Author: John Connolly

2006, Atria Books

Filed Under: Short Stories, Horror

I’ve still never read any of the crime fiction Connolly made his name with, but this is the third supernatural book of his I’ve tackled and loved: it’s just as good as the others. Perhaps as a result of his experience writing thrillers, Connolly has a real knack for building tension. The stories in this collection range from a few pages to over a hundred, but each is expertly paced and crafted. He manages to write stories that are taut and spooky without dipping into cliche or camp. His The Book of Lost Things reminds me of Stephen King at his best, and the mood and creativity of The Gates readily compares to Neil Gaiman’s work. This collection of scary tales marries those styles almost perfectly.

While there are vampires and the like in here, most of the supernatural subjects are pretty original. My favorite were those that told of hauntings by evil spirits, such as the old pagan gods of “The Shifting of the Sands” apparitioning from swirls of dirt to consume men’s souls. The child-nappping beast “The Erkling” and the possessing spirit of “The New Daughter,” who lures a child from her home to an ancient burial mound nearby while her father tries in vain to save her, are similarly great. These particular stories do great things with atmosphere–I found myself transported back to my childhood, reading Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books by flashlight.

Stories like “The Inkpot Monkey” and “Nocturnes” are very Stephen King-y with their cursed or haunted objects and susceptible subjects. And more than one story (“The Ritual of Bones,” “Mr. Pettinger’s Daemon,”"The Shifting of the Sands”) places demons amidst old institutions such as the clergy or a boarding school. There are submerged houses of the dead, passages to Hell, giant spiders in ancient caves, witches, vampires, slime ghosts, you name it.

The long-form stories that dot the book do a fine job of shifting gears. “The Cancer Cowboy Rides Again,” which opens the collection, is actually a departure from the rest of the stories, so much so that placing it first was a pretty bold move. It’s about a wanderer who is a sort of walking carcinoma. In order to ease his own pain, he must infect others with his curse, giving them rapid, incurable forms of cancer. It’s a cop-versus-bad-guy horror story, and a good one. Similarly blending horror and crime writing, “The Reflecting Lens: A Charlie Parker Novella” features a private eye on a case that turns up some other-worldy stuff and includes perhaps the most creepy character in the whole collection.

All told, there’s a lot of great horror stories in here. There’s not a single one I didn’t like, and since the subjects and styles vary so much from story to story, I suspect there are a lot of people that will find something to really enjoy here. Connolly is a great entertainer and storyteller, I can’t recommend his books enough.

Similar Reads: The Book of Lost Things (Connolly), Night Shift (King), Coraline (Gaiman).

Editor: Joseph Gordon Levitt

2011, hitRECord

Filed Under: Short Stories, Poetry, Graphic Novels

As the name implies, this is a short little book filled with “stories” that are mostly less than a sentence. Each bite-sized story is paired with a drawing: in a way they’re almost like one panel comic strips, but also not at all like that. While some are funny, some manage to plumb some nice depth, especially for their size. It’s not an impossible thing to do. (The not-exactly-true tale of Hemingway’s shortest story–”For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”–comes to mind.)  Most importantly this is a collaborative book, curated like a lit mag. The art is varied and interesting, and the range of the stories is pleasantly surprising. And yes, that’s the actor Joseph Gordon Levitt* who runs the show.

Here’s an example:

Tiny Stories is an attractive, if not substantive, little book; a nice thing to have on your shelf, or to leave out on a coffee table. To call it more than a diversion would probably be overdoing things, but it’s a good one. I wrapped up my copy to give as a Christmas present, but then decided to order another for myself. I can see myself quickly flipping through this many times before I’m done with it.

Similar Reads: Our own Eric Markowsky’s collaborative story, “Other Doors, Other Rooms,” over at Camera Obscura was in the same spirit as this.

[This book is currently being advertised on the site--that's how I found it.]

*more or less completely unrelated side-note, he’s the lead in a very smartly written movie titled Brick, a noir-style film set in a high school, which is one of my favorite movies of the last few years.

Author: Bradford Morrow

2011, Pegasus

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary

The Uninnocent is a collection of dark, but not morbid, stories which grow from or end in acts that on the surface seem quite vile: fratricide and murder, incest, animal cruelty, etc. Through skillful characterization and just the right quantity of acerbic humor, Morrow manages to take topics rooted in drear and craft enjoyable stories. Plausibility is not always there, and sometimes the plots work out a bit too conveniently, but as long as realism isn’t what you’re looking for, you’ll come away from this collection quite pleased.

