KIRKUS REVIEW

An ambitious book offers an amalgam of opinion, satire, and character sketch.  

Armed with a brain-teasingly bizarre title that foretells its peculiar contents, this volume features a chorus of quirky voices chanting messages of solidarity, gay pride, and anti-homogeneous individualism. The book opens with an anonymous woman’s exquisitely sarcastic rant parodying a social media outlet (“Fakebook”), accusing it of “destroying friendship,” and musing over the digital impermanence of modern culture and communication. She considers herself an “incredible fag hag.” After pondering the significance of fetishes and Nueva Jork life, she acerbically introduces her artistic, gay “fiend-frienemy” Noloso Chushingura and launches a literary fever-dream of colorfully dizzying co-narrators and their sordid escapades. Noloso is a man who is abandoning his longtime residence in “Disneyfied” Nueva Jork for his childhood home, Mucha Nieve. Unsatisfied still, he flees there for wintry “Palin-town,” where no-nonsense, pragmatic Pavlina Perestroika gets into a mysterious 1975 Buick Regal and begins an otherworldly journey to another land yet returns just in time for Bobby Bluetooth’s comedy set at a nearby cafe. Readers searching for some cohesive link to the stories and their kaleidoscope of curious characters may become dumbfounded by the time lesbian Koontessa Klarissa Koontberger introduces her two adopted children “of indeterminate sexuality.” Giovanni Zsazsasky exchanges gay bars for eBay shopping as the ultimate “go-to pacifier in moments of thumb-sucking sadness,” and wand-waving superheroine Dolores The Day-Glo Drag Queen issues orders commanding the end of abusive Jean-Nette The Jet Lag Fag Hag’s life. This is the third book by Canadian fiction writer and visual artist Bird (Hideous Exuberance, 2013, etc.). Thankfully, lurking beneath all of the snarky commentary and cheekiness are honest reflections of contemporary society, including the gay community’s struggle to vanquish shame and the much-protested incremental gentrification of major metropolitan areas. Not all of this oddly creative volume works, however, with some sections dissolving into garbled gibberish and others becoming overpowered by all of Bird’s slapdash wackiness. Overall, the book’s unconventional spellings, sentence fragments, line-drawn chapter headings, and haiku work well in unison to create a devilishly original tableau of true outlandishness with a conscience.

An offbeat work of carnivalesque proportions, populated by zany, outspoken, and eccentric personalities.

Pub Date: Nov. 16th, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-692-34777-5

Page count: 258pp

Publisher: Hysterical Dementia

Program: Kirkus Indie

Review Posted Online: March 7th, 2016

Reviewed by Karen Rigby
February 8, 2016

Irreverent sketches in a satirized metropolis portray emotional disenchantment.

Stephen C. Bird’s collection of related short stories,Any Resemblance to a Coincidence Is Accidental, presents a hyper-electric commentary on modern life, from online personas to urban subculture. A motley set of recurring characters make their way through absurd situations in a narrative filled with movie references and skewed perspectives.

Seventeen stories follow Fakebook girl, Noloso Chushingura, Pavlina Perestroika, and other misfits living on the fringes of Amourrica Profunda. In a mixture of dizzying monologues, lists, third-person narrations, and haiku, their voices provide a cross-section of insecurity, self-aggrandizement, and opinions on topics that include Broadway, gay culture, sexuality, and masks people wear to avoid pain.

Loosely drawn, sometimes homophobic characters keep the work from gaining a strong focus. Instead, characters appear in service of strange situations: a castrated go-go boy freezes time, a woman finds a porn key baby (perhaps a spin on the port keys of Harry Potter’s world), a chorus of “Grrrlfriends” serve as a counterpoint for another woman, and the leader of a fan club for the Weak-ed musical details membership requirements.

Names for locations, such as “Nueva Jork,” “Doucheyland,” “Palin Town,” “The Crew-Ella de Parkay Villa,” and “Bore-Hos” instead of “boroughs,” along with intentional, winking substitutions for well-known items, such as “Dumbphone” in lieu of smartphone, disrupt the work when they draw attention to the lifestyles they poke fun at. Using only a handful of these inventive words would allow them to stand in sharper relief. Other excesses in the writing include a couple’s lesbianism solely for humor, jabs at rainbow pride that take a turn toward bodily humor, and a chapter penned in the voice of a hillbilly clairvoyant, which uses exaggerated dialect in a way that makes language itself, rather than the message, the dominant feature.

The plots are sometimes macabre and often tinged with cruelty; in one instance of cavalier murder, the murderer escapes without real consequences. More effective moments take place between the lines: a drag queen’s confrontational speech belies vulnerability, and a stand-up comic’s ill-received routine contains the passing remark, “I’m not getting any better.” Such admissions humanize the characters. They may be over the top, but they’re not as out of touch as they first seem.

Amid the blare of poseurs and hustlers, streetwise and self-made figures, the prominent thread is one of deep-seated ambivalence and loneliness.

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have his/her book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Review make no guarantee that the author will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

I’ve been remiss! I meant to plug this in time for Christmas…but ya know what? It would be a really strange Christmas gift. Buy it for yourself, but first buy this and this. stephen c. bird’s latest creation, any resemblance to a coincidence is accidental is a worthy followup to his first two books: surreal, playful, nonsensical, and overtly hostile to the majority of the human race — just like I like it. It’s a tough ol’ hunk of buffalo meat: I recommend you take small bites and chew it well, or else you’re liable to suffocate on the combination of neologisms, bile, and stinging observation. Like Hamlet, bird would have you go not  till he sets you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you.