded house Molly can stand.”

The story “War Paint”—told from the perspective of a NYC-based musician son on a quest to bring his once adventurous dad to New York for Christmas, chronicles the slow heartbreak of losing a father to dementia, after losing a mother to extreme mental illness years before. It’s all there this Thanksgiving at his sister’s house in Arizona where his father lives—the tenderness of a young niece, the sternness of a born-again sister, the vagueness of an aging father, and the anger and impulsivity of a prodigal son. Gunther navigates the emotional tension within the family with such skill and grace, the reader feels not only present at this holiday gathering but gripped by the cascade of the emotions themselves.

The final story, “Save Me,” features a young woman who has left the Mormon faith of her large family and is living a spare but independent life in San Luis Obispo in Mexico. She alone among her many siblings cannot forgive the rigidity of their religion and the heartbreaking cost wrought on a beloved brother. Hannah, the protagonist, is painting and purging her apartment of the “detritus of the life she was shedding” when she is visited—again—by yet two more young Mormon men sent by her family. The “Elders,” as the young missionaries are called, try to convince her to return to the fold of her discarded faith, and the sense of belonging that still calls to her. Gunter expertly traverses this bittersweet differential between dissent and harmony.

Indeed, Teresa Burns Gunther’s HOLD OFF THE NIGHT is a bravura collection of stories offered up to fearless readers by a master storyteller at the top of her craft.

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a short interview with the author can be read here

HOLD OFF THE NIGHT: Short Stories by Teresa Burns Gunther

Published by Truth Serum Press (a member of the Bequem Publishing Collective)

32 Meredith Street

Sefton Park, SA 5083

Australia

Publication Date: May 2023

ISBN: 978-1-922427-00-7

Cover Design Copyright © Matt Potter

Cover Image Copyright © FelixMittermeier

Author Photograph Copyright ©Nan Phelps

“Hold off the Night: Short Stories” by Teresa Burns Gunther

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