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Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories (P.S.)

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Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, the first short story collection by Kevin Wilson, is an impregnable force of fiction. It cannot be impregnated.

By that I mean that it's very, very good. I haven't been able to put it down the last few days.

Wilson is one of those authors who can seemingly effortlessly weave a tale without the use of fancy language or extra words. He barely even uses dialogue, and rarely a metaphor or simile (and when he does, it's perfect, i.e., when a character worries about the side effects of hair-loss medication, he muses, "My head could cave in like a rotten jack-o'-lantern").

Most of the stories have heartbreaking elements, but I was uplifted simply because I was given the chance to read them. Many of the concepts in the book have elements of humor to them, and I laughed out loud once. (Spoiler: In the titular story, a character avoids real life after college by digging tunnels under his town. When he accidentally breaks through the cinder-block walls of a neighbor's basement, startling some kids, he says, "Sorry, I must have the wrong house").

Of the eleven stories in the collection, only two miss the mark. The other nine are brilliant. My top four:

1. "Tunneling to the Center of the Earth" (as said about, three college grads avoid real life by digging. Like the new movie Adventureland, but with shovels)
2. "Grand Stand-In" (love and deception in a rent-a-grandmother service)
3. "Mortal Kombat" (two high-school nerds, in the absence of other young love, explore their blossoming sexuality with each other)
4. "Go, Fight, Win" (standard story: pretty girl moves to new town, becomes cheerleader at high school, spends free time making model cars, falls for a 12-year-old)

"Tunneling..." is an amazing collection of short stories by a young man with a great future ahead of him. Moving. Disturbing. Beautiful. The stories are all of these things. But most of all, they are magically human.

Oddly, in a book with characters that spontaneously explode, and babies who are born with a full set of teeth, realism still rules the day. Not the popular notion of realism, which is much closer to cynicism or pessimism, but that realism which is embodied by the idea that things never work out as well as we might hope or as badly as we might fear. True to life, the stories are unpredictable and, mostly, uplifting.

In the most disturbing story, "The Shooting Man," the protagonist allows himself to be seduced by the perverse, by what should truly be called "evil," when he insists--despite the revulsion of his girlfriend--on attending a freak show where a man will shoot himself in the face. Even after the horrifying spectacle, he cannot let go, and allows himself to be carried away from the light and love of his girlfriend to the darkness and deception of the traveling atrocity. No longer merely a spectator, he now watches the show in preparation for his own, imminent nightmarish performance.

But this story is an exception, perhaps a warning. In most of Wilson's stories the characters discover something about themselves which, good or bad, helps them to grow as people.

Wilson is as comfortable writing about men as he is writing about young women or adolescent boys (here, coming to terms with their nascent homosexuality). In his deft hands, things which might ordinarily disgust us--sucking on another person's hair, for instance--become beautiful images of unspoken bonds of love; and even "Worse Case Scenarios" (the title of another story) provide opportunities for love, discovery, and caring.

A wonderful collection. Highly recommended for those who enjoy literary short stories, magical realism, or the surreal.

After I read the first entry in this remarkable collection-----which, incidentally, concerns the moral and emotional conflicts of a professional rent-a-grandma------I put the book down. Only one story a night, Terry. Pace yourself, man. This is too good to read all at once.

It really is. Wilson has a remarkable ability to get us into the heads of everyday people in surreal situations. A guy who works in a scrabble-piece factory, terrified that he will spontaneously combust, as his parents did. Half-Japanese rednecks in middle Tennessee whose late mother decreed in her will that inheritance of the plantation would be determined by an origami bird contest. A man who discovers the terrible truth behind a carnival act in which the performer appears to blow out his brains. A consultant who, for a fee, provides anxious families with computer-generated projections for potential household tragedies. No matter how facially absurd the protagonist's circumstances, Wilson sucks us right in to an entirely believable universe.

These stories are hysterically funny, often sad, and deeply humane. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

One story at a time.

"Tunneling To the Center of the Earth: Stories" should be in every short story fan's collection.

This collection of eleven stories is outstanding, the only other short story collections I would rank right up with this are We're in Trouble: Stories & Refresh, Refresh: Stories!

This is author Kevin Wilson's book debut and it's a grand slam!

GOOD:

"Grand Stand-In"
"Birds in the House"
"Mortal Kombat"
"Go, Fight, Win"
"Worst-Case Scenario"

GREAT:

"Blowing Up On the Spot" ** (my favorite of the collection)
"The Shooting Man"
"The Choir Director Affair (The Baby's Teeth)"
"The Museum of Whatnot"

Read these stories and you'll see that Kevin Wilson is a natural talent, very much looking forward to reading more stories & hopefully a novel from him.

Enjoy~

I've been reading a lot of short stories lately, it started with Calvino's Cosmicomics, and some of Jeremy Comeau's books. I then continued on to David Foster Wallace and some Bukowski, and although they were amazing stories found myself either exhausted or depressed... or both.

I mention this because this was exactly the book I needed. It manages to walk the line of being a relatively easy and enjoyable read, but full of beautiful imagery and imaginative characters. Kevin Wilson may instantly be one of my new favorite authors.

