There is an inexplicable stone giant looming on the small Oregon town of Stoneshore, but no one in the town is particularly interested in finding out where it came from or why it was there. It’s always there and probably always there. What is the point of worrying about yourself?
Dark Horse
Small towns around the world are filled with these kinds of habits and features (though not obviously spectacular) – both natural and artificial – and when initial novelty wears on it, they simply become part of the landscape. Similarly, aspects of society itself – moods and ideas unique to certain people, specific community spirits.
These small peculiarities are something that journalist Fadumo Abdi feels like they are facing when they arrive in town and search for work, but of course the peculiarities of Stoneshore suggest the potential of supernatural.
What appears to be the Stoneshore Register is a myth that arises around a place when the greater truth is much more tragic. The local urban legend tells of a man who disappeared after falling in love with a woman from the sea. The sad truth is that he simply disappeared from his boat. An invisible tragedy. The story of a young man wandering into the forest in the winter and finding dead, when he is found dead, it seems like a better reality than that of an untimely death.
Dark Horse
Fadumo herself carries a tragic secret – the fact that she is a refugee and does not want to share some of the history and facts of her family with her new neighbors. This is trauma, but it is also a form of self-mythology. She protects herself so that the reality of her experience is less and more for the people around her.
Dark Horse
The book tells these many small stories of town in a thorough and general way of a child’s play, birth, or boating afternoon with a fisherman. I feel that the book is a different world telling volume about creator, author G Willow Wilson, artist MK Parker and letter Richard Bruning. These people feel authentic, their world comes true, their words feel honest.
It also feels quiet as if the small town manages the silence. Even that greatest emotion is muted against the banality of their everyday existence. It’s not contemplative, but even the mystery feels peaceful in one way or another.
The Stoneshore Register is incredible to see the slow erasure of not only small towns but people and their way of life. It’s worrying, but in a way it causes real empathy for thought. Readers may become concerned about the quiet, country spaces that are always within reach. How about those towns? What about their citizens?
“Stone Shore Register” deals with the mythization of small towns
Stoneshore Register
Filled with a sense of emotionally serious and quiet mystery, Stoneshore Register examines the myth of a small town.
It was beautifully rendered and emotionally realized.
An impactful story.
Quietly mysterious.
There is no conclusion, but it does not require anything.
