The Cornstalk Man
by Daniel Crocker
Reviewed by Christine Miller

Christine Miller has a BA in Creative and Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. Her day job is government consulting and her night job she can't talk about. In her spare time, she reads books and occasionally shares her opinions with the people that will listen to her. Thanks for listening.

copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved

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Daniel Crocker’s, The Cornstalk Man, is a tale of an eight-year old girl growing up in rural America in 1970. Sis, the protagonist, narrates the story of the Thompson family, Cynthia, Will, and Sis (who’s given name is Rebecca) and their Momma as she struggles with manic depression. The story begins with Sis as an adult remembering the year she was eight. Her narration begins with Momma in an angry, manic phase roping Will and Sis into writing inappropriate messages in manure on the lawns of some local townspeople in the middle of the night. The story continues through one and a half bipolar cycles, and Momma’s entrance into another "black funk". In addition to Momma’s cycles, Sis watches her sister, Cynthia, a beautiful and loose high school graduate, try to make something good out of her life, and her brother, Will, go through puberty and begin to stand up to Momma. Momma, in her wicked manic state, tries to ruin the hopes and dreams of her children and the people they love; the children, in turn, have to come to terms with their Momma and the parts she has made them play as her pawns.

The Cornstalk Man is not an innovative story. The formula is one of growth and loss of a child at the hands of someone they love. Due to the lack of depth of the story and its characters, it’s hard to feel the highs when Momma is manic, or Sis’s fear when Will tells her stories of the Cornstalk Man. Crocker does a good job of narrating in an eight-year old girl’s voice, however, the veil of the adult re-living the experience adds an element of monotone to the story that makes it hard to get in touch with the character’s feelings. To break the monotone, Crocker writes to provoke a reaction with his excessive use of cuss words, over-illustration of manic depression, and an uncomfortable scene of incest and molestation. These things would not be so bad, except that they do not move the story along. The only thing that moves the story along is Momma.

Besides the character development of Sis, Momma, and Will, Crocker falters in the development of his other characters used blatantly as props to move the story along. They come and go so easily that you are left wondering if they were necessary in the first place. For instance, the scene described above where Sis and Will write messages in manure introduces the character of the local doctor. This doctor, it seems, might be a useful character in bringing to light Momma’s manic depression, but instead he is dropped from the book within a few pages without any follow through. We are introduced to a third-grade girl with an eating disorder and her family, the marijuana selling student, the third grade teacher who becomes Cynthia’s husband, and of course, the Cornstalk Man. Some of these characters could add a great deal to the complexity of the story and relationship of characters, but we do not see Crocker explore these possibilities. He stays firmly fixed on Sis and Momma, and in Momma’s absence, Sis, Will and Cynthia.

The pages keep turning because Momma and her behavior move the reader through the story. She is at times like a great hurricane about to hit ground, and at others nothing but a shadow. Throughout it all, she is still the force that moves Sis through her life, and the reader through the story. It is a pity that Momma is medicated with Lithium by the end of the story, at which point, the story changes direction and ends too simply. The reader is time-warped into the future of an adult Sis and left without a sense of resolution or closure. If anything, adding the adult’s input at the end diminishes the story’s importance and makes it nothing but a memory, a ghost, just like Momma and the Cornstalk Man.

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