Customer Reviews

Emporium: Stories

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought this book of stories was about as good as it gets. The stories, which are strange as hell, were also deeply insightful. How Adam can tell a story about a ma and pop bullet proof vest shop and turn it into a story about a girl leaving home, is beyond me. But he does it. He starts with these wild premises, like a teenage sniper working for a Silicon Valley Police Department, and turns them into moral fables about the pain of growing up, of first love, the push pull of parents and their children.

In some ways he's writing about the most basic things, fathers who don't understand their sons, adolescent love stories. It's just that he's doing it all in such a new and original way. To find a comparison I would probably have to go to Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome To The Monkey House. But in technique he's much closer to Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff and their clean, determined prose.

It's really hard to imagine a short story lover not enjoying this book. If nothing else, and if you're too poor to buy a book in hardcover, grab it off the shelf at the bookstore and read the second story, Your Own Backyard.

Make no mistake, Adam Johnson can write a mean short story, and maybe he will be the "next big thing," but the hype around this collection is perhaps more a reflection of his potential than of the stories themselves. His shtick (and I like it), is to explore very basic and universal themes, such as loneliness, coming of age, love, death, and other such favorites (often though teenage protagonists) in imaginative and slightly surreal, semi-absurd settings.

For example, in the first story we meet a teenage sniper who works for the Palo Alto police, dropping dot-com burnouts on a daily basis. While he does grapple with the issue of empathy, his more pressing concern is fitting in with the older guys and getting a date. The second story is about a night guard at a zoo who is tasked with killing certain animals each night, but the real story is about his attempt to relate to his son, who can't cope with his father no longer being a policeman. In these, and all the stories, Johnson manages to evoke of a lot of sympathy for his characters, as well as humor ranging from dark, to wry, to just plain funny. He's able to create these quirky, yet wholly believable settings (even the snowbound 1960s Canadian space research center), and populate them with characters you want to know more about All of this is accomplished with zero self-indulgence and a high level of prose.

Where the stories tend to falter a bit is the endings-they all end on pretty much the exact same note. Not quite despair, but the tangy hollowness of isolation. This wouldn't be a problem for a novel say, but when all the stories in a collection leave the same taste in the mouth at the end, it gets old. Still, Johnson is definitely a talent to watch for, and these stories do exhibit loads of promise, but they're not as completely stunning as some reviewers might lead you to believe....

Emporium delivers a vision that produces a profound and immediate sense of rightness. More than just a glimpse into the future of our baffling world, Johnson provides a preview of where fiction itself is heading. Prepare yourself for characters more real than your mother, language that demands to be read aloud, images that will delight and haunt. This book soars in the same rarified air as the best collections of our time: The Night in Question, Birds of America, Poachers, Dogfight, CivilWarland, Hotel Eden. I'll end with my own prediction; years from now, you'll be having a drink with friends arguing about who read Adam Johnson first. Count on it.

Adam Johnson's signature style sets his stories apart from anything that's being written today. With each piece, the reader is instantly immersed in a brilliant reality drawn with frightening clarity. The voices are distinct, memorable, impossible to forget. The language is stunning, each sentence layered with meaning. Here is a book that rewards multiple readings, that forces us to re-examine the world in which we live.

this is a fine debut by a writer we're all going to have to watch closely. Most short story collections have one or two zingers, and the rest of the pieces are so-so or just plain filler. There stories crackle with wit and linguistic energy. Perhaps Mr. Johnson might come off as a bit paranoid--or at least the characters in his stories seem to be--but I'll read another collection as finely written as this in a heartbeat. Bravo.

This is easily one of the best short story collections I've ever read. "Your Own Backyard" alone is worth the cover price. Everything else is a bonus and an incredible bonus at that. These stories are strange and creepy and fiery while still managing to be grounded in the emotional terrain of family life, teen angst, the day to day strain of living. I first read "Your Own Backyard" years ago when it appeared in a Scribners collection of workshop fiction. It didn't feel like a workshop story then and it still doesn't. A reviewer said that they thought his stories smacked of the workshop mill. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Each story is unique and imaginative. Some of the stories are very normal, and some verge on science fiction. He's almost like a Vonnegut with more developed and believable characters. Perhaps that's too bold - but I eagerly look forward to new stuff from him.

