The title story in this collection is darkly funny and will be recognized as such by anyone who has spent time in cubeville. I liked this story the most.

It isn’t that everything was a let down after reading the first story. I was drawn to the workers in “The Bridge”, disturbed by the narrator in “I Run Every Day” and appreciated the un- and intentional humor in “Officers Weep”. “Somoza’s Dream” is by far the longest story in the book, and in it Orozco shows what he can do with shifting perspective, but it didn’t get to me the way some of the others did. Presidente in Exile’s story wasn’t as compelling to me as the bridge painter’s, or the warehouse worker’s, or the temp’s. Orozco has a knack for identifying grinding foolishness in the modern workplace.

I’ll be curious to see what else Orozco writes.

The weird vintage photographs on the book cover drew me in. They are compellingly weird: whole-head masks and a coiled tube; a sad, jacketed boy in a bunny costume, and an eerily doubled reflection among others. If you don’t think these photos sound interesting, you can safely skip this book and the rest of this post. If you do think it sounds interesting, you’re probably wondering if it is as good as it seems.

The story is good — there are more strange photographs, and secrets, and special abilities. If this sounds at all familiar, it must be because you’ve read some of the most popular young adult titles ever: not just Harry Potter, but Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, too. And it appears it will be the first in a series, as a bidding war for the movie rights resulted in the announcement of a sequel. (I believe the book is nearly always better, though if Riggs gets his wish and Tilda Swinton plays Miss Peregrine, I will definitely go see it in the theater.)

So it is a good story. I want to say the book is great, but the writing falls a bit short of the magic I’d want to feel to say it was great. (By way of comparison, I thought Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making had that magic.) If you want a good story, are intrigued by monsters, or are curious to see how a writer weaves a story from found artifacts (the photographs are all real vintage images) you’d probably like this.

I get irritated when I read yet another article about how short stories don’t sell. I no longer read much past the headlines of these pieces, because I think they are foolish. People love stories. We never get sick of good stories, we’ll listen to them over and over (and read them more than once, too). Ok, fine, most people probably don’t buy them in book form as often as I do, but that is really because most people don’t buy as many books as I do.

I liked this collection of stories. They have good pain in them, the kind of thing that you recognize and maybe wince when you read. Johnson writes about real life (“My Neighbor Doesn’t Remember Everything She Forgets”) in such a way that even when she is referencing a famous movie character (“The Real Mrs. Robinson Takes a Moment to Reconsider”) you know she is talking about real things not movie and tv things, and certainly not “reality” tv things. She’s also funny, but in the less obvious, not a laugh track kind of way (“Marriage”, “Dragons”).

Because some of the stories feel like a gut punch — can you say that and add “in a good way” or is that too weird? as generally speaking gut punches are not good things — I will be looking forward to her next collection.

This book is a collection of many stories, all just 340 words long, arranged in twenty groups. The groupings could be seen as relationship milestones (the fights, the brides, the weddings, the wives, the offspring) or warnings (the envies, the mistakes, the monsters, the apocalypses) or a list of almost fairytale like elements, a checklist of the stuff stories are made from (the failures, the mothers, the hauntings). There are between four and ten stories in each group, simply titled “Far-Flung Family #3″ or “Drought #6″.

It sounds well-organized, and it is, and that is so you don’t get lost in the two pages of strangeness. Not that you’d really get lost, as these stories are recognizably about relationships, in all their bizarreness, deceit, hope, and wonder. That’s really what each of the groupings are — refracted views of a relationship.

If you are looking for a conventional novel, with a plot that moves from point A to point B, skip this as it will make you crazy. If on the other hand you are up for something more experimental, a read that might not always make linear or literal sense but still pulls you in, give it a try. Phillips can be playful and biting and writes lines that you’ll find yourself returning to, like this one:

Why, why, why does this always happen? Reality lags so very far behind everything else.

Recommended. If you are curious, there’s more info and a book trailer on the author’s website.

I thought Wilson’s collection of stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, was brilliant. I’ll confess to harboring a slight disappointment that his next book would be a novel (the stories really are that good). Upon reading this, my disappointment completely vanished.

It started to disappear the moment Kevin Wilson started to read. I was lucky enough to get to attend a book reading — and it turns out, his nervousness aside, Wilson does a great job reading. It helps that his book is so damn funny and weird.

It is generationally weird. The Fangs are performance artists, and they’ve done a pretty weird job raising their two kids, Annie and Buster Fang, aka child A and child B. The kids weren’t so much raised to be performance artists as they were raised as a performance. And this, as you might expect, has fucked them up.

It’s funny, sad, outrageous, and compulsively believable, how it fucked them up. You just have to admire it, to love it, and be horrified by it, sometimes all at the same time. Yes, it raises all kinds of questions about art and what it means, about personal responsibility and growing up and deciding what do to and what to believe, but it is never, ever heavy-handed about any of that.

Wilson’s story is true. That’s probably one of the best things you can say about a novel, that it feels true. For me, the other great thing I can say about it is I don’t much care if Wilson’s next book is a collection of short stories or a novel — either way, I’ll buy it immediately and relish the read.