By Clare Hickey
Claire Bateman’s collection of hybrid short-shorts and poetry-like objects entitled The Pillow Museum (University of Alabama Press, 2025), is a masterclass in storytelling. The book chases every vibrant thread it lays out and weaves itself together into an unnamed shape. Bateman’s collection may be fantastical, but it is not nonsensical. The plots, characters, and conflicts are largely situated on some parallel plane of surrealism, but in Bateman’s dreamscapes, the feelings are real. Empathy is at the heart of the book, and even as Bateman creates inventions almost beyond belief, giving us pillows that house the dreams of the heads that used to rest there, she also creates physical spaces for which we can’t help sympathizing.
Despite the strangeness, the themes of Bateman’s work are not ambiguous. The opening story “Home Art” describes a woman playing a glass piano to keep the lights in the house running while her husband solves puzzles in the newspaper. She finds herself banging the keys raucously purely for the act of creating light at his bidding, playing songs backwards and soullessly, until she stops. The husband rises from his puzzle and begins to force her hands to play. She sheds her weight of female labor by entrapping him at the keys in her rebellion of noise: “The light came up even brighter as she smiled in her victory.” The story is a single page and yet the conflicts of a marriage are made clear.
The titular story “The Pillow Museum”, published in the New Ohio Review, provides a kind of thesis for the collection. The narrator works at a museum that houses the pillows of famous murderers, Olympic surfers, and IRS attorneys, where tourists visit to sleep within the dreams of others. The story ends by imagining what teachers leading field trips will say about the exhibits: “Think of it… all those sleepers dreaming alone together!” It is a fitting line for a collection so curious about human connection. Aren’t we all sleepers dreaming alone together? When we read this book, Bateman has us dreaming the same dream in separate beds.
The story “Pockets” describes an encounter between an older man and a woman with a pocketed coat in Central Park. He informs her that the park they are in is merely an illusion, and that he is entrusting her with the real park to keep safe in one of said pockets. The story unravels like an improvised ideation. Lines like “Her grandmother’s pockets were packed with Iowa loam so that whenever she felt homesick, she could pinch a bit out to savor its taste on her tongue” are a delicious blend of heart and ludicrousness.
The Pillow Museum is humanistic and empathetic—sometimes a little freaky—composed of science-fiction-y and absurdist pixels. Ray Bradbury meets Jorge Luis Borges meets Lydia Davis meets Yorgos Lanthimos. Bateman enters a shared dream with us and acts as a guide comparable to the white rabbit of Wonderland. Like a surrealistic improv impressario, she hosts parties and plays games where we associate along with her, creating odd physical spaces and the inverted rules. As she does, Bateman writes as if she’s able to see a world just beneath the veil of ours, and this collection of uninhibited writing alters and delights.
Clare Hickey is a writer from Dayton, Ohio.
New Ohio Review 