[This outstanding collections of short-stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Eugene Cross

2012, Dzanc Books

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary

Find it on Goodreads.

If Dzanc books isn’t on your radar as a go-to press for outstanding collections of short stories, it should be. Once a year, for the past three years, a collection by Dzanc has blown me away. Lauran van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us was my gateway drug, and the way she combined the far-fetched and everyday made the collection one of my favorite books I read in 2010. In 2011, I read Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass, laughing at the sometimes lunkish characters while shaking my head with recognition. So when I picked up Eugene Cross’s collection, Fires of our Choosing, I knew I was in for something good.

Cross’s book does not disappoint. A combination of Phillip Meyer’s American Rust and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, Fires maps the lives of working-class men and women who often find themselves a dice-throw away from being down-and-out, problems with love, family, and alcohol complicating perpetual crisis of the wallet and the heart. 

It would be easy to call Cross’s characters losers, but only in the most literal sense: almost everyone in this collection has lost something or someone–a father, a sibling, a wife, direction, hope. In “The Brother,” a house painter haunted by his past is forced to give his girlfriend’s addict brother a job and a second chance. In “The Gambler,” a recent widower finds solace in the familiar circus of a local casino. “Harvesters” follows a man following the harvest, trying to win over a woman he has jilted before, and will jilt again, his departure as predictable as the seasons. If these sound predictable, they are anything but, and Cross continually wrong-foots readers, keeping them guessing until the last page.

Stories by Ron Rash and Bonnie Jo Campbell, who often cover similar, bleak ground, can act as a series of downward strokes when collected, which can be exhausting to read, but Cross’s stories are more varied, and Fires largely avoids this. Some of the most effective stories are the ones where Cross leaves behind the familiar and branches into different voices. “Rosaleen, if You Know What I Mean,” which chronicles a boy’s failed rebellion in the face of his dissolving family, and “Come August,” a brief story told as a second-person address that tells of a babysitter who finds her life irrevocably changed when she steals a few moments of sleep, are two of the most arresting stories in the collection.

Opening “Eyes Closed,” the story of a two-bit pool hustler hoping to pay rent with a big score, Cross writes that “Bars and pool halls were not places you went to turn your luck.” His characters know this, yet these are the places they are drawn to, where their luck changes momentarily before inevitably running out. These are the places in Erie, Pennsylvania, that Cross brings to life so well, the places his characters might find dignity and grace in the incremental victories gained against life’s uphill struggle.

Similar Reads: American Rust, by Philipp Meyer; Jesus’s Son, by Denis Johnson; Burning Bright, by Ron Rash; and American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Harper Perennial, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

Find it on Goodreads

Love Begins in Winter appeared on my desk wrapped in silver paper this past Christmas. It wasn’t on my wish list, but I accepted it with all the love that was intended from someone who had a hunch about me and about this book. You might consider my review a belated thank you card for a favorite gift, or else a form of retroactive wishing for what I have already been given.

These are rare and wonderful stories, subtle in tone, ambitious in scope, and Romantic in vision. Each one performs a precise balancing act that spans multiple settings, voices, and perspectives, a feat rendered all the more impressive by a general lack of flash in the writing. Van Booy’s prose is direct and unadorned, as enjoyable to read as it is challenging in its depiction of conflicted emotions.

But perhaps my favorite thing about the writing here is the boldness of it. “Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained,” says Bruno Bonnet, the cellist who narrates the title story. “Music and love are the same.” Van Booy’s characters are prone to lofty speculations like this, and the success of these five stories lies in their ability to support their most challenging observations, persuading readers with precise, evocative detail.

In Love Begins in Winter, “Tiger, Tiger” best showcases the characteristic boldness in Van Booy’s writing. At first, the story appears to be a tale of parallel relationships, the narrator and her boyfriend considering a deeper commitment at the same moment that his parents’s relationship has come undone after decades of discontent. And it is partly about that, but the story takes a strange turn when the narrator discovers the lost writings of the family doctor, Dr. Blix Felixson.

Dr. Felixson’s musings, along with the narrator’s own experiences as a child and then as a pediatrician, transform “Tiger, Tiger” into a meditation not only on love but on innocence as well. The rest of the story is interspersed with excerpts from Dr. Felixson’s journals:

People’s expectations of coupling may be too grand, and thus disappointment, loneliness, and often pain are the inevitable adjuncts of something we thought would be the ultimate answer (an emotional cure-all) to our ongoing fears….

Humans must learn not to blame each other for being afraid, disappointed, or in pain. We perhaps might learn to view those we have special feelings toward as being our companions rather than our saviors, companions on the journey back to childhood….

Every adult yearns for some stranger, but it is really childhood we miss. We are yearning for that which has been stolen from us by what we have become….

