#827 Bones- Alexis Schaitkin

#827 Bones- Alexis Schaitkin

Kayla and Luz were best friends. They were outcasts at school and a little bit different. They both sought and were embarrassed by attention. Kayla knew that Luz would not be her best friend for long. She thought Luz would get too pretty (like her sister) to stay friends with her when they got older. They would indeed stop being friends, but for entirely different reasons.

The title references the girls’ desire to break a bone, and get a cast. They thought they would like the sympathy. But something always stopped them from going far enough to purposely break something. Perhaps Kayla knew that her own imperfections would never be reason for her feelings of inadequacy. She needed something larger, something obvious like a cast. She didn’t realize until much later that her imperfections were what made her Kayla.

“No matter what she did, all of her best efforts to remake her life would always be a little bit spoiled, because the best things would never feel like home.”

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

#792 Human Snowball- Davy Rothbart

#792 Human Snowball- Davy Rothbart

A late night Greyhound bus trip, a thief with a stolen car and a roll-full of scratch-off lottery tickets, a man about to turn 110 years old, a bar that “smelled like someone just puked on a campfire,” and a desperate play for love…yup this is a Valentine’s day story!!

The cast of characters that end up as passengers in the back seat of the stolen car as they kill time makes for a very fun Buffalo road-trip adventure story as well. There’s business deals, race conflicts, food runs, good times-bad-times, and runs-in with law enforcement. Great nights like this don’t happen all the time, but when they do, thye make the other days worth it.

Notable Passage: “A plume of merriment rose in my chest that was six parts the gentle glow of heading into any bar on a cold, snowy night, and four parts the wonderful, unpredictable madness of having a hundred-and-ten-year-old-man I’d just met on a Greyhound bus as my wingman.”

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#603 Snake River Gorge- Alexander Maksik

#603 Snake River Gorge- Alexander Maksik

This is from the 2013 Best American Non-Required Reading collection. Theo needs a job. He’s eighteen, his parents are struggling and his older sister is away with the Army. He answers an ad in the Penny Saver and the recruiter comes to his house. He is a fast talking salesman and convinces Theo and his parents that this is a great opportunity for someone willing to work hard.

What it turns out to be is a door-to-door canvassing gig selling magazine subscriptions. By itself, it’s a harmless job, no worries, right? Except the crew travels together, stays in sleazy motels by night and has a horrible caste system. Henry is at the top, with his own room, the top selling get the bed, everyone else gets the floor. The low man, called the bunker boy, is tied up all night to a chair. This doesn’t sit well with Theo, so he unties bunker boy. Retribution is harsh and swift for Theo, and just like that his “great opportunity” is done. 

There is some stuff here about class and privilege, but it’s clumsy and forced. The story itself was interesting enough without that theme.

Rating: 7-7-6-6 Total= 26

#498 Foley’s Pond- Peter Orner

#498 Foley’s Pond- Peter Orner

The boys of the neighborhood have a secret spot they call Foley’s Pond. Cesspool is really a better name for it, leeching runoff from the local golf course.

“Once, Ross Berger dove into Foley’s and came out with green hair and leeches on his thighs…We all jumped in. It was like swimming in crude oil. A fantastic place, Foley’s—scragged, infested, over grown, and gloomed long before Nate Zamost’s sister wrecked it.”

Barbara was the two and a half year old girl—Nate’s sister—that crawled under the fence and drown in the cesspool. Nate might have told her how to get there. Now, one girl dead, they turned the cesspool into a clean public park. The boys miss their secret spot. Nice story, huh?

Rating: 6-5-5-5 Total= 21

#491 An Intrusion- Tim Wirkus

#491 An Intrusion- Tim Wirkus

This was in the 2013 Best American Non-Required Reading under the subheading: Best American Advertisement for a Home Security System. Mike and Julie are a happy young couple managing but barely to eke out their mortgage payments. They come home one day to find an envelope of pictures tacked to a wall inside their home. They didn’t do it themselves, and nobody else has keys:

“The pictures showed a young couple engaged in a series of mundane domestic pursuits—standing together at a sing washing dishes, reading on a couch, playing cards at a dining room table, changing a light bulb in a floor lamp. The problem was that the couple—who were not Mike and Julia—were doing all these things inside Mike and Julie’s house.”

Creeeeeeepy! Makes me think of a Davis Lynch movie. They change locks, call the police, but the pictures keep coming until they move out and eventually break up. Some couple just cant handle the little mysteries of life.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total=30

#48 Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine- Matthew Klam

#48 Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine- Matthew Klam

OK, two days in a row now I’ve read stories about a loveless marriage of a couple having a child.  At least this one has a somewhat happy ending.

