As a reader the best part of an interlinked short story collection is the links. Whenever I stumble upon a connection in my reading I am delighted. There’s lots of clever linking in unexpected ways in Anthony Marra’s collection The Tsar of Love and Techno, and every single one of them pleased me immensely, even if some of the stories did not.

The book is rooted in the former Soviet Union from Leningrad in the 30s to war-torn Chechnya to a hellscape former labor camp turned mining town called Kirovsk, ringed by a forest made of steel and plastic where citizens swim in “Lake Mercury.”

Like an actual mixtape this one starts strong and ends kind of weak, like the mixtape maker got bored and didn’t care that the last song was a throwaway and gets cut off right in the middle — so it goes with this collection.

It opens with “The Leopard” about Roman Markin a painter turned soviet censor. Roman is mourning his only brother, Vaska, executed for religious fanaticism and he’s plagued by guilt for not having warned his brother. But Roman is a good comrade and toes the party line, erasing Trotsky and rosying up Stalin’s cheeks. Even so, Roman’s got a subversive streak. He warns his sister-in-law that she must erase all photographic evidence of his brother, her husband and at the same time he tells his nephew to always look in the background, his father is there. And it is true, while Roman erases the no-goodniks, he paints in his brother’s face at varying ages.

Gah! It’s a heartbreaker, this story. Roman eventually finds himself on the wrong side of the party over a picture of a ballerina. It gets sadder after that.

Then we move to Galina,the granddaughter of that ballerina, her story told by a chorus of girls she grew up with in that toxic town, Kirovsk. Then we meet Ruslan a former limo-driver turned chief of the Grozny tourist bureau, and then Kolya a prisoner of war and a former beau of Galina’s, and his brother Alexi and a neighbor Vera and the stories just keep spinning and spinning around each other with a mixtape and a painting that keeps popping up in delightful ways. Though I thought Alexi’s story dragged and dragged and dragged a little more, and I often found myself thinking “Gah, am I STILL on this story?”

The final story clunked hard for me, though from my research I see a lot of people thought it was transcendent. Without giving too much away I will say it just felt like it was trying too hard, really, really stretching for poignancy and hitting ouy over the head with its meaning.

Still, I dug this collection it’s painfully beautiful and the humor, there is a lot of humor, is razor sharp.

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As much as I love Lorrie Moore’s writing I have to admit this one was kind of a slog, which says a lot because the collection is comprised of only eight stories. Often I’d quit mid-story and not get back to it for weeks, then have to start the story over at the beginning because I had no idea what was going on.

Frankly, a few of the stories I just didn’t get. For instance, “Thank You For Having Me” about a single mother and her teenage daughter attending the second wedding of the former babysitter. In this one the mother offers up thoughts on all kinds of things — her daughter, the guests, the former babysitter’s first husband playing guitar at this new wedding, the potluck dinner — then suddenly the day is interrupted by a motorcycle gang and an impending thunderstorm. What?

There was a lot of what-ness throughout, especially in “Referential” about a woman and her boyfriend going to visit her “deranged” son. I still can’t even tell you what the hell was going on in that story.

But, because she is Lorrie Moore, even that story had its moments like when the narrator tricks her boyfriend into revealing he’s already found someone new. It’s sly and clever, and Moore describes it like this:
?Good night,? he said. His expression had already forwarded itself to someplace far away.

She is damn good, and there’s just enough of these glimmers of wonderful to make up for all the whatness. Plus, there’s the story “Wings” about a failed musician, her slacker boyfriend, and the reclusive millionaire she befriends. That story is a keeper.

Overall, however, the collections is kind of drag.

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I discovered Elizabeth McCracken in the mid-nineties about the same time I discovered my all-time favorite band, The Replacements. I have since woven the works of both artists into my heart and mind so inextricably that they have become a part of me, and thus I have a hard time explaining what they mean to me without bursting into tears. That’s totally rational, right?

For those who know me well, you will understand what I mean when I say The Giant’s House is the literary equivalent of “I Will Dare” to me.

Once you have fallen so hard for someone’s work and gone on record for being kind of loony when it comes to it, new records or new books fill you with an odd sort of trepidation and excitement. What if it sucks? What if it sucks and then I have to rethink my entire system of belief? Oh my god, I hope it doesn’t suck. Please don’t suck, becomes a sort of chant you say as you flit through the songs on the latest record or turn the pages of the book.

I’m happy to report that Thunderstruck & Other Stories does not suck. Of course it doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s a haunting and heartbreaking and humorous collection of stories filled with ghosts, both literal and figurative.

In “Something Amazing” we have a mother haunted by the ghost of her daughter, who died as a child, and refuses to shuffle off the mortal coil. In “Property” a widower is haunted by his landlord’s crappy possessions. In “Juliet” the employees of a public library puzzle over the brutal murder of their most enigmatic patron.

But, like I said, not all the haunting is about those no longer with us. In one of my favorite stories “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey” a dying man goes to a former friend’s house to make peace, maybe, with the man who made a documentary that haunted his life. I loved this story, which explores what life is like when we are constantly plagued by the person we were in our twenties.

The titular story “Thunderstruck” is phenomenal. In this one a family escapes to Paris in the hopes of getting their wayward, pre-teen daughter Helen away from dangerous influences at home. It seems to work, until it doesn’t work at all. This is one of those short stories that builds you up and then takes you apart until you are nothing but raw emotion and a single finger to turn the page.

As a reader I have a hard time putting an entire short story collection into a singular context, to find the themes that run through each of the stories and then pronouncing then, what it is “about.” As an avid music listener, I cannot do that for records either. And I always equate short story collections to records.

