Book Review: More of This World or Maybe Another

When Barb Johnson read one particular line from her story “Killer Heart” at the Louisiana Book Festival in her measured, reassuring voice, I felt like she had reached across audience members’ heads in front of me and punched me in the stomach. It felt like she did this in a good way.

A visceral, tangible reaction is the best possible thing I can hope for in any reading experience, and that’s exactly what I got from Johnson’s extraordinary, revelatory book of short stories, More of This World or Maybe Another.

Each story is a self-contained epiphany, simultaneously furthering our knowledge of characters who are each inherently damaged and fascinating. While they are at times struggling to know and accept themselves, they are utterly recognizable—as people we not only know and see every day, but also people we are and have been. People we might one day be, if we are lucky or unlucky in our lives. They are fully formed, from the first story and the first word.

I cried inconsolably while finishing Johnson’s “If the Holy Spirit Comes for You.” This was in a public coffee shop, no less. It’s more than a violent, heartbreaking collection. Mixed in with the tragic is a continuous pleasure in the powerful simplicity of the language Johnson employs and in the familiarity of the settings—first, an unnamed “semirural” town likely near Lake Charles and later, Mid-City and Uptown New Orleans. In the end, however, the stories are universal because the extreme specificity of the characters and place serves to underscore greater truths about family and love and how we come to define what those notions mean to us.

Johnson grew up in Lake Charles and was a carpenter in New Orleans for 20 years. Her carpentry is not just a biographical detail of note. It informs her stories with both substance and balance, building the kind of well-made quality only a master crafter can accomplish. And in this slender volume of nine stories, Johnson has crafted an entire world of familiarity, one populated with people I want to visit again and again just to see them come alive and hear them tell their stories.