I am not normally a fan of offbeat, fantastical stories, preferring fiction with realistic situations that shed insight on circumstances I might share in my own life. But Kevin Wilson, who goes back and forth between the real and surreal throughout this collection, won me over big-time. Even his often odd premises - like parents who hire professionals to pretend to be grandparents to their children - bear too close a resemblance to reality, given how many parents won't take their children to nursing homes to avoid exposing them to the harsh reality of such places. And in that story, the all too recognizable human traits - like the guilty conscience of the protagonist who serves as a surrogate grandparent -- quickly take over. When he does tell a "straight" story - like "go, fight, win" or "Mortal Kombat"- he mines some incredibly powerful and moving feelings, like isolation, detachment, and ultimately indifference to being social outcasts as the characters go about constructing their own separate, and slightly weird worlds that make more sense to them that the ordinary world they can't find a place in.
The 11 stories in the collection are:
1. Grand Stand-In - 26 pp - Great piece about a woman who works for a company that provides "surrogate" grandparents for families so they can avoid explaining to their kids when a real grandparent has died, or even more cruelly, when the "sandwich generation" couple no longer finds their parents suitable companions for their children. A very twisted world that the author gets you thoroughly engrossed in with the portrayal of a stand-in grandmother whose conscience gradually becomes plagued by the deception she helps facilitate.
2. Blowing Up On the Spot - 18 pp - Another wonderfully offbeat story. A 20-year-old guy works as a sorter in a Scrabble factory and must cope with the death of his parents, who spontaneously combusted, and his traumatized younger brother who now makes repeated suicide attempts.
3. The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide For Sensitive Boys - 11 pp - An incredibly poignant story. A boy who has lost his sister creates a guidebook, with encyclopedic entries, on how to cope with, foresee, and make sense of a sister's death.
4. Birds in the House - 17 pp - Four brothers compete for the rights to a Southern mansion after their mother dies and makes them go through a bizarre ritual of building paper birds to determine who gets the house. Told from the perspective of one of the brother's sons, who has more love for his departed grandmother than any of the warring brothers.
5. Mortal Kombat - 20 pp - Two high school AV nerds begin a sexual relationship. One has genuine romantic interest; the other succumbs to the physical connection because they're both so horribly isolated from their classmates and families. A fierce game of Mortal Kombat becomes the forum for working out the tension in their relationship.
6. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth - 12 pp - Three college graduates start digging a hole in one of their backyards. It then becomes a fantastical set of tunnels that enable them to escape the pressures and demands of a "normal" life.
7. The Shooting Man - 14 pp - A bizarre tale of a man obsessed with a circus freak show and the efforts he makes to convince his friend and girlfriend to see the star attraction - a man who shoots himself in the face.
8. The Choir Director's Affair (The Baby Teeth) - 10 pp - The friend of a philandering husband worries about the impact his friend's affair will have on the man's new baby, who has an extremely premature set of teeth.
9. Go, Fight, Win - 41 pp - An amazingly good novella about two very mixed-up kids. A lonely and shy 16-year-old girl becomes even more isolated when she moves to a new town and her mother insists the best way to make friends is to join the cheerleading squad. She goes through the motions with her team who do make an effort to include her, but she feels no sense of belonging. Her only relief comes from building model cars. (Hence the great illustration on the book's cover of the snap -away parts that come in model kits.) The only person the girl manages to connect with is the strange 12-year-old boy who is her neighbor, who goes through his own odd obsessions - recently with trying to fly, and now, more dangerously, with playing with fire.
10. The Museum of Whatnot - 21 pp - Another fascinating story, in which the weirdness of the premise provides the perfect vehicle to demonstrate the main character's emotional state. A woman who has cut herself from all meaningful connections to anything - both people and inanimate belongings - works as a curator in a museum that displays people's collections of banally routine items - like a lifetime's worth of toe-nail clippings or rubber-bands and paper clips. One visitor who keeps coming back to find meaning in his estranged father's collections of all the spoons he owned over the course of his life challenges the woman into forming a connection with something, and someone, less trivial.
11. Worst-case Scenario - 16 pp - A man whose job is to lay out the worst-case disaster scenarios for companies and people begins to deal with the consequences of his doomsday predictions when a young mother who hired him becomes crippled with fear over all the dangers her young child could fall victim to.
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