I'm about to order The Family Fang right now, even though I very rarely read novels due to lack of time, I think I need my fix.

PS Be sure to read the author's bio and Q/A in the back... it's brilliantly funny! A great little surprise :)

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.

Bold, confident, matter-of-fact weirdness. These 11 stories start strange, stay strange and beg you to believe all these unusual situations are, well, perfectly plausible. Kevin Wilson takes reality and gives it an ever-so-slight Twilight Zone inversion.

Slight? Well, maybe more than slight. In most of these, he stretches the ordinary and part of the inherent tension is this: how far is he going to take this premise?

Next, Wilson adds a colorful, memorable character who accepts this alternate reality. In fact, the main character must not really seem to notice or mind, in fact, that their world spins on a slightly different axis. Then, gives this person a warm very human heart. Shake, stir and describe as plainly as you would any old story about regular people doing regular things.

One story, "the museum of whatnot" (the story titles aren't capitalized) gives us 31-year-old Janey who is the "caretaker and sole employee of the Carl Jensen Museum of Whatnot." It turns out that in 1927 Carl Jensen passed away without heirs and he has made the house he lived in available to the public. "However, Mr. Jensen had no art collection to speak of, no gold-leaf furniture, no snuffboxes from China. What he did have was five hundred and seventy-three framed labels of canned apricots, apricots that none of his closest friends had ever heard him admit a fondness for." There's a regular museum visitor, a doctor, and Jenny explores a relationship with him and bristles from the advice from her off-screen mother, who chimes in by telephone. Touching, powerful.

Hard to pick a favorite, but "birds in the house" is right up there. Four brothers are busy folding paper cranes, 250 each, because those are the instructions in the will from the narrator's grandmother, who has devised a simple contest to determine who will inherit the long-held property Oak Hall. When the paper cranes are completed, four fans will be switched on and the brother with the last crane on the table will win the property. "My father and his three brothers fold tiny pieces of paper, squares of yellows and pinks and whites and blues and greens so thin that light passed through them as if they aren't there at all. I watch the brothers' hands, callused and big like sledgehammers, as they struggle not to tear the cranes, not to snap a neck or rip a wing." The tension is palpable as the crane population grows and the narrator recounts what little she knows about the family history. Yes, there will be tricks. The ending is a thing of beauty.

And in "go, fight win," the ordinary idea of new girl in town, trying to fit in, is taken to extremes. With a mother who is her own biggest cheerleader, Penny listens to her mother's advice and follows her own heart's desires, too. For one, she likes building models. And second, there's a neighbor, a 12-year-old boy, who has a thing for fire. Events run far out of Penny's control but still there's this bond between Penny and her neighbor and Wilson makes you feel it, too. He insists that you do so.
In the title story, absurdity is taken to sci-fi cartoon land and "the shooting man" isn't just Twilight Zone, it's right up there with pure horror. A classic.

A marvelous bunch of stories from a storyteller who doesn't flinch at odd thoughts and ideas. In fact, he practically embraces them.

This slim collection of short stories could be read in one sitting - but you'll want to take your time and savor them. The writing is excellent, the stories utterly original. They walk the fine line between plausible and magic realism, and it's up to you, the reader, to decide which way you lean. A few read like modern fables, with a hefty dose of hilarity mixed in. He is absolutely a writer to watch, and I look forward to reading what he comes out with next.

I really enjoyed these short stories. They are refreshingly unique. It's not easy capturing readers in a dozen pages, but Kevin Wilson got me on about 3/4 of the stories, and that's an impressive percentage! Definitely give this a book a try. You might not love all of them, but most!

It's a discouraging and oft-repeated fact of the publishing world that short-story collections don't sell well. As a writer, I read several trade magazines, and none I've seen have yet put forth a therory as to why they don't. I would hate to think it's because of readers' perception of this sort of book being universally like Tunneling to the Center of the Earth &mdash, a mixed bag, best suited to devoted fans of the form.

This collection disappointed me with (technically competent) fluff as often as it delighted me with imaginative tales of put-upon loners and quirky iconoclasts. The first half consisted mainly of stories enamored by their own eccentricities, with little reason to exist except to say, "Look how off-the-wall I am! Don't you just love me?" I wanted to tell Wilson that just because a character's job is to pick the Qs out of piles of tiles at the SCRABBLE factory doesn't entitle that character to sympathy, crap-job though that might be. Also noteworthy was the first half's rampant irresolution. I suppose stories without meaning or any real plot are automatially consigned to fizzling ends.

Then came the latter half -- tales I thought had polish and tender consideration (without sentimentalism) to who their characters were, beyond the unusual vocations, bizarre tics, or physical ungainliness. By the final page, I wanted more. Some of the stories in Tunneling are simply, unpretentiously beautiful.

I wish more discretion had been exercised in selecting which stories to include in this volume, for Wilson does have obvious talent. Another editor, more fastidious, might have served him better. I found a few typos -- never a good sign. As a chapbook, perhaps, at one hundred pages or so, Tunneling would merit four or five stars. As it is, the blend of affecting short works about flawed people on the margins and superficial freakshow pieces that take readers nowhere is roughly fifty-fifty. Is the glass half-empty or half-full?