And like a record, I judge short story collections based on the images that stick with me long after I’ve close the cover. The more images the better. I can remember scenes from practically every story in Thunderstruck & Other Stories, which doesn’t happen all the time. Hell, there are some books I have forgotten what they are about as soon as I close the cover. Not so with this one. This is a collection of stickers.

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And I can’t tell if my problems with this book are specific to B.J.Novak’s writing or the genre of flash (or short short, whatever you want to call it) fiction itself. I’ve struggled with this kind of writing before. All the stories come off as a set up for a punchline. It often seems as though the whole point is to come up with an absurd premise — Grandma doing blowjobs in heaven; going on a date with a Congolese warlord; John Grisham going apeshit because his latest NY Times bestseller went to press with a fake title — and see where it goes. It never seems to go anywhere emotional, genuine, or honest. It just seems to be all “ha ha should I fuck the warlord?”

Ugh.

At their best, some of these stories are trifling little amusements. Some brought a chuckle to my brain, especially when threads from one bit showed up in another bit. Like the man in “All You Have to Do” who lays out his very simple, yet detailed methods for meeting a girl showing up a few stories later in “Missed Connection: Grocery spill at 21st and 6th 2:30 pm on Wednesday.” This happens a few times, and I appreciated every time a story came back around. But on the whole the book feels like a literary equivalent of a Hallmark card — you wade through a lot of nothing to get the briefly amusing.

The longest stories are the best and most enjoyable. At the same time they make the book even more frustrating. In these stories, “Sophia” and “J.C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote” specifically, you can see Novak has the chops to rise above his ironic hipster detachment punchline bullshit, and write something genuine and emotionally satisfying. You can also see that an absurd premise doesn’t have be the end goal. In “Sophia” our unnamed narrator orders up a sex robot and unwittingly gets the first artificial intelligent being capable of human emotion. It sounds ridiculous, but the narrator has to struggle with falling for this creature or staying true to his romantic ideals.

In the latter story Novak includes reviews for his fictional translator. The reviews are so spot on and send up not just reviews in general but the writers of them specifically. He has a Chuck Klosterman review that made me snort with laughter.

Yet these two shiny gems aren’t enough to bring this book out of the ugh and more ugh territory. Too often the voice is one-note with a sort of emotional remove from the characters (most of them unnamed unless they’re famous e.g. Johnny Depp, Tony Robbins, Nelson Mandela, etc., etc., etc. ad nauseam). And there is tons of writing like this:

He didn’t care. He knew what he did. But he kind of did care. . .

and this:

But he had what he had and he did what he did, and everyone remembered him fondly.

Ugh. It feels a little like first draft word vomit.

It’s weird. Even though this collection annoyed the hell out of me, if B.J. Novak ever wrote a novel I’d totally double down and read it. I suspect if his writing were to mature past these punchline set-ups and absurd situations and he really gave his stories time to develop some sort of emotion, you’d get a pretty satisfying novel out of this guy.

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The titles of Karen Russell’s books make my brain do a kind of Weird-Al-esque karaoke. I like to believe this has more to do with Russell’s imaginative stories infiltrating my brain than anything else. When I read her fabulous debut novel Swamplandia!, I sang The Decemberists’ “O Valencia!’ for two weeks straight.

Now she gives us a batch of equally wonderful stories called Vampires in the Lemon Grove and if you can say that title without singing it to the tune of J. Geils Band Centerfold, well you probably weren’t in 4th grade 1981 when this song was all the rage. You’re singing it now, aren’t you? Good, because this is a short story collection worthy of being stuck in your head.

Like Swamplandia! this isn’t a book without faults. There’s a few overlong, sentimental head scratchers that seem to go nowhere. In one, an alienated teen finds important items from the past that have consequences on the future. Frankly, I didn’t get this story and I’m still not entirely sure what happened in it.

In another a fortysomething masseuse, Beverly, works over a PTSD-suffering young soldier with an enormous back tattoo depicting in great detail the day one of his buddies was killed. As Beverly strives to take away the soliders’ pain the tattoo changes as does the soldiers’ memories of that day. I don’t know if this story is actually boring because it’s too long and overly sentimental or if it’s that “War-things” make me go ZZZZZZzzzzzz.

But the rest of the collection? Totally aces. The title story finds sad, old vampire Clyde hanging out in an Italian lemon grove since the lemons there seem to quench his thirst for blood. Clyde reflects on the life of blood-sucking and his love for his wife, Magreb, who is itching to move from the grove and spends a lot of her time in the form of a bat.

Then there’s two delectably creepy tales. “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis” which finds a young bully, Larry, haunted by a scarecrow version of one of his victims. This one was hard to read what with all the mindless, young-teen boy violence, but also compelling because you want to find out not only what Larry is hiding but what happened to the real Eric Mutis. Also creepy, “Proving Up” about a family hoping to stake claim on some fine Nebraska farmland. This is the kind of mind-bending story that has you reading along and then you’re all “woah, did I miss something,” because it changes on you that quickly.

Perhaps my favorite of the collection is ?The Barn at the End of Our Term” about US Presidents reincarnated as horses. The former presidents are not only devastated by this horse thing, they have big plans to go back to Washington and take back the White House. That is all the presidents, except for Rutherford B. Hayes who just wants to know what lies beyond the corral fence and if his wife Lucy has been reincarnated into that blind sheep. Though it sounds absurd the story is quite sweet and funny. You can read it at Granta, and you should.

What makes Russell’s stories so enjoyable is that she takes what seems like absurd or outrageous premises and imbibes them with meaning and emotion. She writes stories that are imaginative and satisfying to read because she doesn’t rely on clever or an outrageous premise to do the entertaining, instead her wonderful writing does that.

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