You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a catalog of the mundane made nightmarish and surreal. Eating an orange is a visceral act of destruction and consumption. Applying makeup is an absolute negation of the self.
Sex is dissociative and alien, a study of individual body parts joining and separating in feverish dispassion. Commercials are bizarre tragedies populated with gruesome cartoon imagery.
Kelly Link is one of the most terrifying writers I’ve ever read, even though her stories are rarely flat-out horror. She’s got a knack for juxtaposing weirdness with the mundane, and it’s basically catnip for my reading soul.
The only thing I remember about Jonathan Lethem’s first collection of short stories is that he really liked abrupt endings. Lucky Alan is no different. Sometimes the endings work, and sometimes the stories just feel unfinished. That’s probably why this collection has so many one-star ratings – people assume that Lethem is trying to pawn off his fragments on an unsuspecting public, and they react with vehemence.
I’ve never been a huge fan of horror, but over the years I’ve gained an appreciation of scary stories. They aren’t necessarily the same thing, either. As I see it, horror is a genre with a few common tropes, one of which is that the story may or may not be scary. For example, I’ve never … Read more
Published: February 12, 2008 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Genre(s): Fiction, Slipstream Format: Hardcover Pages: 244 I was drawn to this collection of short stories by two things; first off, the cover is gorgeously designed, evoking both the period setting of many of the stories – the 1950s and 1960s – and the unsettling, off-kilter themes … Read more
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