My favorite of Morrow’s techniques is a temporal slight of hand he pulls a few times. He’ll set something up, then subtly skip ahead to an outcome, leaving the reader tantalized. For instance in the space of a page from “Ellie’s Idea,” we learn three things about Eleanor Mead: she is (or at least was) married, then that she is in some sort of moral if not actual trouble, then that “Waking by herself still felt strange.” What she’s fretting over and why a married woman is alone is left for the story to fill in. Similarly, in “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill” the teenage narrator, in talking about a girl he’d been spending time with, mentions kissing her “again” in the first reference to them ever kissing–leaving a big gap for the reader to fill in. This does a wonderful job of helping to characterize this secretive loner of a narrator in particular.

“Grover’s Mill” is probably the best story of the bunch, not only for the above moment. It’s put together well structurally, and also quite engrossing from a story standpoint. Wyatt’s father drowned himself during the broadcast of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radioplay for fear of the invading Martians (Grover’s Mill is the setting in which Welles version takes place, and the center of the real-life hysteria that it effected). His mother orphaned him not long after by drunkenly drowning herself in the same pond that swallowed her husband. This leaves Wyatt with his grandma and Franklin, a pompous know-it-all who Wyatt believes is pulling a con on his grandmother.

Wyatt (like the unnamed narrator from “The Hoarder,” and nearly all the book’s other main characters) is a bit of a delinquent weirdo who sees the world differently than those around him. But he’s not a bad person. He means well, and does a fine job of articulating his thoughts and emotions in the narrative. This is a recurring motif in the book, perhaps what Morrow means by uninnocent: his characters experience terrible things and perform terrible acts, but there’s a sort of purity at the root of it all. This book is full of monsters, but these monsters are some of the most human characters you’ll come across.

Other stories–like “(Mis)laid,” which uses an (almost) schizophrenic amount of parenthetical statements to characterize its (control freak) hostage-taker protagonist, or the title story which tries its best to tell a confession story without ever revealing what exactly is being confessed to–work to greater or lesser effect. None of these conceits drags a story down, but none really lift any above average either. On the whole this is an enjoyable selection of stories. The subject matter is dark for sure, but there’s a lot of positivity buried in here. At turns funny and touching on poignancy, it’s a book fans of short stories slightly edgier than you might find in the typical New Yorker should give a shot.

Similar Reads: The Outlaw Album (Woodrell); Give Me Your Heart, Tales of Mystery and Suspense (Oates).

[A review copy was provided. This book is currently being advertised on the site, I was unaware of this when writing the review.]

Author: Meg Pokrass

Press 53, 2011

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary

Damn Sure Right is a collection of 88 (by my count) flash fiction pieces in about twice that number of pages. In general, flash fiction is to fiction kind of like what haiku are to poetry: hard to isolate one from all the others and appreciate it on its own.  You need to take the collection as a whole since some flash fictions are more successful than others. This is not to say that Meg Pokrass’ collection is “uneven,” but some of the stories are better than the others, and when they’re good, her stories are really good, terrifically comical at the same time that they are poignantly tragic, all in the space of a page or two.

The whole book is compelling; Pokrass keeps you wanting to read more, even when some stories are less satisfying than others, not as cohesive. This is the challenge any collection faces, of course, poetry, short stories, essays, but with flash fictions, each is like a bump in the road, you haven’t invested too much time or commitment to any single one; you can put the book aside at any point and pick it back up again when you want.

Flash fiction partakes of all the classic story elements – a protagonist/narrator, conflict, and usually a sense of resolution, an image of completion, or explanation. Because the form is so compact, lots is left up to the reader to infer, and this can be the truly powerful thing about flash fiction, the way it engages the reader’s imagination, to fill in the blanks, connect the dots.

Take Pokrass’ story, “Thirty-nine.” Told by a nameless female narrator, it’s about a woman breaking up with her hunk boyfriend, a medical student but kind of slacker, you realize as you’re reading the story. She’s been an aspiring actress up until now but at thirty-nine she wants more stability, feels her age creeping up on her (“I’m squinting – accentuating my crow’s feet.”).  She’s taking real estate classes but hasn’t told her boyfriend, who likes the idea of her being an actress, as if it’s that glamour that appeals to him. It’s this idea he has of her and her own self-assessment that clash and result in her leaving him. None of this is explained, but it’s what we come to realize in the space of a few hundred words. The story concludes: “The wind, as usual, gusts strongly when walking directly north.  I have to push against it to move forward.” What a metaphor.

