Pocket Full of Teeth
By Aimee Hardy
Review by Chloe York
Pocket Full of Teeth
Aimee Hardy
Running Wild Press
$19.99
978-1960018533
September 13, 2024
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Flannery O’Connor meets Shirley Jackson meets Stephen King in Aimee Hardy’s debut novel, Pocket Full of Teeth—a slow-burn, southern gothic frame story about grief, mother/daughter relationships, and the circular, iterative nature of story-telling.
Pocket Full of Teeth follows four women across a 30-year span of time—Eddy, Cat, Sarah (Cat’s mother), and Beatrix (Eddy’s mother). Eddy’s narration comes in the form of a police interview transcript. She is being questioned after her family locket is found in the bottom of a well with a dead body on the grounds of a creepy mansion and its even creepier rose maze. During the interview, Eddy reads aloud from a manuscript dug up on the same property years before that her historian mother Beatrix had been analyzing. Beatrix’s point of view is included as footnotes within the mysterious manuscript, which follows the story of teenage Cat as she navigates the death of her mother Sarah and her new life under custody of the abusive Ray, Sarah’s long-time romantic partner. What follows is a deliciously gothic tale interwoven with ghosts, fairy tale beasts, and an unforgettable ending perfect for those of us who love to say, “good for her.”
From the opening interview, Hardy deftly establishes a sense of intrigue. Whose body is in the well? What will Cat’s manuscript reveal about it? How reliable are any of these narrators? Hardy handles the challenge of writing from four different perspectives with great skill—each narrator has their own effortlessly distinct voice and the epistolary technique is perfectly utilized.
Beatrix’s footnotes provide ample world-building of Cat’s little Southern town and a deeper look at the fairy tales and myths Cat references. Eddy’s police interview provides an
anchor that ties each narrative together, while Sarah’s journal entries convincingly track her descent into madness and the bittersweet revelation of exactly how she died. In addition, Hardy’s use of fairy tales and myths works extremely well in establishing another layer of magic and intrigue to this gothic tale. The minotaur in the maze, the faun Pan, and the princess who shrank her captor monster until all that was left of him was his teeth in her pocket.
At its heart, Pocket Full of Teeth is a story about stories—how we “hold stories in our hands, and we have hope, even when we feel all is lost. We long for a happy ending where everything is okay because it gives us hope that all could be okay with us as well, that someone might hold our stories in their hands and hope that everything will turn out okay for us too.” This unexpectedly warm message against a background of chilling death and violence is what makes Pocket Full of Teeth so special. That even in the face of loss, abuse, and hopelessness, we might reclaim our power through words and walk away with our own pockets full of teeth.