My Heart Is Either Broken - Megan Abbott

 My Heart Is Either Broken - Megan Abbott

My Heart Is Either Broken follows Joe Abercrombie’s Some Desperado in Dangerous Women. It is a very different story, and an unusual one for Dozois, as it belongs to neither science fiction nor fantasy genre. It was collected in Laura Lippman’s The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, but it is not really a mystery story either. It belongs most clearly to the tradition of noir, and Megan Abbott has edited an anthology of noir stories and has also written a study of film noir.

It is a tense and disturbing portrait of a couple trying to cope with a horrifying event. Abbott chooses the limited perspective of the husband, which works particularly well to reveal the suspicions that surround his wife. She uses the husband’s defence of the wife, the way in which others in her community fail to understand her, to build up to a shocking moment of doubt and suspicion. By the time the story ends, doubt and suspicion have erased any possibility of happiness. Even relief will be dogged by fear and doubt thereafter.

My Heart Is Either Broken is a powerful and haunting story which is well worth reading, and re-reading. If you have not read anything by Megan Abbott before, it is a very good starting point.