A volume of unconventional short stories features hardscrabble characters facing extraordinary circumstances.
North Carolina fiction writer and poet Buchner’s dazzling assortment of 18 tales offers a diverse cast struggling with some outlandish situations, both earthly and otherworldly. A man’s celebration of his wife’s pregnancy is cut short in the darkly humorous opener, “Made by Brutal Beasts.” Homer, a heavy-drinking child care company worker in therapy, becomes alarmed at his wife’s startling transformation into an excessively hirsute beast with prenatal “animalistic urges.” The theme carries forward with a different couple in the apocalyptic “Baby Teeth,” in which the pair’s “undead” newborn is anything but normal. Buchner experiments with form in “American Metal,” a sensory treat comprised solely of brutally vivid blog entries from a soldier deployed in the Middle East during wartime. The author also experiments with narrative brevity. Among the volume’s shortest tales is the marvelously morbid, two-page “Last Days at Wolfjaw,” which depicts a small family locked inside a cabin at the mercy of a plague of giant killer flies buzzing just outside the front door. Just spanning a single page is “About Future,” in which a man takes it upon himself to “put down” members of his own family who seemingly have outlived their usefulness to him. Conversely, the fantastically cinematic “Dracula Mountain” conjures a world dominated by vampires and the “nightwalkers” they create. A family tries to survive when a relative who’s “seventeen years old, but pale and skeletal” reappears. This story, along with several in the collection, disappoints only because it deserves a more fully realized treatment.
One of the assortment’s greatest assets is its sublime unpredictability. From junkies who donate plasma to the moving, tender father-son relationship in “Good Night,” the book crosses boundaries and traverses genres with seamless ease. Dominating these tales are themes of struggle and vulnerability, hardship and loss. Families buckle beneath the weight of grief, financial woes, or even supernatural forces, while others simply become prey to online entertainment, “drawn in like a wolf to raw meat.” Many characters are pensive and reflective only after the worst has occurred, while others recognize the fleeting nature of beautiful things as they “stayed awake past midnight and watched the fireworks from the balcony, content with all we didn’t know. A brocade crown filled the air with big hanging breaks of gold, slowly fading to right us. But beautiful things never last.” Buchner’s literary talents are on brilliant display. The prose he employs vacillates between raw descriptions of hungry teeth biting into greasy meat to lovely turns of phrase from brothers lamenting their father’s abandonment when they were young and how that affects their desire for children of their own. Nearly every tale has appeared in a variety of literary journals, and with good reason: They shimmer with the gloss of a creative imagination and enticing characterization. As the expectant father remarks in the opener, “Life was a horror movie, but only if you looked for it.” There is indeed mild, sunlit horror embedded in Buchner’s stories, but he also demonstrates a deep understanding of human nature and how it operates in times of desperation and when faced with the paranormal.
Transgressive, audacious tales steeped in gritty human struggles and otherworldly oddity.