A common theme in these stories is people using other people, sometimes violently. John Updike once wrote of Ray Carver that his stories depict lives “beneath the threshold of any aspiration higher than day-to-day survival.” This sometimes feels true about Pokrass’s stories.  The characters are generally young, unsettled, looking to get some sort of advantage, often by exploiting others somehow. Or, as Pokrass writes in the story called “So I Drew Him a Poodle”:

I faced the door and decided to walk before anything worse happened, before I could tell him or he could tell me that everything was really fucked, had always been and would always be so…

Or again, in the story called “Crocodilian”:

I learned that my mother’s luck was a wan cup of Pepsi that has been out all night for a sick child, flat and then discarded.  On our stoop, luck cleared its throat like a Mormon missionary and walked away.

In “Her Bottom,” told by the less talented, less attractive friend of an aspiring actress (with an enormous ass), we realize by the end of the story what a soul-sucking person Haley, the talented actress is. Having milked her friend for comfort over a disappointing boyfriend, she winds up in a show on the Disney channel and it’s with a shock that the narrator realizes, hearing her own words of consolation parroted back, “She is using my inflection, my voice.” (She’s also lost her big ass, which leaves her with “no character.”) Other violations aren’t as subtle. Rape, physical and emotional abuse, theft, shabby treatment.

In the title story (one of the truly great ones in this collection) a woman is raped in some unspeakably violent way that we’re left to imagine from the way she’s approached by her attacker and her slurred speech, broken jaw afterward.  But the collateral damage to her relationship with her ineffectual boyfriend may be even more moving.  Years later when her husband takes her from behind she recalls the rape – as the reader does, by this very act of intimacy – and she can still vividly summon “his flannel shirt and the smell of his fear and the things he did that he thought would help.”

But for all the bleakness we encounter in these stories, Pokrass is exuberantly funny, fun to read.  Her sentences are gorgeous.  In “Extinction” she writes, “The Big One, the nine-pointer on the San Andreas fault is looming like an angry landlord.”  In “The Mask of Politeness” she observes, “The rest of them turn toward me as if I am a piece of sharp bone that made its way into the dinner soup.” In “Terribly Light and Small,” commenting on the décor of a health food store:  “The word ‘antioxidant’ is displayed everywhere you look in here, like mouse ears at the Disneyland Hotel.” “Blood Sugar”:  “Life feels like being stuck in a bus, next to a skinny bitch – the kind that keeps blinking.” “Foreign Accent Syndrome”: “Her fancy-sounding accent whizzed overhead like a dragonfly – harmless, colorful.”  The story “Zelda” begins, “My sex drive walked back in the door with a broken suitcase.”  You can’t help but chuckle, even as you recognize the drab, depressing reality that underlies the words.

A cover blurb by Frederick Barthelme (with whom Pokrass works as an editor for the online literary magazine Blip - formerly Mississippi Review) says Pokrass “writes like a brain looking for a body.”  This may be another way of saying the stories are looking for a plot. At their least successful, some of these stories just don’t hang together, and concluding sentences that should be a revelation or a summing-up just aren’t.  Even allowing for the possibility that the fault is with me, the reader, at times I “just don’t get it” after reading and re-reading some of the stories, usually those less than a page, like “Everything Surprises Me” and “The Magician” (but even here there’s a marvelous image: “…cabs call like geese, or the mothers of missing children.”). Still, even after reading these more inscrutable flashes several times, you suspect that there may actually be a body there that goes with the brain.

Similar Reads: Wouldn’t You Like to Know, by Pam Painter and They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, edited by Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney

Author: Ben Loory

2011, Penguin

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.

I really wanted to like this book. Though to be honest, my expectations were based entirely on the cover art and jacket copy praise-quotes. This collection, Loory relates in his Acknowledgments section, is the product of a writing workshop–perhaps if I’d known that beforehand I would have exercised more pause than I did.

Loory has his moments: he’s got a very nice way with words and is quite adept at turning a clever phrase. He is a very good writer–that is immediately evident upon reading his work. But this book’s marriage to its conceptual premise is its undoing. This is a 200ish page book full of mostly 2-5 page stories which all (all) follow the same structure.

