gravely finished reading Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
Bookwyrm posts
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“there’s a Cheers story in it” set me up to expect lighter stuff but these are pretty damned serious stories. I particularly liked “Exit Zero”, “Can Only Houses Be Haunted”, “The Ecstasy of Sam Malone”, “Flowers and Their Meanings”, and “Viola in Midwinter”, which is nearly half the stuff here.
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Fun twist on time travel, but also I think this might have worked better as a novella in some places, a play in others, a few short stories, an X-Files episode or something like that, etc. I don’t remember why I picked this up, used (in retired-library-book plastic sheathing even) or when. It’s been on my “to read” pile for a year or so. I’m probably going to drop my copy in a little free library rather than keep it.
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A lovely coming-of-age (I learned from a Bookwyrm post that you can call these a Bildungsroman) New York City story with a lot of heart. Another reviewer called it a “funny-sad” which: yeah it’s that too. While I also more than enjoyed Auster’s similar 4, 3, 2, 1, in this case, the same kind of story (or, one quarter of the same kind of story), follows someone just under two years older than me to New York City so rather than the former’s dips into period-overexposure I had lots of “yes, hello” moments. I’m not a nostalgic person but that was a nice personal bonus.
(Also Cheers gets another well deserved tip of the hat in Beautyland, like it did in Exit Zero.)
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Most of what I want to say about Sky Daddy would spoil the afterword, which was a minor revelation for me. “Oh, jeeze.”
Set in San Francisco and viciously deadpan about it.
