The gnome stories /

This collection of eleven stories from genre-hopping novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer Monson (Letter to a Future Lover, 2015) is filled with intimate looks into the minds and lives of characters in unusual situations. A man recently left by his wife kills a home intruder and then becomes a home intruder himself; the assistant to a successful starvation coach considers her role; and a man gets a job at a facility where his deceased girlfriend is kept in cryogenic stasis. Some of these clever stories have interesting forms, such as In a Structure Simulating an Owl , adapted from the form of a patent filed for an artificial owl. Executed in Monson's conversational, clean, and nearly quotation-free style, the collection will interest Monson's existing fans and readers who enjoy exploring the flexible boundaries of short fiction. Some of the stories don't offer readers any clear character to root for, but there is a hefty creative weight to them that will delight many.--Jason Hess Copyright 2020 Booklist

This offbeat collection from Monson (Letter to a Future Lover) touches on suburbs, relationships, and, yes, gnomes. The titular gnome first appears in "The Reassurances," in which a man adopts a stretch of highway to propose to his girlfriend, Sharon, who turns him down right before she gets into a fatal car accident. The man remembers a story he heard from Sharon, in which a pair of campers on hallucinogens come across what they think is a live gnome in the woods and bring it back to their campsite; the next morning, they discover they'd actually found a human child. This kind of unexpected yet mundane horror is prevalent in all of Monson's stories. The outward ordinariness of the characters always belies something deeper and darker, as in "Weep No More over This Event," in which a man whose wife has recently left him gradually displays a penchant for violence that may have contributed to his wife's decision. "Our Song" is about a man whose job it is to delve into and embody other people's memories in order to help parse or preserve them; the narrator's attempts to fix past wrongs ends in tragedy. Monson shines in his longer stories, where he's able to work the magic of his sleight of hand--shorter, more experimental pieces like "In a Structure Simulating an Owl," which finds inspiration in a patent application, are a little harder to land. Nevertheless, this is a strange, unnerving, and intelligent collection. (Feb.)

Cozy domestic lives are routinely unsettled, sometimes violently, in this dystopian set of stories by seasoned experimenter Monson (How We Speak to One Another, 2017, etc.).The "gnome" of this book's title is a garden gnome, which intermittently appears here as a symbol of the intersection of weirdness and allegedly "normal" suburbia. In "Believing in the Future With the Torturer's Apprentice," a female narrator recalls her husband's secret life producing torture porn. In "The Reassurances," a man begins working at the cryogenic facility that's preserving his girlfriend, who was killed in a car wreck. The glib narrator of "It Is Hard Not To Love the Starvationist's Assistant" works at an extreme weight-loss facility where amputation is mandatory if goals aren't met. And in the concluding "Our Song," a man working on tools to archive and tweak our memories roams around the troubled psyche of a popular singer, attempting to seed her mind with a song idea. Some of the stories' conceits are high-concept to a fault; one, for instance, takes on the format of a patent document. But the virtue of the best stories is Monson's capacity to bridge unusual setups with compassionate storytelling. "The Reassurances," in particular, blends its science-fiction milieu with the narrator's repeated reckoning with loss, and Monson delivers that feeling with both heart and humor. (The narrator sponsored a stretch of highway in his late girlfriend's name before she died, and he's now legally bound to tidy it.) Sometimes the mood is openly comic: In "Everyone Looks Better When They're Under Arrest," the narrator bemoans a never-arriving stove that would complete his family's obligation to a reality show: "We are on the pointy end of some long existential stick." But the atmosphere is generally more muted as Monson contemplates how suffused with loss, fear, and mortality our everyday lives are.Bemusing SF-tinged fare echoing the tone and spirit of Saunders and Vonnegut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.