STARRED Book Review: Other Minds and Other Stories

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

In Bennett Sims’ Other Minds and Other Stories, the mundane is not mundane, but a space where one can enter a jungle of anxieties, hopes, and fears.

Bennett Sims’ Other Minds is a collection of deep dives into its characters’ thought processes. They are quiet, intellectual stories, often taking place over no more than a couple hours of the character’s life in which very little action actually occurs. However, as the characters spiral, the tension grips tighter. As suspicions snowball into certainties and questions mushroom into conspiracies, the simple process of writing an essay or reading a book turns into a question of life and death.

Consisting of twelve stories, Other Minds begins and ends with two ekphrastic pieces. The first, “La ‘Mummia Di Grottarossa’” is a single page, opening the book with a description of the mummified body of a Roman girl in a museum in Rome, spelling out her epitaph, bringing this bit of history into the eerie present moment.

But while these moments of ekphrasis are fascinating, the stories wedged between them cover a vast array of subject matter, from the cerebral freakout of a man intent on killing his backyard chickens in “Pecking Order” to the detective in “The Postcard” who enters a world slightly askew from the reality he remembers. The stories don’t only vary in length, but in subject matter and theme. While “The Postcard” may have a noir leaning, “Unknown,” in which a strange number calls the protagonist’s cell phone, is as unsettling as a psychological horror story. 

It’s Sims’ penchant for the unsettling that is most thrilling about the book. The two-page short short, “A Nightmare,” bends the world uncanny when the dreamer sets foot in a field strewn with an endless line of grocery carts. The protagonist of the novella-length story, “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” faces his own anxiety over a fellowship proposal letter, a frustration that builds to a point of tension close to a psychotic break.

Sims masterfully draws the reader into each story, each mindscape, until the reader themself feels at the brink of explosion or collapse, and Sims does so with minimal action, almost no external force. The hero and antihero, the tension and conflict, all of it exists inside the character’s head. 

The seduction of this book wouldn’t be possible without Sims’ smooth and eloquent prose. Whereas an ekphrastic piece about a mosaic medusa inlaid in a parlor floor may sound un-enthralling, Sims embellishes the scene with rhythmic prose: “Books are just sculptures that don’t erode: they extend mortal forms across immortal time, preserving impermanent pasts for an infinite future.” His prose alone is an engine that can sustain the reader’s momentum even when literally nothing is happening on the page; nothing, that is, except for the mental acrobatics of a questioning mind. While the vocabulary is academic and possibly not the most approachable, its sonic beauty carries the reader through even the most elaborate sentences, dancing to the rhythm of thought. 

Though showy, flashy, and linguistically extravagant, Other Minds is a simple book with a simple quest at its heart: to understand the minds of other people. Often the protagonists get nowhere, such as when the aforementioned Fellowship-seeker, intent on understanding what the reader of his application will expect, comes to ridiculous conclusions. Other times, the protagonist botches the job. But it is the intent to understand these other minds through literature, through the act of reading, these other minds with their labyrinthine mental blocks and penchants for doubt or intensity, that is at the heart of the book as a whole. Each story asks the reader to reach beyond themselves into the inner workings of the protagonist and to understand someone other, someone else. 

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