White Dialogues

October 30, 2017
Sims’s debut story collection (after the novel A Questionable Shape) elegantly explores the ordinary and fantastic terrors lurking in the deepest recesses of the psyche. Told in the second person, “House-Sitting” features a protagonist who has been employed to oversee a cabin in the woods, and who starts believing that the place is haunted by the owner’s deranged thoughts. “Radical Closure,” also told in the second person, centers on a writer who is plagued by inescapable self-defeating notions of being an “idiot” and a “failure.” The narrator of “Destroy All Monsters” plays out in his mind a complex scenario in which insects approaching his apartment window stage a Godzilla-like production. Sims’s stories have horror trappings, and the author excels when tackling everyday, mundane territories. The intricacies of relationships are given a sophisticated treatment in stories such as “The Bookcase” and “Za.” The latter examines the neurotic thought process of a woman as she is trying to interpret the coded language of an email from her recent partner. This is a cerebral collection for fans of smart, philosophical fiction that is not afraid to follow thought experiments to their most chilling conclusions.

August 15, 2017
Eleven eerie, dryly witty short stories by novelist Sims (A Questionable Shape, 2013). There are some clever literary stunts scattered throughout this collection, but there's no doubting the inventiveness of the author's prose, pacing, and ability to build tension and occasionally dispel it with laughter. The first entry, "House-sitting," is a gothic nightmare in the vein of "The Tell-Tale Heart," about a housesitter driving themselves insane with the specters of ghosts. "You keep thinking: you are living in the cabin of a madman," writes Sims. "You wonder: how long can you live in a madman's home without going mad yourself?" "The Bookcase" is a very meta exercise in which a mean-spirited scrap between neighbors becomes fodder for an episode of Ira Glass' This American Life. "Ekphrases" is another experimental work, one that catalogs works of art completed at "the edge of death." What seems to be a trifle in "Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute" turns out to be some emotional stories traded between friends as the titular film plays out in the background. There's a travelogue of monsters in "City of Wolfmen" and a Kafka-esque play on kaiju movies in "Destroy All Monsters." Sims goes down the gothic horror road again in the two-pager "A Premonition," which begins with the delicious line, "It was late and I was beset by a black wind." There's a final ghost story of sorts in "Radical Closure," in which a writer ruminates on the nature of death. The collection ends with an eerie multimedia work that mashes up the film criticism of Lebanese author Jalal Toufic, images from the Hitchcock film Rear Window, and the spiraling madness of a film critic choking on his own critique. Touche. A deft collection of spooky fables that pivots from classic stylings to postmodern irony.

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