The Awful Possibilities

Starred review from March 29, 2010
Nine caustic stories by TeBordo find screeching ironies in rhetorical absurdities and writerly subversiveness. In “Took and Lost,” the sense of violation felt by someone “who lost something” in an unspecified theft (though the thief is described as “a brilliant man... penning poems with his left hand and novels with his right, while beautiful and scandalous arias drip from his tongue”) is played out in an elaborate street spectacle. “The Champion of Forgetting” is a chilling chronicle of a brainwashed kid who has been kidnapped by a band of organ snatchers and is enlisted in their schemes; she proves masterly at sedation and surgery, to the reader's increasing horror. TeBordo relishes in tossing narrative wrenches into familiar setups, as with the second-person “SS Attacks,” in which a bored 10th-grade narrator plans a school shooting to compensate for his older brother's cooler existence. Similarly, in “Rules and Regulations,” the narrative transforms itself with vindictive fluidity from a dubious manual on child discipline to offering tips on caring for one's aging parent (“Enact your revenge with double-knotted bows and dirty linen”). Bizarre and biting, these tales leave a mark.

May 1, 2010
The nine stories of TeBordos first collection are as ambiguous and creepy as his third novel, We Go Liquid (2007). The opener and closer are also stylistically unusual. In each of the four parts of SS Attacks! nearly every paragraph begins with the same word; the narrators a teenager apparently planning a Columbine-like incident. Every paragraph in Rules and Regulations starts in imperative mood; whats being taught is child, then elder, abuse. Those experiments bookend more conventional fare, but never are the tale-tellers named, the scenarios unfolded mount in violence as they head toward ghastly or at least lowering endings, and the diction is so chaste (Gertrude Steins ghost hovers over the lot) that a dire surrealism roils beneath their superficial naturalism. Best of show may be The Champion of Forgetting, told by a traumatized girl kidnapped by human-kidney thieves. Photo-postcards showing black glop inundating mid-twentieth-century exteriors and interiors with apparent strippers interfile with the stories; the handwritten messages on their versos constitute another weird tale. Sheer delight for connoisseurs of nongenre strangeness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)