Mark Bagshaw

The Darktown Ladies' Story-Book & Gun Club Mark Bagshaw

By way of preface, The Darktown Ladies' Story-Book and Gun Club begins by telling the story of how a group of ordinary middle-class suburban women talked themselves into forming a writing club, and how the group arrived at an appropriate name for itself. The narrator of the preface, retired Professor George Badget, is also the editor of the collection of twenty stories that follows, each story written by one the club members whose brief bios appear at the conclusion of the collection. More than anything else, these stories are about relationships, mostly private ones: wives and husbands (and "exes"), parents and children, siblings, intimate friends, and courtship partners (that is, people in the process of becoming intimate). A second large grouping has to do with larger social issues: class issues, political issues and international relations, health care, women's issues (which, here, often arise from male-female relationships), aging and age-related diseases, and the relationship of the individual to any person or organization outside the self ('society' writ large). Also included here are healthy doses of genre fiction: science fiction, tales of the supernatural, seduction and personal betrayal, art and creativity-and murder." The Darktown Ladies' Story-Book and Gun Club is a frame story collection in the tradition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: By the conclusion, the narrative that frames this collection of stories and the characters of individual authors may be of as of much interest and importance as the stories themselves.