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The Floating Order
The Floating Order is a unique and innovative collection of stories. Erin Pringle's world is filled with the dreamlike, nightmarish narratives of children: children in danger, children at the mercy of their parents, children in all kinds of trouble. Children who continually rise, return, and haunt the pages. "Erin Pringle's stories are true wonders - a beautiful mix of intimate feeling, thick syntax, and dangerous language." Michael Kimball
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
133 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2009
173 people want to read
About the author
Erin Pringle
11 books48 followersOriginally from the rural Midwest, Erin Pringle now lives in Northwest with her partner, Heather, and son, Henry. She's the author of a novel, Hezada! I Miss You (2020) and two story collections, The Whole World at Once (2017) and The Floating Order (2009). She received an Artist Trust Fellowship (2012) and was named a finalist in the Kore Press Short Fiction Award (2012). Other honors regarding her work include four Pushcart Nominations, being shortlisted for a Charles Pick Fellowship, and named a Notable Best American Non-Required Reading.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 19, 2009
Full disclosure: Erin is a friend. We studied and worked together for a few years in Texas. However, I would be giving this great collection five stars even if I had never heard about Erin Pringle before.
I had heard Erin read some of these stories, so her voice was with me as I was reading this book. It's one of those books one cannot easily forget. The stories are dark but beautiful, sad but wonderful, heart-wrenching and peaceful,...all at the same time. I'm already looking forward to Erin's next book and cannot recommend this one enthusiastically enough.
I had heard Erin read some of these stories, so her voice was with me as I was reading this book. It's one of those books one cannot easily forget. The stories are dark but beautiful, sad but wonderful, heart-wrenching and peaceful,...all at the same time. I'm already looking forward to Erin's next book and cannot recommend this one enthusiastically enough.
November 4, 2009
For full disclosure, I must say that I know Erin personally. I've been a fan of her writing ever since I had the pleasure of being in workshop with her years ago. This collection is beautiful and heartbreaking and lush and lovely and challenging in the best kind of way. Buy this book and support the debut collection from an author that I'm sure will have a long and prolific career!
February 13, 2019
The wonder of The Floating Order, a collection of short stories by Erin Pringle, is that it is impossible to pigeonhole. At their heart the stories have a darkly fantastic edge, but this aspect is more often than not a component of the character’s view of the outside world.
Skewed perspectives dominate, particularly i9n the first half dozen or so stories, which offer the fragmented observations of damaged personalities. In ‘The Floating Order’ a young mother commits the most heinous of crimes; as a sustained study of mental disorder it’s hard to beat, delivering as it does an achingly melancholic and horrific impact. In ‘Cats and Dogs’ a young girl waits anxiously for her mother to drop out of the sky like rain so they can return to some semblance of a normal life. ‘Losing, I Think’ focuses on the loss of children in all its guises.
Some stories stray into more macabre territory. ‘Sanctuary’ tells the story of a furniture removal man, tasked with the job of moving an upright piano from one church to another, who makes a truly gruesome discovery. What makes the story stand out is the thoughtful approach Pringle takes with the piece and the unexpected denouement. As ‘Halfway There’ unfolds, every parent’s nightmare is realised with an appalling, slow-motion intensity. In the surreal ‘Digging’ a young brother and sister try to come to terms with their homicidal mother and search for ways out of their imminent dispatch. ‘All I Have Left’ has something of the folkloric feel about it, but with the dark brutality of early folk tales before they were sanitised in more modern times.
Most of the stories are told from the viewpoint of a child and are all the more effective for that, allowing Pringle to illustrate genuinely awful acts and situations with an innocence that heightens the tension and drama. ‘Raw as Hands’ shows how a young girl copes with a twin sister addicted to scrubbing herself clean perpetually. In ‘Rabbits’ a little girl with measles outfoxes her nurse with shocking results. ‘Skeletons/My Fourth Birthday/Hell is Channel Three’ portrays a four-year-old’s perspective on the loss of her father to war. ‘Why Jimmy’, one of the highlights of the collection (along with ‘The Floating Order’, ‘Sanctuary’, ‘Halfway There’ and ‘Rabbits’), brilliantly catches the casual, and yet innocent, brutality of a young girl committing a bizarrely grisly act. Sown into the narrative is a healthy leavening of humour, all generated by the young girl’s unintentionally comic observations. This same innocence in the face of terrible events is used to good effect in ‘Every Good Girl Does Fine’, which revolves around a chain reaction of events at a choir practice that result in a bloody finale.
It’s Pringle’s ability to get inside the mind of a child and see the adult world from their perspective that is the real strength of this collection. Another is the shifting nature of reality from this perspective. There is also very little in the way of gratuitous detail when it comes to revealing exactly what happens; it’s all the more chilling when your imagination is engaged in this exercise.
Skewed perspectives dominate, particularly i9n the first half dozen or so stories, which offer the fragmented observations of damaged personalities. In ‘The Floating Order’ a young mother commits the most heinous of crimes; as a sustained study of mental disorder it’s hard to beat, delivering as it does an achingly melancholic and horrific impact. In ‘Cats and Dogs’ a young girl waits anxiously for her mother to drop out of the sky like rain so they can return to some semblance of a normal life. ‘Losing, I Think’ focuses on the loss of children in all its guises.
Some stories stray into more macabre territory. ‘Sanctuary’ tells the story of a furniture removal man, tasked with the job of moving an upright piano from one church to another, who makes a truly gruesome discovery. What makes the story stand out is the thoughtful approach Pringle takes with the piece and the unexpected denouement. As ‘Halfway There’ unfolds, every parent’s nightmare is realised with an appalling, slow-motion intensity. In the surreal ‘Digging’ a young brother and sister try to come to terms with their homicidal mother and search for ways out of their imminent dispatch. ‘All I Have Left’ has something of the folkloric feel about it, but with the dark brutality of early folk tales before they were sanitised in more modern times.
Most of the stories are told from the viewpoint of a child and are all the more effective for that, allowing Pringle to illustrate genuinely awful acts and situations with an innocence that heightens the tension and drama. ‘Raw as Hands’ shows how a young girl copes with a twin sister addicted to scrubbing herself clean perpetually. In ‘Rabbits’ a little girl with measles outfoxes her nurse with shocking results. ‘Skeletons/My Fourth Birthday/Hell is Channel Three’ portrays a four-year-old’s perspective on the loss of her father to war. ‘Why Jimmy’, one of the highlights of the collection (along with ‘The Floating Order’, ‘Sanctuary’, ‘Halfway There’ and ‘Rabbits’), brilliantly catches the casual, and yet innocent, brutality of a young girl committing a bizarrely grisly act. Sown into the narrative is a healthy leavening of humour, all generated by the young girl’s unintentionally comic observations. This same innocence in the face of terrible events is used to good effect in ‘Every Good Girl Does Fine’, which revolves around a chain reaction of events at a choir practice that result in a bloody finale.
It’s Pringle’s ability to get inside the mind of a child and see the adult world from their perspective that is the real strength of this collection. Another is the shifting nature of reality from this perspective. There is also very little in the way of gratuitous detail when it comes to revealing exactly what happens; it’s all the more chilling when your imagination is engaged in this exercise.
January 25, 2010
Amazing book! Difficult in the most wonderful ways stories can be. You will be haunted by the images, you will be struck by the beauty of the language.
January 12, 2010
Trippy, disturbing, amazing writing, and stories and images that stick with you.
October 29, 2017
The absolutely perfect October read!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews