Eros and Order: Love That Creates and Destroys

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By TJ Brown

Carl Parsons has a gift for finding the exact moment when a life starts quietly unraveling, and Eros and Order is built entirely around those moments. The question running through every story is deceptively simple: what happens when desire refuses to stay inside the structures we've built for it? The answers he finds are anything but simple, and that's what makes this collection linger.

The opening story, which shares the collection's title, sets the tone perfectly. Paul Patterson is arrogant, Sandra is trapped, and their marriage is described with an image that stays with you long after the page turns. Their vows exchanged under a trellis whose vines twined tightly, "for they were perfectly artificial." That's the kind of writing that does real work. Not decorative. Diagnostic. Sandra's slow reckoning with what motherhood and marriage have cost her identity is rendered with the kind of psychological precision that makes you stop and reread certain passages just to feel how precisely they've landed.

"Perfect Girl" gives us Serena, a teenager whose overbearing gangster father controls her life even as she quietly plots something far beyond his ability to contain. It's a story about love against impossible odds, and about what forgiveness costs when the person who needs forgiving has also done something unforgivable.

And then there's "The Story of Aunt Jenny," which is unlike anything else in the collection. A folktale about a runaway slave who disguised herself as a man to survive on the Underground Railroad in West Virginia, told in a warm first-person voice that feels like a grandmother leaning forward in her chair. When Parsons writes directly to the reader at the end of that story, the intimacy of it is genuinely startling and completely earned.

What ties all of it together is Parsons' measured, literary prose and his deep respect for the complexity of the women at the center of most of these stories. This isn't a collection that judges its characters. It simply watches them, with patience and genuine curiosity, as they try to find their way through lives that turned out to be harder and stranger than anyone warned them.

Strongly recommended for anyone who loves literary fiction that takes relationships seriously enough to make them uncomfortable.

About the Author

Carl Parsons

Carl Parsons is an author with a diverse background in both the sciences and humanities. After spending 22 years in management roles at TRW Automotive, he shifted his focus to teaching English and pursuing his passion for writing. His short stories have appeared in publications such as The Broadkill Review, The Raven Review, Scars Publications, and Spillwords Press, while his poetry has been featured in Literary Yard and Plum Tree Tavern.

Carl has been recognized for his contributions to literary fiction, receiving numerous literary honors such as Contributor of the Year from Spillwords Press and a Best Political Thriller Award from Literary Global for his novel Trios: Death, Deceit, and Politics. He also moderates two chapters of a local book club. Carl holds a BA and MA in English from West Virginia University as well as a MS in Manufacturing Management from Kettering University and is a member of West Virginia Writers, Inc.