Guest post written by Pocket Full of Teeth author Aimee Hardy
Aimee Hardy is an author in Birmingham, Alabama. She has various short stories published with Running Wild Press, Stonecoast Review, and other literary collections. She received a Pushcart nomination in 2019 for her short story “Paper” and is dedicated to telling stories in unique ways. Aimee is married with two kids and loves to get lost in nature or disappear into a good book with a warm cup of tea. You can find more about Aimee on her website or by following @aimeenhardy on Instagram.
Her book Pocket Full of Teeth starts as the police interview of Eddy Sparrow after a body is found. As she answers the officer’s questions, she mentions a mysterious manuscript hidden in her recently deceased mother’s desk drawer. The manuscript is about a young girl named Cat who returns home after her own mother’s death to find her house haunted. As Eddy reads Cat’s story, her own secrets emerge, and she begins to experience strange phenomena: wet footprints, phantom phone calls, and nightmares. But a book couldn’t be haunted, could it?
Storytelling is an ancient art, one that is often built on the tales and myths that came before. As authors, we weave these pieces of history and lore into our narratives, allowing them to resonate in new, powerful ways. In Pocket Full of Teeth, these influences are alive, shaping both the landscape of the novel and the complex web of emotions that characters experience.
1. Southern Superstitions – Haint Blue
The Southern Gothic tradition is steeped in the mysticism and folklore of the American South. One particular superstition that influenced the tone of Pocket Full of Teeth is the belief in “haint blue.” In Southern folklore, painting porch ceilings or doors in a pale blue hue is thought to ward off evil spirits—haints—from entering a home. This superstition finds its way into the novel as a physical and spiritual barrier. The color itself becomes a boundary between life and death, reality and the otherworldly. Much like haint blue offers protection from malevolent forces, Pocket Full of Teeth presents characters struggling to keep their own demons at bay, both the tangible and the psychological, and underscores themes of vulnerability, isolation, and survival.
2. The Little Mermaid
Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid may seem like an odd influence for a Southern Gothic novel, but it touches on a central theme in Pocket Full of Teeth: transformation. In Andersen’s story, the mermaid yearns to become human, even though it means giving up her voice and enduring immense pain. The concept of changing one’s very nature, of enduring hardship to achieve a dream, resonates deeply with the protagonist’s arc in Pocket Full of Teeth. Much like the mermaid, the characters are willing to make sacrifices to transcend their circumstances, but they, too, are haunted by the price of those transformations. The novel questions what we are willing to give up to escape our pasts and whether such escape is even possible.
3. Greek Myths – The Minotaur and the Maze
The myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth is a potent symbol of entrapment and confrontation. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth is an elaborate maze designed to confine the Minotaur, a creature that is part man and part beast. This motif of a maze becomes both a literal and metaphorical device in Pocket Full of Teeth. Characters are trapped not only in the physical landscape of the South, but in emotional and psychological mazes of their own making. Their attempts to navigate these mazes—both external and internal—mirror the Minotaur’s struggle for identity and freedom within his own darkened prison. The novel asks the reader to consider what it means to be monstrous and whether the monsters we fear most are the ones within us.
4. The Mad Hatter – Tea Parties and Madness
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland introduces us to the Mad Hatter and his chaotic tea party, where time is meaningless, and madness reigns. This surreal, topsy-turvy world parallels the distorted reality that surfaces in Pocket Full of Teeth. Much like Alice, the protagonist of the novel finds herself in a world where the usual rules no longer apply. The sense of time slipping, of tea parties standing as a veneer for something far darker, draws a direct line between Carroll’s whimsical madness and the unnerving atmosphere in the Southern town. The tea party in Wonderland becomes a metaphor for the disorientation felt by those who live in places where reality is constantly bending, whether through superstition, grief, or fear.
5. The Tooth Fairy
Perhaps one of the most unexpected influences on Pocket Full of Teeth is the myth of the Tooth Fairy. In popular culture, the Tooth Fairy is a benign, almost whimsical figure, leaving coins under pillows in exchange for lost teeth. But the novel flips this myth on its head, transforming it into something darker and more ominous. Teeth in Pocket Full of Teeth are not symbols of growth and innocence but are instead talismans of power, control, and mortality. The exchange of teeth becomes a currency of fear, with the novel examining what we lose as we age, as we experience trauma, and as we confront our own mortality. The Tooth Fairy’s presence looms large in the novel, reimagined as a figure of foreboding, a harbinger of loss rather than comfort.
These five tales—each with their unique sense of magic, mystery, and menace—form the backbone of Pocket Full of Teeth. By pulling threads from superstition, myth, and fairy tale, the characters’ stories become a world that is both familiar and deeply unsettling, where the past is always present and the monsters are all too real. In the end, storytelling itself becomes a labyrinth, one that readers must navigate as carefully as the characters within it. But will the reader find their way out or will they be trapped forever with the monster inside