These pronouncements could easily come across as a heavy-handed way of developing the themes of the story, all the more so for introducing a voice from outside of the narrator’s experience to deliver them. And perhaps they are heavy-handed, but the mysteries being addressed here–the nature of innocence, the purpose of love–are large enough, fundamental enough, to stand up to a little heavy-handedness.

This kind of directness requires courage in the face of abstraction and confidence in the power of the story itself to stand up under the gravity of its own grandest aspirations. In the end, the power of “Tiger, Tiger” is derived not only from the worldview of Dr. Felixson, but in seeing how the narrator interprets his wisdom and enacts it in her life, a life that may after all be very different from the examples that have been set for her.

Each of these stories is similarly built to bear up under weighty considerations: death, grief, love, loss, and time. They offer readers ambitious ideas about life and then send their characters around the world and into the past to find out what might be true for themselves.

Similar reads: The Secret Lives of People in Love, by Simon Van Booy; The Book of Life, by Stuart Nadler; The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Author:  Patrick Michael Finn

2011, Black Lawrence Press

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

Find it on Goodreads.

Patrick Michael Finn’s award-winning second story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, depicts the grim industrial nightmare and post-industrial hell of Joliet, Illinois.  Think of Dante’s Inferno and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” shuffled together and you begin to get a picture of just how grim this world is, and how pitilessly Finn depicts it, while still making us care about these characters stuck in their blighted urban Ninth Circle of Hell.  But when the damned are stuck in hell together, they do hellish things to each other, and nothing namby-pamby like the infernal and eternal talkers of Sartre’s No Exit.   No, these are all-American sinners, who take no prisoners, and have no pity for themselves, so why should they have any for their victims?

So in the course of the opening story, “Smokestack Polka,” a kid whose father has died of a heart attack on his walk home from his job at the Joliet railyards tries to kill the loathsome wife- beating thug who tries to put the moves on his mother, six months after his father’s death, at his cousin Reenie’s wedding.  The brick the unnamed narrator on the roof hurls down at Tomczak barely misses its target, and Tomczak takes the incident for an accident and concludes the story with, “But let’s get the hell out of here.  This fucking place is falling apart,” which, whether Tomczak realizes it or not, pretty much describes all the lives depicted in this powerful collection.

In the title story, “From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet,” Finn picks up this brick imagery, but uses it to describe the rats that another unnamed, almost teenaged narrator finds in his house, especially after their rat killing dog has died: “They were bigger than bricks and moved like blunt lengths of gray pipe on four legs…”  To the narrator’s growing frustration and horror, however, his parents are perpetually too drunk to even notice the infestation.  Well, infestation might be a little tame for this vermin invasion.  As in many of these stories, however, the narrator exacts a terrifying, and terrifyingly funny, revenge on his parents’ fog of inebriation.  I won’t spoil the pay-off, but it would not be out of place in a Poe story, only a lot grosser.

But Finn is just getting warmed up.  “Shitty Sheila” is a character study of a doomed woman who escapes a glitter factory in Paducah, KY, only to end up as an exotic dancer in Joliet, until she loses that less than rewarding job to drugs, drink, and a vile man; and then things get really bad.  But “For the Sake of His Sorrowful Passion” is both the lowest that Finn allows his characters to sink and at the same time, offers a glimpse of hope at its conclusion.  Another hapless teenage (Louis) protagonist lives in a foster home run by an immensely hypocritical woman, and attends a Catholic high school.  But he, along with some other students, are so inept  at sports and thus despised, they’re told not to bother participating during gym classes, so they hang out in the locker room, where the other sports-phobic boys, one in particular (who is repulsively described as “the dandruff eater”), force him to fellate them and whose body serves as a dart board for their ejaculations, which half excites and half revolts him.  Of course they’re found out, but the protagonist, being an orphan, is blamed for the incidents and the only one tossed out of the school.  He’s further betrayed by the woman who runs the orphan house, and exacts a brutal vengeance on her and on the hideous man who has made fun of him throughout the story.  Strangely, however, and satisfyingly, Louis finds a home of sorts by story’s end.

Finn’s writing is a marvel in all these stories.  He has the knack for a telling image (“By the time he turned twenty, Ray Dwyer looked like a movie gangster’s bodyguard.”—“Where Beautiful Ladies Dance for You”), but also the true artist’s ability to have his characters string soul denigrating insults at their defeated victims on a scale that Homer’s heroes, gloating over the enemies they’ve just slain in battle, might envy.  So an old drunk monster named Hudak hurls these imprecations at poor Louis, who is trying to run away on a “boat” he found: “‘What is our Fairy-Mary Louise up to out here?  What does our Miss Pussymoist have here so early?’”  Needless to say, Hudak gets his too.

