Customer Reviews

Mcsweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales was a book I really wanted to like. After all, it featured short stories from some really great writers, and the emphasis was going to be on adventure. I really wanted to like it, and found it disappointing that the book was only entertaining in spots.

The goal of the book, as Chabon states in the introduction, is to have an anthology of short stories in a more "classic" vein: the sort of stories that were published in decades past, filled with fun and mystery as opposed to the more literary, plotless, "moment-of-truth" stories of today. Unfortunately, this book did not make me long for yesteryear, but instead made me think that the passing of short genre fiction was not necessarily a bad thing.

The biggest flaw in the book is that the authors - almost all excellent at long fiction, seem to be unable to write a truly good short story. A couple stories, such as "The General" and "The Albertine Notes" are borderline unreadable. Most of the others are just so-so. Even Stephen King - who has shown over the years that he is adept in short fiction as well as novels - has contributed an only mildly okay story which is probably only best enjoyed by his Dark Tower fans. And Harlan Ellison - a master of the short story and an author who I really enjoy - is also a disappointment here, with a story which comes more as a Harlan Ellison parody than the real thing.

There are one or two gems in the bunch (but not much more). Nick Hornby and Elmore Leonard have written a couple good stories, but that's around it. Ironically, some of the stories seem to consist of the very material that Chabon is trying to avoid: for example, one story is nothing more than a character study of a woman climbing a mountain; there is no adventure or real conflict in the tale; it may be good writing, but it does not fit with the themes of the anthology.

Most people will buy this book because they enjoy one or more of the authors featured within. My recommendation is to read the authors you like and approach the others at your own risk.

The premise of this anthology was terrific-- round up a bunch of first rate (mostly "literary") writers and have them do stories that are unpretentious, unaffected, rip roaring good reads. Just look at the cover illustration and you know what I mean. But the more the literary the writers here, the more it's plain that most of them saw the project as a kind of fun-slumming and as a result, their work wreaks of condescension and self-parody. The only good stories here are written by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock and Kelly Link. Genre writers all, but nevertheless heads and tails better than the likes of Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, Jim Shepard, Chabon, etcetera. If you want to read a knockout anthology that wonderfully achieves everything this antho doesn't, check out "CONJUNCTIONS:39-- The New Wave Fabulists" The contrast between the two collections is profound.

As might be expected with any collection such as this, it's uneven. I appreciate the idea of re-creating the old pulp style stories and the roster of authors are all top-notch, but a lot of the tales are too cute by half. I love stories that have a flair to them, but sometimes that gets taken to the extreme and damages the narrative. It would seem to me, as someone who has made a hobby of collecting the old pulp comics and magazines, that you can't have it both ways. If you want to throw a curveball at your reader, you can't do it in a lackadaisical manner, which some of these authors tend to do.

I made a conscious effort to read each story and give each one a chance and there was really only one that I gave up on, mostly because it was too long. The best, for me, were the contributions by (no real surprises)Glen David Gold, Elmore Leonard, and Neil Gaiman. I was a little surprised by how much I didn't like the Stephen King story and editor Michael Chabon's contribution was also a bit thin. Indeed, Chabon's story seemed to exemplify what was wrong with the stories that just didn't seem to work. He tried too hard to capture the pulp spirit and in doing so ended up with an interesting story but not a very entertaining one.

I thought overall the book is worth reading, although I think perhaps it's better to read the stories piecemeal when your appetite for that type of story is piqued.

I had great hopes for this anthology, but to be charitable, it's not a must-read. Michael Chabon wanted to bring together strong genre and mainstream writers to reinvigorate the short story by turning away from the ubiquitous "moment of truth New Yorker-type" story toward the classic generic tale, i.e., the plot driven short. But the mainstream writers in this collection write as if they know they are slumming, and, ironically, they try too hard to elevate their stories above the very genres they are working in. Thus, the stories don't satisfy at any level, because they're neither very good at playing the generic game nor significant in their own right. As for the generic writers like Ellison, King, Leonard, and Moorcock--well, their stories are about what you'd expect, which means they don't really belong here at all. Their inclusion here mainly serves to underline the failure of the other writers to play the generic game with any success. (Not that these stories are particularly memorable either: Ellison's effort, for example, is a story I've read in one form or another in almost every one of his collections, and King's story from the Roland cycle could conceivably interest those readers who have had the extraordinary patience to follow the Roland cycle in the first place.) The bright spots are stories by Neil Gaiman and, surprisingly, Dave Eggars himself, publisher of McSweeney's. The latter is written with a great deal of care and respect for the reader and the genre (which I'd characterize as the Hemingwayesque travel-adventure tale) and it does manage to revivify that genre in a way the other stories all-too often fail to do. The low point is the execrable offering by Chris Offut, whose narrative conceit is that it was written over a weekend in time for the deadline but unfortunately reads is if it was written the night before. I won't say anything about the bizarre offerings by Sherman Alexie and Kelly Link, or the tired and threadbare plots of Nick Hornby and Michael Crichton.

Maybe what this collection proves is that hybridity doesn't always work. Or maybe what it proves is that one must know the generic rules before one breaks them. Or maybe it just proves I like my drinks straight.

Any collection of short stories, especially those anthologizing the works of various authors, will by its nature be a hit-or-miss proposition. Some of the stories will be better than others, some could be excellent, some could be outright duds. This collection, put together by Michael Chabon, has a much better average than most such books -- very few of the stories in this collection disappointed.