Here are the opening lines to 5 of the 40 stories, which I’ve (honest) chosen at random:

The boy and the girl live in a small town.

The octopus is spooning sugar into his tea when there is a knock on the door.

A man is walking through the woods when suddenly he sees a Bigfoot.

A man and a woman fall in love and are married, and are happy in every single way.

A hunter returns to his village one night with a severed human head in his hand.

Spot the pattern? You can see how that could get tedious. After a few stories it slips into a pattern which slips into a monotonous hum. Each of these stories has a wannabe allegorical air to it, sometimes to an almost haughty degree. And while I suppose it’s an admiral thing to attempt, it led me to be not at all surprised when I read the collection’s history as a student project. Even Kafka’s Aphorisms is full of duds, and while Loory has talent, Kafka he is not. For every story in which Loory hits an emotional nail on its head, he has three strikeouts. Too often the stories devolve into arbitrary randomness:

The man walks out the door and is eaten by a lion.

Ouch, he says, and gets up and walks on.

So basically Loory’s greatest fault is trying too hard.

Still, the book’s not unworthy of your time. There are some gems to uncover, such as “The Martian.” Moreover, the New Yorker story appended to the end (“The TV”) is quite strong. But his clear reluctance to include it at the expense of his vision (“The following is a longer story not part of the same project included here at the publisher’s request”) only serves to highlight this book’s biggest flaw: not its composition but its conceit. The publisher should have made more requests.

Loory took a one-note idea and ran with it; if his next book utilizes more variety and he attacks it with the same fervor (and writing prowess), it will be a must-read.

Similar Reads: Museum of the Weird (Gray), The Outlaw Album (Woodrell), Guadalajara (Monzó)

Author: Kelly Link

2011, Jelly Ink (self-published)

Filed Under: Horror, Short Stories, Short-Run.

Get the book.

This is a short, little volume collecting, as you might have guessed, three zombie stories. Each of these stories, all by Kelly Link and originally published in different books, is good in its own way, but what really makes the collection worth notice is its consistent originality. There aren’t really any shambling corpses, no survivors banding together in a boarded-up house. One of the stories doesn’t even have actual zombies–or any sort of supernatural element–in it.

“Some Zombie Contigency Plans” is a very solid short story that will appeal to fans of realist fiction. It’s about a young ex-con, Soap, who cruises around crashing parties in his spare time. He finds his way into a house party  thrown by teenagers and gets to know a young girl in her parents’ bedroom. The narration does a great job of making Soap sympathetic (largely in part to his escapist fantasies of surviving a zombie attack), but there still a looming tension that surround his actions and uninvited presence in the house.

Taking an opposite tack, “The Wrong Grave” uses a wry sense of humor to keep the reader interested. Link creates a clever narrative structure, with the slightly distanced narrator shifting focus between characters as the story goes on. It opens on Miles Sperry, a bumbling schoolboy who digs up his dead girlfriend’s grave to get back some poems he had put in her casket that he wants to send in to a contest. He finds an unfamiliar, and very animated, tattooed and wisecracking dead girl in what he thought was his sweet Bethany Baldwin’s grave. This dead girl would fit better into Scrooged than Night of the Living Dead, which I think is why I found her refreshing. And on top of this, the story still manages to reach a point of poignancy as it follows her to its end.

The most traditional of the stories, from a zombie fan’s perspective, is still pretty out there. “The HortLAK” is about a convenience store situated on the edge of an area called the Ausible Chasm. This is a place where the dead roam and possibly have a settlement–no one’s really sure since they mostly keep to themselves. Occasionally the zombies shuffle into the store with a handful of leaves, or something else with no apparent value. The store owners, hoping to tap a new retail treasure trove, experiment with new ways to barter with the zombies. They stop using money, to the bewilderment of the few human shoppers that come through. The story gets pretty interesting, based mostly on the strength of its clerk characters, Batu and Eric, and its sense of humor:

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you saw they were from some other place, where things were different: where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere, were just a little bit different.

Like its companions, this story manages to succeed on more than just one merit. In addition to the humor, its creativity is to be admired (there are both CIA operatives and mind-reading pajamas), and it, too, adheres to a more traditional realist structure and pacing (not as common in horror and supernatural stories as you’d think) that make it an easy, pleasant read. All three of these stories are good, far better than I expected when I opened the cover. If you’re looking for some light, unique reading for your Halloween weekend, have one of these printed up and sent to you.