This is an amazing collection of stories, with characters and situations that are wildly imaginative and testosterone-laden (that goes for the female characters too!). Your Own Backyard is my favorite, a frantic but insightful tale of how a father finds himself trying to connect with his adolescent son, and The Canadanaut, the most bizarre story here, is just plain laugh-out-loud funny. My only reservation is with most of the endings; the author, in attempting to show that there really is no end to the stories of our lives, has a habit of cutting the ending short, which leaves the reader puzzled and frustrated. Still, a minor complaint about the most entertaining and thoughtful prose I've read in a long time. I look forward to more by Mr. Johnson.

The stories in this collection will stay with you long after you have finished it. After reading such great stories as The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite and the Cliff Gods of Acapulco you will find the characters unforgettable and haunting. Mr. Johnson's apparent talent is to put his characters into situations that are unique, teetering on bizarre, all the while amazing you with moments of humanity handled with insight that will leave your heart pounding after the last word. A great collection. Mr. Johnson is THE best new writer around...remember his name!

Witnessing the zany adventures found in Parasites Like Us, I found the promise of a near dozen equally as zany short stories to be inviting. But after the first third of the collection, it's obvious that all the stories have a very similar texture to them, almost like the zaniness has been equated, manipulated without a sense of freedom; it's all very calculated when the wackiness unfolds. The one impressive feature of Adam's one-off collection is his keen insight into the mind of experiencing the urbane (History of Cancer) or pushing the envelope of seriousness/farce (The Canadanaut). There are a few memorable stories (Teen Sniper) and some with endings that will leave you shrugging (The Eighth Sea).

Teen Sniper - 5/5 - Literally titled, a teenaged sharpshooter in a near-future police force spans the mild influence of caffeine substance abuse between his grasp of reality while enduring `flash empathy' with the victim with his target of love and with his mechanical comic-relief buddy ROM. 32 pages

Your Own Backyard - 4/5 - Ex-cop now security guard has lost the respect of his 9-year old son because of the fact his euthanasia side-practice at the zoo hardly warrants any respect but still manages to keep the family together. 26 pages

The Death-dealing Cassini Satellite - 4/5 - A 19-year old bus driver for a gaggle of women cancer survivors chauffeurs the ladies to a club where he confronts the short history of his cancer stricken mother to open his heart, an energetic survivor willing to open his mind and the attention of a younger lass to open his eyes. 20 pages

Trauma Plate - 3/5 - The owners of a body armor shop face dwindling patronage due to the opening of a large-scale armor shop, which pushes the three-person family to an unfamiliar brink, including a young girls introduction into love and a husbands dappling into Elvis movies. 18 pages

Cliff God of Acapulco - 2/5 - A clumsy buddy Vegas trip to meet an acquaintance spurs a farcical look into a father and son household involving a caiman, a snake and a college bowl game before they take a drug-induced ride in a freefall stimulator... I mean freefall simulator. 28 pages

The Jughead of Berlin - 2/5 - With no segway into the reason behind the name of the titled character, the daughter finds the ennui of her high school love life dramatically opposing the onset of the ATF raid of her father's house from illegal gambling and illegal importing of random good from random South American aerial sorties. 30 pages

The History of Cancer - 4/5 - A boyhood duo bide their summer time by sorting pilfered flooring tiles, debating upon how coitus is carried out via observation and logical delineation, and living the gap between having a strict father and not having one at all. 12 pages

The Canadanaut - 4/5 - Building a death-ray in the artic wasteland of Canada, the tight yet bizarre team of scientists are relocated to an even more desolate artic site to pursue the goal of space flight before the soviets do, except that the modular is too small for any of the team except the artic, bastard-French speaking nomad dwarf. 38 pages

The Eighth Sea - 3/5 - A teenager arrested for urinating on a police horse is punished by having to attend lectures about making choices, where he meets an older woman with a nice car and later her supposedly nympho daughter in their community college class and even later meeting her husband at a motivational power lifting exhibition. 39 pages