“It was too long” has become a refrain of mine after finishing most books, television series, or movies. Modern media often doesn’t know when to leave. Hugh Sheehy knows when to leave. And he knows how to leave the reader wanting more. Nothing shows mastery of a language better than brevity, and each of the thirteen stories in Design Flaw by Hugh Sheehy exemplify this effortlessly. 

 

My favorite stories were the titular “Design Flaw” and “Demonology, or Gratitude.” Magical realism and literary fiction gave birth to these strange but familiar tales that haunted me long after finishing the collection with their visceral descriptions of the otherworldly  — a half cat, half monkey in a suit spouting philosophical musings and a dirty bubble entering and exiting human bodies at will. 

 

But it was the stories in which Sheehy focuses on men and their human failings that disturbed me the most. Sheehy forces us to observe the parts of masculinity that I’d consider the most uncomfortable to look at — the parts that I will cross the street to avoid, the parts that cause me to click “block” without a second thought. 

 

Both “The Secret Self” and “Everything is Going to Be Okay” capture so well the pitiful ache that I feel when I see a once strong man who has turned feeble, dependent, and sad. No matter if that strength was once used for good or bad, I find myself feeling sympathy for a man as he becomes small. Sometimes the evil in a bad man appears to erode with his mind and body. Sheehy acknowledges this and challenges it. Yes, the strength to self satiate is gone, but what is left is a blind hunger and two empty hands clawing with abandon for purpose and reassurance. 

 

Though the stories in Design Flaw set the reader up for a big, messy climax, each one ends like the close of a book rather than a shot of a gun. Together the reader and the protagonist of these stories experience the world around them with a mixture of disgust and tenderness and do the only thing that you can when confronted with “[a] design flaw,” something or someone so “thoroughly corrupted, [we’re] not sure how to fix it” — walk away. 

​

- MMM