A Better Angel

Starred review from May 12, 2008
The author of Gob's Grief
and The Children's Hospital
returns with a sublime collection of nine stories whose wide assortment of characters, many of them children, fugue around death, are plagued by remembrance of things past and are possessed by violence. In “Stab,” a young protagonist whose twin died, joins a little girl in a killing spree of neighborhood animals, eventually setting their sights on larger prey. A woman who tries to commit suicide in “The Sum of Our Parts” wanders hospital halls as an astral projection, witnessing the unexpressed desires of her “friends” in pathology. And a Juno
-esque teen, a hospital regular with short-gut syndrome, writes an animal book of sublimated child-ward life: bunnies with “high colonic ruin,” cats with “leukemic indecisiveness” and monkeys with “chronic kidney doom.” The story “Why Antichrist?” gives us two teenagers who have each lost parents, one to 9/11 (which looms large in the collection); the devil is soon literally between the teens. With heartbreaking imagination, Adrian illuminates how people act out their grief on their own bodies and the bodies of others, and enter the world of the spirit in the process.