The stories in Erika Krouse’s collection Save Me, Stranger are haunting and imaginatively told.
The Los Angeles Times wrote of the book:
“Surprising…Powerful…Krouse’s narrators are far from perfect; they’re messy, problematic and human, and all the more interesting for their contradictions. Save Me, Stranger is the kind of collection whose stories stick around even after they’re done, inviting you to sit with the questions they raise, the discomfort they provoke and the beauty on which they shine a light.””
In her own words, here is Erika Krouse‘s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Save Me, Stranger:
My newest book, Save Me, Stranger, is a collection of twelve short stories set all around the globe, each story revolving around themes of rescue. I picked a song for each story:
- For “The Pole of Cold”: “Arctic Icemusic,” by Terje Isungset (feat. Beatrice Deer, Radik Tyulyush, Evie Mark & Maria Skranes). “The Pole of Cold” is about the young female Siberian mayor of the coldest town on earth, and what happens when she meets a tourist whose parents caused her father’s death. This song blends traditional culture (Siberian throat singing!) with modern conventions (throat singing beat-box, what?) to create something new yet old.
- For “The Piano”: “Devotion,” by Liz Story. “The Piano” is about a piano salesman trying to sell a desecrated Steinway with a secret. I play this song on the piano often. I love its tenderness coupled with restraint, and its constantly shifting and interrupted time signatures, like the song can’t decide whether it’s in the past, present, or future.
- For “North of Dodge”: “Get Behind the Mule” by Tom Waits. “North of Dodge” is a grittier story than the previous two, featuring a teenage runaway/orphan who gets a job driving an ice cream truck through Omaha’s ganglands. The story and the song are both about defying your assigned role in life, but also the need to work your ass off, because no choices or chances come easy.
- For “Eat My Moose”: “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” by Ella Fitzgerald. “Eat My Moose” is about two Alaskan veterans—Collum and Bonnie—who become professional euthanizers to cosmically ward off their own deaths. This song has prominence in the story (you’ll have to read it!) and…well, Ella.
- For “Save Me, Stranger”: “The Night We Met,” by Lord Huron. “Save Me, Stranger” is about a cleaning woman/single mother almost killed in a convenience store holdup, but a teenage boy steps in and dies in her stead. I love the lyrics, “I am not the only traveler who has not repaid his debt,” and “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you.”
- For “When in Bangkok”: the third movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata in B-flat major, Op. 83. “When in Bangkok” is told from perspective of the 12-year-old daughter of a pedophilic sex tourist, on family vacation in Thailand. For me, this song is a soundtrack of the protagonist’s bewildered mind as she navigates Bangkok’s Red Light District, determined to prevent her father from committing crime.
- For “The Standing Man”: “Chonlima” by Kodo. “The Standing Man” features a Tokyo ramen shop worker and an overworked American expat trying to discover the secret to the worker’s perfect memory. The Kodo song features five drummers in rapid and perfect unison—the synchronicity of Tokyo working life that both story characters submit to and struggle against. Like the protagonist of this story, Kodo musician-athletes live in communal isolation, with work-monk lifestyles built on unrelenting discipline.
- For “Jude”: “Houdini’s Box” by Jill Sobule. “Jude” features a young woman obsessed with her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor with a secret name. This song reminds me of the relationship between the two of them—separate from all other realities, enclosed in a box of pain that can hold them but nothing else, not even life.
- For “Fear Me as You Fear God”: “Janie’s Got a Gun” by Aerosmith. “Fear Me as You Fear God” is about a woman who drives to Colorado to flee her deranged husband. She hides in a mountain B&B that’s haunted by a ghost with a thirst for revenge. I’m probably being over-the-top with this song, but who cares because it’s badass.
- For “I Feel Like I Could Stand Here With You All Night and It Would Be the Worst Night of My Life”: “Scrapyard Lullaby” by Chris Whitley. “I Feel Like” etc. is about a grandpa working at a consignment store selling racist artifacts, and a customer who challenges him on his values. I like how Chris Whitley is trying to reconcile ideals with reality in this song, “searching the scrapyard for my dirty crown.”
- For “The Blue Hole”: “32 Flavors” by Ani DiFranco. In “The Blue Hole,” a pregnant college student is trying to figure out her options as she tests for her scuba certification in New Mexico’s Blue Hole. She and DiFranco strain against roles and double standards, trying to find a new definition of themselves as they come of age.
- For “Wounds of the Heart and Great Vessels”: “Not Alone” by Patty Griffin. The story is about a woman who, after a disastrous almost-date with an anesthesiologist, discovers that the near-stranger hasn’t eaten or slept for a week after accidentally killing a patient. This Patty Griffin song is, for me, what people often need—a simple offer of help, to see us through the worst times of our lives.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Erika Krouse’s playlist for her memoir Tell Me Everything
Erika Krouse is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, winner of the Edgar Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Housatonic Book Award; the story collections Save Me, Stranger and Come Up and See Me Sometime, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Patterson Fiction Prize; and the novel Contenders, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Krouse’s fiction has been published in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, One Story, and more. She teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and lives in Colorado.