The trouble with short story collections

Oh, I do love a good short story and based on the one I have read so far, Laird Barron can sure write a scary, nasty one. I read Old Virginia (which you can read here) which features many of my favorite story elements: wicked scientists, the CIA, battered tough guys, an ancient evil and a surprise connection to a historical mystery. All of it written briskly and creepily.

Great that it started the collection the Imago Sequence. If he had led off with something weaker, I might not have persisted. With short story collections, I find that each weak story makes me read a little faster and I then miss the nuances and details that make short stories enjoyable, so I think a good story is weak and read a little faster. Pretty soon I have given up on the book. So what to do? In this case, Steve read it first and told me the stories to read and which to skip. That is my kind of friend.

King in the New Yorker

I am pretty excited for the giant new Stephen King novel. He is not universally loved, but I love how he made horror novels work. There is a new short story, not explicitly horror, although it is horrific, in the New Yorker. Read it here. I've not read them, but here is a new Lethem and a new Saunders.

Some really sad stories

What do you get when you put Winesburg, Ohio , a bevy of Jim Thompson characters, and the songs of Big Black and the Drive By Truckers in a blender? You get the brief, brutal and sad stories of Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff. Pollock was born in the actual town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, a town which may have named after a fistfight. The citizens do their best to live up to their town's heritage by filling their days with casual violence, thoughtless sex and a wide range of substance abuse.

It sounds like tough reading, and it is. Some of the stories are tragic as in the case where a mentally damaged recluse stumbles upon a brother and sister rutting in the woods or in the case where a boy tries to earn his father's love by viciously beating another boy. Others are merely sad as when a moves in with one of the town's many brutish thugs in hopes of finally finding a friend. In all these cases, things end poorly.

So why should you read these stories? If you can stand the sadness, it is the characters. Pollock has a real sympathy for his characters, probably developed in working thirty years in a paper mill. He has a clear-eyed view of the lives of the marginalized and the daily challenges they face. He doesn't provide much, if anything, for hope or redemption and even makes a point of the same sad stories repeating across the generations.

This book was short and theoretically you could knock it out in a evening. The stories were just too intense for me to do that. Depending on your viewpoint, that could be good or bad. My vote is good.

Happy, happy, happy all the time

With a title like You Must be This Happy to Enter, you might expect bucket loads of bitter irony. This third collection of stories by Elizabeth Crane is actually filled with laugh out loud humor, strange turns of events and stories that look realistically at the world, while maintaining the belief that life is worth living.

These stories are some of the best I have read in years, and remind me of another favorite, Ted Chiang. Like Chiang, Crane sets up bizarre situations (a woman goes through life with words on her head, a woman becomes a zombie and is put on a reality TV show, a couple's child turns into Ethan Hawke and so on) and then sees how they react. These people find that yes, their lives are strange, but they are still good and worth living.

A major theme of the book is realizing that you are different (usually bizarrely so) but living with it rather than ranting, collapsing or withdrawing. Don't worry, Crane doesn't go all Free to Be You and Me on you. No, it manages to portray a sincere belief in goodness without becoming cloying or cheap. I think she manages this by focusing on the individuals and not trying to present lessons. The humor doesn't hurt either. As I mentioned this is a funny book.

One of the better, albeit more sad and touching than funny stories in the book is called Promise. Its a list of promises that a hopeful mother is making to her eventual child. You can read it here.

Since this is a short story collection and they tend to be spotty, I planned to read a few strories each night, but I found myself powering through it all at once. I guess I need to get her other two collections.