Horse Girl Fever by Kevin Maloney Reviewed by Hally Rae Winters

Horse Girl Fever by Kevin Maloney 

Reviewed by Hally Rae Winters 

Publisher: Clash Books

Publication Date: January 7, 2025

ISBN: 9781960988362

Pages: 140

Horse Girl Fever is a tight fourteen-story collection by Kevin Maloney. This collection opens with the juicy and heart-wrenching first line, “Two days before Halloween I caught my wife having sex with my best friend Dave in a position we’d never tried in seven years of marriage.” In this opening story, “Ghost”, the narrator goes on a drinking binge over the course of a few days and finds himself at a Halloween party with Abraham Lincoln. He dresses the narrator in a last minute costume as a ghost effectively splicing the night into how people treated him before and after he wore a costume. He ends the night walking with a hoard of other zombies “haunting the night” and asking questions later. 

The journey all of these narrators take starts on the sentence level as each sentence moves toward one direction and spits the reader out onto a totally different path than expected. The drug-and-alcohol-induced fever dreams of these stories are like playing chutes and ladders. In the midst of these characters experiencing devastating heartbreak, Maloney’s prose cuts through the mess of their lives in these beautiful and profound ways. In the first story, “Ghost,” ethereal images flit through the story even though the narrator is down in the dumps: “I snorted it and watched a thousand white butterflies migrate across a memory from my childhood.” Throughout the collection, different images of the Godhead are evoked, almost like the Holy Spirit is haunting the collection.

Many of these stories are punctured at a moment of crisis or in between one for these narrators which is a very exciting way to find a character. In “King of the Pit” we see a young man being tossed about in a mosh pit, and the youthful energy of that story is transformed into existential premature nostalgia with the line, “I don’t think I’ll ever feel like this again.” In the following story, “Wrath of the Red-Eyed Wizard”, we’re given a coming-of-middle-aged story in contrast to the latter coming-of-age story. The first thing we learn about the narrator is that he’s pretending to not be the person he is: a man who is “39, from Portland, and loves sports.” His whole life is on the ridge between his younger adulthood and middle-aged adulthood. His loneliness is anchored in his loss of youth which he paints onto younger women under the guise of desire, but which he understands on some level to be his desire to have a “minute lost in the nadir of their youth,” followed promptly with his desire to then “disappear and be dead forever.” He feels he is in between youthfulness and death, and doesn’t yet see the stretch of life to be had before him that is available and waiting. He need only reach out.

He begins crying in front of the young nymph-like intern at the office and excuses himself. Frustrated, he punches his face over and over. As he discovers that he’s broken his nose, his coworker Janet who is around the same age as him knocks on the door. She tells him to lie down and what prompts him to obey is how she reminds him of someone’s mom, tapping into the Freudian motif throughout the collection. But it isn’t until he is on the floor of his office where he has been working for ten years that he sees a totally new perspective. The ceiling, the way it’s spackled, reminds him of birch trees. He sees beauty in something for the first time where he has only seen mundanity which translates to a new perspective of Janet, her smile, her touch. They have sex in his office right then. He discovers that “middle-aged women are incredible at sex. The world is full of them. It’s like finding out that topsoil can get you as high as cocaine.” He realizes that the world is full of beauty, and it was only because he got into a different position that he was able to see this. This collection really looks at the different positions a man can be in and how they can completely alter the trajectory of his life. From the opening line of the collection being about a narrator seeing his wife in a new position with someone else and how that sets off a chain reaction of events, to the many altered states that open a character’s mind in the same way that religion can sometimes replicate or vice versa. These new positions, new ways of seeing things open the character’s lives up to newer and untapped potential whether that be the millions of middle-aged women in the world or a new life in Nunavut, all of these new angles offer the chance at rebirth. 

In “Nativity” a teenage boy is on the precipice of becoming an adult and what ends up skyrocketing him toward it is the prospect of becoming a father. He’s been hooking up with this girl, Astrid, who takes him to the Mormon ward when four teenage Mormon boys set up a Nativity scene right in front of them without making eye contact. The narrator in that moment decides to pursue a career with his dad’s electrical contracting company, and as his life goals pillow up, Astrid vomits. He realizes his moment of religious clarity was just the weed and alcohol. Then as he and his friend are having a jam session, they both realize independent of one another that they won’t be famous one day. The come-down from childhood hits as adulthood sweeps in, and his friend gets the call that his girlfriend is pregnant. 

The whole of this collection is a non-stop fever dream of beautiful and honest prose in which each story propels one to the next. Every story has its own impact and yet the collection is divinely intertwined. Maloney’s ability to find beauty within existential dread and in all corners of the earth is what catalyzes so many of these character’s lives. The last image in the collection is of the narrator holding a baby born via the turkey baster method, and he realizes how useless men are. He talks about how men one day will be made more useless and childbirth will be managed without them. Men will then have to go into the forest and “our sad songs will echo through the birch trees.” It’s a beautiful wish into the world to fill it with a bunch of Jesuses.

Kevin Maloney is the author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim and Cult of Loretta. His fiction has appeared in FENCE, Barrelhouse, Rejection Letters, HAD, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Hally Rae Winters is a writer from Los Angeles. Hally was awarded the CalArts post-grad fellowship as well as a residency with Sundress Publishing. Her work was a finalist for Flash Frog’s flash contest and shortlisted for Fractured Lit’s “Elsewhere Prize”. Her fiction and book reviews can be found at Thirty West, The Los Angeles Review, Laurel Review, and more.

6 August 2025