by Ray Vukcevich
ISBN: 1931520011
This is a collection of truly weird short stories.
Make that very weird, very short stories. By short, I mean on average they are under ten pages, as there are 33 stories in a book around 250 pages long. By weird, I mean these kinds of things happen: a guy thinks cats are wind-up things, people start growing spacesuits on themselves like a rash and float up off the planet, cockroaches take up residence in a guy’s nose, another guy tapes himself at night to see if he snores in hopes of proving his ex-girlfriend wrong only to find out there are people in his room, paper bags on the heads of a family sitting around the breakfast table avert a comet strike, and when nanobots take over a mom two siblings throw their parent over a bridge repeatedly with a bungee cord to get them to leave.
If you are the kind of person who believes that some desserts are so rich, so sweet that you couldn’t possibly eat the whole thing, and you might just die if you had two, then you are probably the kind of person who would need to read a book like this in small doses, instead of all at once. All at once, the weirdness can be overpowering, I suppose. And you do have to be in the mood for it. But if you, even in secret, think that those people who couldn’t finish the dessert are crazy, because it tastes so good of course you want more, if only people wouldn’t be horrified if you reached for another, then you should be all set and read this book straight through.
The publisher has put several of the stories online, so you can get a taste.
Vukcevich has a vivid and somewhat twisted imagination, and a displays a decent sense of humor in his stories. His writing is self-assured, which is a good thing, because if he is going to convince me that a tree is growing out of somebody’s head he needs to sound like he knows what he is talking about.
This is from “Mom’s Little Friends”:
“Please, don’t do this, children.”
“Shut up, Jessica.” Ada spoke not to our mother but to Mom’s interface with her nanopeople. When Dr. Holly Ketchum (Mom, that is) introduced a colony of nanopeople into her own body, it was seen by many as a bold new step. It had, after all, never before been done under controlled conditions. Nanotechnology held such promise — long life and good health, a kind of immortality, really.
So how did it work out? What one word would sum it all up?
Well, “whoops” might be a good choice.
Vukcevich has one other book, Man With Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces, which I am now going to look for. His fiction is hard to describe. I could throw a lot of labels on it — surrealism, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and all might fit, (or might not) — what matters is the end is that I think his stories were strange and fun.
