I Read Books: Boxcutters

 

Boxcutters by John Chrostek

A short story collection, varying greatly in length, style, tone and genre. How to sum it up?

Some are naturalistic, in Big Green two women go on a road trip to pick up the belongings of a dead friend. In Glass Spectacle an artist appears in a glass structure in a park, living there, sculpting. In Jesus Christ, Human Relations, Jean is upset that she’s passed over for a job, a job taken by Jesus Christ (not that one… maybe). And yet each of these still has the edge of uncanniness of some of the more fantastic stories, the strangeness form elsewhere emerging in the usual. In Knucklehead for instance a town has passed a law requiring that people fight, and how one resident responds.

Knucklehead bridges into the weird horror stories; an aspect of the collection, of the unusual impinging on the mundane, comes to the fore here. In Self Maintenance someone is trapped in their apartment, and sewage keeps coming in, threatening to flood the place. It seems almost conscious, malevolent. In The Conduit Of All Things Richard Nixon has a moment of revelation. In Honey a sitcom star tries on a wig, loses both her own identity and that of her character.

There are others too, that do not fit this paradigm I’ve imposed, that break out of the box I constructed. Still, they disturb rather than comfort, they conceal while they reveal.

Read This: Collection of stories that are equally strong in their descriptions of regular people and life as when something inexplicable arrives
Don’t Read This: Lots of death, grim loss, failure
And As A Final Disclosure: Malarkey Books provided an Advanced Reader Copy for me