Similar Reads: Zombies Vs Unicorns (Black, ed)

2011, Little, Brown and Company

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.

Get the book.

A pervasive sadness oozes from this collection of semi-linked short stories. This book is a short, grim affair with most of its stories centered around poverty and violence, and most of its characters lacking education or, often, perspective. All this, bolstered by Woodrell’s sharp, atmospheric prose, makes for a very strong collection.

I call it semi-linked because, while characters do not populate multiple stories, there is a unified tone at work. Woodrell’s characters are vulnerable and often cornered. There are murders and self-defense killings here. There are rapists here. He relates the tales of soldiers returned from war and arsonists destroying out of boredom. The stories all take place in the Ozarks, with many locations and allusions appearing more than once. Twin Forks comes up a lot. There is even a story titled “Twin Forks” about a shop owner forced to pull a shotgun on aggressive ruffians. It comes up again in “Woe To Live On,” set a hundred years in the past and depicting lingering remnants of the Civil War. The shared setting and mood that transcends the time and place of these stories does a lot to create a satisfying and cohesive whole.

“Black Step” is the strongest story in this collection. It’s about a soldier with seemingly undiagnosed PTSD. He wanders his sick mother’s home, achingly trying to get back to war. A trailer trash gold-digger ten years his senior convinces him to wed her–he learns later she only wants him to die so she gets the death benefit payout. We learn the soldier’s father committed suicide when he was a boy, as he relates in the below quote. He internalizes it all, hoping only for the approval to go back to war. The book is worth picking up for this story alone. It exemplifies the mood, as well as Woodrell’s abilities:

He waited all of a calm spring night for some fresh serious pain to come into his heart and kill him. Twelve coiled hours hunched at the kitchen table, frozen peas dumped on the tabletop, a shotgun leaning against the back of his chair. He arranged rank after rank of cold green peas, took aim, and flicked each toward the kitchen sink and kept a secret score. Then he gathered the peas from the sink and floor, rearranged them across the table top, and flicked them all again[...] At some point inside that addled calmness the heavy curtains parted and he thought he spied a good way out, an answer to it all–stepped to the back stoop and sat and erased his problems in this world, maybe not the next. He died gushing blood on the second step of the back stoop, the step we keep painted black.

This collection is full of symbolism and mired in emotion; the characters are gritty and dimensional; the outlook stark. It’s very good. Woodrell is the author of Winter’s Bone, which was turned into a movie that garnered some attention recently–and appears to have shared the grim grey-sky weight of heavy emotion . Apparently he has written a few other books as well. I’ll definitely be tackling more of his work when I have the time. If you’ve never heard of him, and you like realism in your short stories, this is a book to check out.

Similar Reads: Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Proulx), Where I’m Calling From (Carver).

[A review copy was provided.]

2011, Regan Arthur Books

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.

Get the book.

In seven longer-than-average short stories, Stuart Nadler takes on fathers and sons, lovers and ex-lovers, philandering philanderers, sibling rivalries, and orphans of all ages. These stories are expansive, opening landscapes of regret and redemption all along the Northeast Corridor. Each one boasts moments of hard-earned clarity rendered with a degree of precision that made me pause to admire their craftsmanship, craftsmanship I found all the more impressive for the complexity of the stories themselves.

While Nadler’s prose is simple and direct, the tales he tells tend to distort conventional relationships almost beyond recognition. In one, a girlfriend hires a surrogate temptress to test her boyfriend. In another, a man, his lover, her husband, and their children all add up to something like a family. In other hands, setups like these could easily descend into melodrama; in Nadler’s hands the result is something much less predictable and much more memorable.

In “Winter on the Sawtooth,” the narrator shares his wife knowingly, if not happily, with her lover. Their son, Josh, home from his first semester of college for Thanksgiving, isn’t crazy about the idea, and he’s not about to hide it. “Sawtooth” offers my hands-down favorite moment in the collection, and I can’t think of a better example of Nadler’s ability to pry a moment wide open, exposing it to the light of multiple perspectives. It’s this ability more than anything else that allows his characters to appear fully formed and finely flawed amid their sordid stories.

Having declared a truce, father and son, more like brothers or old buddies, sneak out to an abandoned mill to have a beer where the local teens drink. Josh wants to show his father pictures from his first semester, specifically pictures of a girl he’s met, Sarah. The narrator is pleased to be bonding with his son, but he can’t help feeling out of place playing with his son’s laptop in the middle of the woods.

