From Publishers Weekly
Running the gamut from weird to outright creepy, these 13 stories shed sympathetic light on the unseemly, the ungainly and the unrefined. The first story, "Mechanical Men," about animal testing and chimpanzee murder, mixes George Saunders's brand of bureaucratic absurdity with Raymond Chandler's lean prose. "Abduction" sends a jaded tabloid reporter to a filthy motel room on a tip about a girl who gave birth to an alien baby. In "Pulp Life," a girl is sentenced to carry a dead man's photo for 14 years after she kills him in a drunk driving accident. The industrial mayhem of "Breaker" is set on a small African island where ships are disassembled (inspired, the author notes in his acknowledgments, by an
Atlantic piece by William Langewiesche), and "Cutters" follows journalists on an assignment that drags them over the edge in a "hillbilly dumping ground in the mountains" populated by snake-handling religious fanatics. Reading not unlike literary dispatches from
TheTwilight Zone, Nelson's collection won the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction, and it's not difficult to pick up on O'Connor's influence: strange and damaged characters mired in strange and damaging situations.
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Review
"These lightly absurd tales, recalling Barthelme in their elegance and T. C. Boyle in their inventiveness, trace some of the boundaries of human loneliness and need for connection. In these stories the natural and mechanical worlds clash again and again, and in that clash the author finds comedy and vibrant life."--Erin McGraw, author of The Good Life: Stories
"Nelson has a great range of interests and a wicked sense of paradox. He is disciplined and adventurous in equal measure."--Robert Anderson, author of Little Fugue: A Novel
"The worlds of many of these stories are fantastically imaginary and imaginative, even hallucinatory."--Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)
"[Nelson's] thirteen offerings, which vary broadly in topic, voice and tone, are united by his ability to enmesh downtrodden figures in situations that highlight our biggest contemporary dilemmas . . . Nelson's talent for irony does more than simply point out our cultural hypocrisy, it also elucidates our most personal dilemmas . . . Nelson is expert at crafting scenes of desperation resolved, zealotry succumbed to and disaffection upended—all while refusing to repeat instance, image or idea . . . This is impressive at a time when people seeking cultural understanding have come to rely less on the stories our finest writers tell us and more on familiar melodramas . . . Nelson is, most definitely, spinning the absolute—and perfectly crafted—truth."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Running the gamut from weird to outright creepy, these thirteen stories shed sympathetic light on the unseemly, the ungainly and the unrefined."--Publishers Weekly