Terrible things are done to and by terrible people in these stories.  Finn sometimes piles the horrors on so heavily, it’s hard slogging to keep reading.  More than a few times I felt like I did as a kid, while watching a horror movie, staring in repulsed fascination and turning away at the really gruesome and scary parts.  But Finn rewards a strong stomach.  He portrays characters blighted not just by urban blight but by their own severely circumscribed lives and life-chances.  Most of them are content to get drunk most nights and laid on Saturday night.  And one young very nasty thug shows a surprisingly tender side, in his love for his tropical fish collection.  A couple of characters escape, if only into the mercy of death or their dreams, and one or two actually make it out in one piece, but Joliet is forever seared into their hearts and souls.  As it will be in yours, if you dare enter this dread jungle.

Similar Reads: Alien Nation, Alan Catlin (Poetry); What Work Is, Philip Levine (Poetry); Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.; Mohawk, Nobody’s Fool, and The Risk Pool, Richard Russo

Author: Jennifer Egan

2010, Anchor Books, Random House Inc.

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

Find it on Goodreads.

The Internet probably doesn’t need another glowing review of A Visit from the Goon Squad, but I wanted to write one anyways, more for myself than anything else. Because I do love this book even though parts of it irritated me. Parts of it irritated me deeply, and yet I finished it in just a couple of sittings and then went around recommending it to friends and blathering about the story written as a series of power point slides.

When I first flipped through Goon Squad, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” caught my eye like a campus streaker: I couldn’t help looking again even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. I assumed the power point slides featured in a larger work, but when I realized that they actually comprised their own 75 page story, I prepared for the worst. Here come the gimmicks, I thought.

And I wasn’t wrong about the gimmicks; this book (whether you call it a novel or a collection of linked stories) is full of odd formal tricks and devices. I was just wrong about how well they’d all work in the end. Goon Squad is an ambitious experiment in narrative structure, successful in the extremes of its inventiveness and its willingness to overthrow all of our expectations about time.

I didn’t know it then, but I first encountered Goon Squad almost two years ago when a friend sent me something to read while I was recovering from surgery. “Safari” is about a domineering record executive named Lou on an African vacation with his kids and his new girlfriend. The story’s greatest strength lies in the shifting relationships between the characters which set the stage for disasters still yet to come when the vacation is over. The omniscient narrator reveals the future in short flashes that become more frequent towards the story’s close.

When I first came across Lou in “Ask Me If I Care,” Goon Squad’s third story, deja vu sent me skimming through the rest of the collection. “Safari” was the next story in sequence, and I reread it with a redoubled sense of doom, knowing not only the reveals about the future offered by “Safari” itself but a whole additional cast of characters who Lou was destined to cross.

I remembered, too, the exchange my friend and I had about the way “Safari” collapsed its timeline. My friend had mixed feelings about Egan’s “flash forwards.” He felt they opened the story to an epic narrative sweep, but sometimes it felt like a cheap way of “tacking on dramatics without really developing a story.”

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Eric Markowsky <> wrote:

Cheap is often a good word for these kinds of flash forwards. They can undermine a story by rendering the narrative present unimportant compared to the drama of the future. I’m okay with it here because I don’t think the story relies on it too heavily. They only appear towards the end, and though they certainly change the way you read the conclusion, the final moment happens in the narrative present and offers its own brand of drama.

Unearthing this exchange in 2012 felt strangely like collapsing my own timeline, the same way that rereading “Safari” two years later did. I could see the way I read the story then and the way I read it now simultaneously. I still agree with my old assessment of “Safari” as an individual story and the way that time works in it, but I see now that my previous assessment has nothing to do with “Safari” or with time as either works in Goon Squad.

Goon Squad is a continuous narrative with no narrative present. To say it flashes forwards or backwards misses the mark; there is no singular reference point from which to flash forwards or backwards. Each story begins somewhere new, and each subsequent story is embedded in the details of those that have preceded it. The collective story of Egan’s ensemble cast isn’t plotted so much as it’s collaged, overlapping characters in setting and time so they hide and reveal each other in turn.

This is why “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” works so well: structurally, the power point slides may be truer to the project as a whole than most of the book’s more conventional stories. The form allows events to coincide physically suggesting a variety of relationships in time. Descriptions written inside four overlapping circles suggest simultaneous realizations. Observations embedded in concentric circles suggest a ripple of thought radiating out from an initial idea. Each layout offers a slice of time, inviting readers to explore it along multiple axes instead of a singular line.

The book has its missteps–“Selling the General” struck me as so tonally different from the rest of the work that I felt like I’d watched twenty minutes of “Bananas” in the middle of “Annie Hall”–but the cumulative effect of Goon Squad is stunning. When I finished, I felt as if I’d lived as many lives as there were characters. I started turning back through the pages immediately, like going through the pages of an old scrapbook looking for memories I might have missed but which, I was certain, were still there somewhere.

Similar Reads: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; The Known World, by Edward P. Jones; The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman.

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)