Elmore Leonard's "How Carlos Webster Changes his Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman" stands out as one of the best in the book, although Gaiman's "Closing Time" and Moody's "The Albertine Notes" are also standouts. Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium" is something of a departure for him, a sci-fi short that's quite unlike his more famous works, and Sherman Alexie's "Ghost Dance" is a really good little horror tale. Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick" is entertaining in and of itself, although his hardcore fans have already read the story, which is actually an excerpt from his (at the time of this volume) not-yet-published Dark Tower novel, "Wolves of the Calla." Chabon closes off the collection with a story of his own, but "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance" is not a complete story, but the beginning of a serial (and if anyone can tell me if or where the rest has been published, please do so -- it's not in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories as I expected).

Chabon's goal, he says in the introduction, was to put together an anthology of that endangered species, the plot-driven short story. He succeeded by leaps and bounds. The collection showcases a lot of different voices and a lot of different kinds of stories, but all in all, it's far more entertaining than most short story anthologies.

I'm a big fan of the McSweeney's franchise and of Michael Chabon, so a book of stories by the McSweeney-ites plus some other big name authors (Rick Moody, Stephen King, Laurie R. King, Elmore Leonard and others) with Chabon as editor sounded very promising. Unfortunately, many of the stories are merely decent plot ideas in search of an ending, or worst--in the case of the Stephen King story--pure dross. There are stories that start well only to disappoint or in some cases annoy the reader. In Chabon's introduction, he mentions how several of the authors described their giddiness in rediscovering the fun of writing. It's too bad that doesn't translate into fun of reading. Since the contents are "all original works", I assume that when Chabon decided to guest edit this collection, he sent out an invitation to the authors, some of who fall more naturally into the psychological thriller, adventure, ghost story genre than others. Hands down, the Elmore Leonard story is the best of the lot that I've read. I'll fess up and admit I didn't make it to Michael Chabon's piece. I read about 350 pages and just plain got tired of it. If I finish it later, I'll update this post.

I was more than a little disappointed with this anthology. I was hoping for a modern take on the thrilling pulp yarns of yesterday and instead many of the authors went for stories without any real tie to the idea of being "thrilling." Instead there are thoughtful tales of fantasy, good and unreadable SF and just a few examples of the genre that I thought this book was shooting for. Elmore Leonard comes through with his tale of Carlos Webster,
Michael Crichton does a nice job with a little story about a man with "mother" problems, and David Eggers does a nice take on a Hemmingway style mountain climbing adventure. Don't get me wrong there are good stories here, but the overall feel is not consistent with the title. Just too many tales of time travel and soul searching in a collection of "thrilling tales" for this reader.

Probably the best piece of writing in the book is Chabon's introduction in which he bemoan's the "quotidian epiphantic" short story as the ONLY type of short story to be given serious consideration. What about plot-driven stories? Despite what many critics would have us believe, it is the plot-driven story that sticks in our mind. The spirit of the book is to gather some of today's best authors and have them give the old plot-driven story a go. The results are hit and miss. I greatly enjoyed "Megalodon" and "Tears of Squonk" as well as the offerings of Nick Hornby and Elmore Leonard. Surprisingly, the masters of the plot driven stories - Stephen King and Harlan Ellison - offer lesser efforts (in Ellison's case, he merely reprints an old story instead of writing a new one).

I was really looking forward to this collection of short stories. I used to love reading short stories when I was in school, but outside of magazines there really aren't that many short stories written anymore. In fact, that was the supposed reason for bringing together this collection of stories. Some of the stories are rather good, but most are mediocre, and a few are just plain stinkers. The stories I enjoyed the most were:

"The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter" by Glen David Gold. This story tells the tale of a murderous elephant and how she was finally captured and hung. This is my personal favorite story in the treasury.

"How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman" by Elmore Leonard A young boy has his ice cream stolen by a famous gangster and moments later watches the criminal murder a lawmen. That one event (the stealing of the ice cream or the killing?) changes the life of Carlos Webster forever.

"Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" by Dave Eggers I'll give him credit, Eggers is a more talented writer than I imagined him to be as this story illustrates. It's the tale of a woman's quest to hike up Kilaminjaro. Great storytelling.

"The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" by Michael Chabon This story is a "what if" piece of historical fiction. The last bit of a rebellion on the British controlled North American continent is crushed. The two sons of the rebellion leader are saved and rescued by their famous uncle, an inventor of air ships.

Overall THRILLING TALES was a bit of a disappointment. Several of the tales were promising, but did not deliver in the end, such as Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium" a story about a VCR that can veiw the future. Others were duds. However, the few outstanding stories make this collection worth reading, though not necessarily worth buying.

Nick Hornsby, Elmore Leonard, Dave Eggers, Laurie King and Michael Moorcock alone contrbute stories which would make any collection outstanding! "The Albertine Notes" shows a lot of narrative spunk and extroidinary sense of nostalgia, but lost narrative focus for me in the last few pages. I agree with others that Stephen King and Harlan Ellison let us down here. My guess is Nick Hornsby could turn out to be the best of this group. I doubt that any multi-author short story collection issued in a given year for the last century and a half had any higher percentage of good stories. Go buy this sucker!!!