On the first page we see an idyllic picture of 8 month pregnant Julia: “A cartoonist couldn’t have drawn a more adorable creature” then a half page later: “You were supposed to slip naturally into the new shape…But she popped out hugely, and felt like a bear sipping tea.”

The rest of the story is an overly depressing picture of miserable people during this process. We see Kevin who is a failed videographer who “thought of the things he’d never be, the speeches he’d never give.” He’s abandoned a documentary about a young basketball phenom when the kid’s career never panned out…just like his own. Sad enough, but then we get passages like this:

“He stopped loving Julia when he couldn’t get her pregnant, but then, after two years of humiliating and expensive $29,000 fertility process, they’d succeeded, and now that she was pregnant he wished he was dead.”

 Jeez…it’s like a country song about a drunk dog getting hit by a train comin’ from momma’s funeral. The whoa-is-me feeling in this story is really over the top. In fact the whole story is littered with these statement:

“If it got any worse, she would have to kill herself.”

“If she hadn’t been locked up in that place, she’d be dead”

“It would be easier just to die”

“I’m gonna kill her in her sleep”

“—“

“—“

etc.

I didn’t buy anything in this story.  Kevin somehow comes home from a trip, doesn’t check in with his pregnant wife, doesn’t check his messages all night, then doesn’t find it strange that his 8-month old wife isn’t home after midnight, etc. There is nothing in this story making us believe he is a capable of that. And I don’t buy the sudden and whole-hearted emotional redemption in the end.  I get that pregnancies are hard for couples, but there are 7-billion people on the planet, so let’s not pretend that these characters have been through some new trying human endeavor. 

Sorry, I guess I was in the mood for something else, maybe something with hope and goodness in it. After these last 2, I'm feel pretty sorry for humanity.

Rating: 5-5-3-2 Total= 15

#42 Loteria- Kevin Gonzalez

#42 Loteria- Kevin Gonzalez

Hector is dealing with his father’s recent suicide and relocating his mother into the apartment of his father’s former mistress. As he tries to reconcile his fathers life and death, he contemplates his own.

There is little in this story that I enjoyed.  None of the characters are likeable…the father is a corrupt politician, a philandering, lottery-winning, money wasting coward who ran over his son’s dog. His son has schemed behind his back to become the executor of the will. His mother, pissed-off by his father’s mistress takes it out on the wrong woman. Hector himself is a cold, bitter loser that plays false victim to both his father and son. But neither are they despicable either.  There is just little in each to care enough about.

All three generations are named Hector, and I think we are supposed to see them as 3 aspects of the narrator.   The 4^th Hector is the giant cockroach in his apartment that he continually tries to kill, but can’t.  That is he can’t kill himself off like his father did.

His mother’s name is Socorro which means “help, I’m drowning.”

I just don’t get this story.  I thought at first that we were supposed to hate the father for mis-spending his lottery winnings, but it turns out he left than an ample amount in his will. Nobody seems particularly hurt, or needing, or anything that makes me want to hear a story regarding any of these characters.

Gonzalez tried to write in some cute allusions and metaphors that really didn’t work for me.  For example, among his fathers many suicide notes, he uses comas but never periods. Later he looks up at the night sky and notices: “In the sky the stars appeared like all the periods that suicide notes have forgotten.”  That just seemed forced to me.

Notable Passage: none

Rating: 6-4-4-4 Total= 18

#28 Peg- Sam Shaw

#28 Peg (2006)- Sam Shaw

OK, this is an odd one.  At first it seems like a melancholy story about a young couple failing at marriage after 3 years. “Peg” is a made up fling he creates to make his wife jealous and hopefully kick start a passionate renewal of their relationship. He’s dis-illusioned, she’s closed off, etc. Sure, we’ve seen this before, but then it takes a wild turn to the bizarre and gory.

While out for a walk deciding whether to actually pursue cheating on his wife instead of just pretending to, he comes across a car accident that left the driver decapitated. Feeling helpless himself to do anything useful at such a scene, he couldn’t stop himself from staring at the severed head.  Approaching the head, he looked at its face for a sign of what to do:  “its as if the head had something to impart to him.”

So he takes the head with him…yup.  Suddenly it seems that our protagonist is a psychopath.  I realized it might be time to start reading with a different mindset.  I’m sure I can come up with some parallel or link to what the head represents…his failed relationship, the disappointment in himself. But really I think he’s just carrying around a severed head. 

Well, Mr. Shaw…you have my attention, this wasn’t exactly a home run, but it was memorable. I’ll look for more to read from you.

Notable Passage: I didn’t find anything to post here…but did I tell you that the main character carried around a severed head?!

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total =27