"How to Kill Her" by Ana Maria Simo (High Risk)

Might Have Been Better as a Short Film

Without seeing the 15-minute film, I am guessing that Simo directed that project and then entered it into a film festival in hopes of securing funding for a full-length movie. That didn't happen. When the High Risk editors asked if she wanted to be in the anthology, she adapted the film into a short story.

How else do you explain Betsy the prostitute dominating the first few pages and then disappearing? In movies, characters disappear all the time. Actors have schedules. Filmmakers run out of money. Producers fail to secure locations. Start shooting a scene with a woman giving blowjobs and hand jobs in her car outside of a nightclub is expensive. If the rest of the movie is in one place, that makes sense. The producers ran out of money. Possibly, Simo envisioned a movie about two lesbian friends – a hardworking prostitute and a sad mentally ill woman. For the 15 minutes, she could only get the actresses together in one scene, but a longer movie would have explored their friendship.

It works as an experimental film, because audiences understand the limitations. During Evil Dead, Sam Raimi filmed the back of his crew member's heads to make up for missing actors. He called it the “fake Shemp.” In Evil Dead 2, he replaced an actress and dropped two characters entirely. No one cares.

These problems are less forgivable in a short story. Betsy is such a strong character that writing her off makes no sense. She cleans her hands with a towelette. She uses Listerine. When a john comes in her mouth, she takes it as a challenge to avoid in the future. She has standards. She never hustles a man standing next to a woman. She's remembers accidentally doing it once and coming home with only $75.

Then she comes home to an answering machine message from Maura that goes “I think I've killed her” and it's Maura's story. Compared to Betsy, Maura is boring. A good actress could make up for it, but in fiction we only have writing. Maura hallucinates her ex-girlfriend dead on the bathroom floor. Maura calls Betsy repeatedly in a panic. Betsy comes over in a panic and kicks in the door. Betsy yells at her. “She's having a good time, asshole!” and that's the last we hear of Betsy.

So it's Maura's story.

At a writing conference, John Green said that bad writing can teach an aspiring writer better than good stories. Bad clumsy stories reveal the process. A good story is seamless. This is a mess that never coheres into an actual narrative. Instead, it's a series of scenes and potential stories that the author never develops. Maura hallucinates her ex. Maura buys roses and wishes that she could punch her ex. Maura muses on Anna Karenina. Maura is so lonely that she considers fucking men again, but she doesn't want to fuck men. Finally, Maura imagines her ex fisting the new girl and punches things until she gets her head stuck in the headboard.

Everything about this story feels like an unfinished thought. As a fifteen minute movie with actresses and sets and music, it might have been diverting. Someone might have seen these disjointed scenes and thought “Yes, let's develop this into something.” As a short story in an anthology, it's a forgettable nothingburger.

There's no action or tension. There's a possible story out of Maura not knowing that Betsy is a fast food hooker, but Simo told us that Betsy told Maura about her job. In a more developed story it could have been a devastating meditation on people only hearing what they want to hear and the lies we tell ourselves. In this piece, it feels lazy. Everything else from Maura's jealousy to Catholicism to Anna Karenina is just lying there like a dead hooker in a bargain brothel.

Researching Ana Maria Simo is almost as frustrating. Almost every site about her repeats the Wikipedia biography. I couldn't find the original movie online. There are many sites praising her but they don’t go much farther than that. The best material on Simo is the Goodreads page for the novel that she wrote in her 70s. By most accounts, the novel is just as messy and unformed as this story. I wish that she had more success because I wanted to like this story. Since I couldn't like this story, I wanted to find out that she put something interesting and exciting out into the world.

If you want to buy her novel, here’s the Amazon page.

I might have a job. I’ll find out next week. But I will still need more money for support so if you can get a paid subscription or donate to my gofundme, I will be most grateful.

I used that fucking AI to put Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre on Audible. If you don’t mind that crap, feel free to buy Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre. The stories are just as messy as this one.