At first, the narrator’s not sure what to make of what he’s looking at, standard college pics of parties and dorm life. But then:

My interest is piqued because of the sheer volume. He has so many photographs of Sarah. Pictures in which she is the focus, in which she is posing, in which she is wearing black tights and patent leather shoes, wearing merino wool and a foolish pillbox hat, wearing Levi’s and canvas shoes, wearing a loose green-and-white baseball-team ringer T-shirt. And there are pictures in which she exists by accident, as an incidental ornament in someone else’s portrait, a blurry figure in the back of a Chinese restaurant. For the few minutes I look, and for days afterward, I’m left with a dark, discomfiting regret that, for all my effort, I can’t seem to lose.

“Here,” Josh says. “Let me show you a picture from he day I met her.”

To have such a thing, I think.

Between the son’s enthusiasm and the father’s regret lies the gulf of a life lived, well in some respects, poorly in others, but past and passing regardless, and certainly not nearly as well documented as the life of his son. That Josh is oblivious to what an older generation might find amazing about something he takes for granted only compounds his father’s amazement. Josh sees what the pictures mean to him now; his father sees what they could mean to him later and envies his son.

Each story in The Book of Life contains a few moments like this one, moments that convey before and after, as if the image were its own negative. Moments like these sometimes stood out even above the stories themselves, so that I find myself more eager to recommend the book as a whole over any particular entry in the table of contents. The length of these stories (the shortest is over 20 pages, the longest is over 40) and the care taken to develop character suggests that Nadler is comfortable in a longer format. According to his website, he’s working on finishing a novel. The Book of Life is very good; I’m betting his novel could be even better.

Similar reads: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Packer), The Feast of Love (Baxter), The View From Stalin’s Head (Hamburger)

[A review copy was provided.]

2011, Knopf

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.

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It’s been a few years now since Millhauser’s excellent Dangerous Laughter came out, so I was definitely eager to get my hands on this book and read some new stories by one of my favorite authors. We Others only contains 7 new stories, but this was hardly a let down. The new material is substantive and the 14 selected stories form a very fine compilation of stories I was happy to read again. Both new readers and his fans alike should be satisfied.

Millhauser often builds scenarios in commonplace settings, but somehow manages to give them the aura of a fairytale world (without the fairies). He is a fabulist, and for many of his stories his trick is to impose our real world, or some bastardization of it, upon that skewed reality.

Sometimes, stories like “The Invasion from Outer Space”–in which a yellow space dust made of single-celled organisms blankets the earth but doesn’t seem to cause any harm–pull this off through the first person plural, a tough voice to write in successfully. Through this lens readers can take in the oddity of the broad world before them and compare it with their own. Millhauser doesn’t need to set the stage in these stories, because the stage is his story. “The Next Thing” has a singular narrator but accomplishes a similar type of storytelling. It begins as a Wal-Mart-like megastore, evolves into underground habitations, then an entire corporatized town, and eventually an authoritarian government of a sort.

Of course, not every piece is structured like this. But the setting is always carefully and cleverly created through his sharp, selective imagery: a broken escalator collecting dust in “The Next Thing,” a bowl of malted milk-balls in “We Others.” Millhauser’s one of my favorites for many reasons*, but most of all, because he’s a wizard with words. Unlike some of his plots, his descriptions are rarely large in scope. Instead they tend to focus on a few select things placed precisely around his scenes. The result is imagery as potent as any writer can muster, at once lush and sparse. He renders his worlds in sepia hues, and like an old photograph or a memory of a far-away place, some things are in sharp focus, while the faded background exudes feeling more than detail:

Ancient wallpaper showed faded scenes of some kind repeating themselves all over the room. Albert, who seemed more and more excited, led me up the creaking worn-edged stairs to my room–a bed with a frilly pink spread, a lamp table on which lay a screwdriver with a transparent yellow handle–and quickly back down.

This comes from my favorite Millhauser story–indeed one of my favorite short stories by any author–titled “A Visit,” and included in this collection. That relatively short description of Albert’s tour of his house tells you more about Albert than pages of exposition and backstory could. This is the tale of a man who travels to the New England woods to visit his former college roommate (Albert) and meet his wife. Albert’s wife, it turns out, is a two-foot bullfrog named Alice. Alice doesn’t talk, or wear clothes, or do anything a normal bullfrog wouldn’t do. Still, their grotesque relationship affects the befuddled visitor, touches him.

The strongest of the seven new stories, “Tales of Darkness and the Unknown, Vol. XIV: The White Glove,” reads a bit like Henry James writing the kind of pulp horror the title implies. A teen boy’s closest friend begins wearing a white glove on her left hand, covering something that clearly makes her itch, and reduces mobility. But she won’t talk about it, or remove the glove to reveal her ailment. He becomes increasingly preoccupied with the glove, beset with a desire to undress her hand:

The glove sat there, exposing its two buttons. They were looking at me. They were daring me, with little white smiles, to get on it with. And an anger came over me–at the grinning white buttons, and the smug little white glove, and the fat white moon, and the careless house, which entrusted itself to the night, and at innocent Emily, lying there too peacefully, though with a slight look of strain between her eyebrows, and at the sky, and the stars, and the rushing-apart universe, and the vain fool who stood in the dark bedroom like a killer with an upraised knife–like a strangler with a cord in his hands–like a boy lost in a forest.

The story is a wonderful exploration of obsession, and pairs very nicely with another of the new works. “Getting Closer” is a short, bittersweet depiction of the clash between sentimentality and emotional maturity. It concerns a young boy headed to the river with his family for a summer day full of swimming and picnicking. He pauses to contemplate the happy day before him, and finds himself paralyzed with a dread of shattering the halcyon moment; by taking in the day, he realizes like Adam eating fruit in Eden, the day will be gone forever, and, one can infer, his innocence with it.

Of the previously published stories in this collection, Millhauser says in his author’s note that he “chose stories that seized my attention as if they’d been written by someone whose work I’d never seen before.” I like that. But he still managed to collect here a pretty representative exhibit of his excellent work in short stories. If you’ve never read Millhauser before, this new collection is the perfect place to start.

Similar Reads: The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (Millhauser), Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Shepard), Museum of the Weird (Gray).

[A review copy was provided. *Disclaimer, Stephen Millhauser was one of my college professors so I'm admittedly a little biased.]

2011, Open Letter

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.

Get the book.

Postmodernist stories, in their self-referential, pastichey stubbornness tend to appeal only to a select audience. And, sadly, there isn’t all that much of it being written today (a bit of a snake eating its own tail–not sure which follows the other). Sure, there’s glimpses of it in some more mainstream stuff, and a few of the old guard are still around, but it’s few and far between. And a lot of what’s left feels pretty dense and stodgy, and certainly unfriendly to the casual reader. Gone is Donald Barthelme. So imagine my surprise when my brother–not someone I’d peg as a reader of much postmodernism–recommended to me a book of short stories (translated from Catalan) that does a very fine job of delivering short, satisfying, and mostly-accessible stories right out of the postmodernist mold.

My favorite story is one that would appeal to most any reader that has graduated above airport fiction through that relatively minor rite of passage that is reading Kafka. “Gregor” has the best opening line of a story I’ve read this year:

When the beetle emerged from his larval state one morning, he found he had been transformed into a fat boy.

The reference is obvious, and the story goes on to tell an inside out version of “The Metamorphosis.” In another story (“A Hunger and a Thirst for Justice”), Robin Hood steals so much from the rich and delivers so much to the poor that their roles reverse. This story, like others, has its clearly politicized angles. But like any great story of this ilk, it delivers its lesson with a subtle hand, allowing it to merely entertain if that’s all the reader want’s out of it. The opening story “Family Life” is about a family with a tradition of chopping off a ring finger of children aged 9, and explores the degradation of a family tradition left unhonored.

Not all the stories are metafictional or pastiche, ans some are less accessible than others. The surreal “Centripetal Force” I don’t think I can even describe. “Life is So Short” starts with a man and a woman getting into an elevator, and ends with the same man and woman getting into an elevator.

This book is very short and very good. Most of the stories are 5-10 pages. They are smart, funny, and for the most part very easy to read. Even the stories more ethereal in substance can be read an enjoyed by the casual reader. Guadalajara is a great way to spend part of an afternoon if you want some fun-sized fiction to scratch that literary itch.

Similar Reads: Prick Songs & Descants (Coover), Museum of the Weird (Gray), Forty Stories (Barthelme), Collected Fictions (Borges)