These Heroic, Happy Dead

February 29, 2016
The effects of war hover like a leaky umbrella over the 10 stories that furnish Mogelson’s cogent debut collection, which finds veterans, active servicemen, and those around them struggling through conflicts at home and in combat. In “To the Lake,” a troubled ex-soldier drives into a New England snowstorm in hopes of reaching his estranged girlfriend, yet ends up instead at the home of another damaged veteran after, among other events, his truck loses control and crashes. “Visitors” follows the mother of a soldier in prison for an accidental murder as she grows accustomed to seeing her son behind bars. Across the ocean, “A Beautiful Country” finds a former commando traveling the vast expanse of Afghanistan for work as an independent military contractor, and “Total Solar” concerns a journalist caught in an attack on a garden restaurant in Kabul. Perhaps the strongest story is “Kids,” which studies grief through the eyes of an active Army captain as he loses comrades within his unit and outside his patrol base. Mogelson follows a traditional story structure throughout, often feathering in backstory in expected ways, and his narratives remain compelling. Hope is hard to come by in this collection, but the stories will linger with the reader.

Starred review from February 15, 2016
U.S. veterans deal with the collateral damage of military service in this collection of often surprisingly understated stories. An alcoholic veteran of the Afghanistan campaign is bailed out of jail by another vet who lost his legs ("To the Lake"). A vet's broken marriage leaves his son with at least a bad physical scar, and the father eventually re-enlists ("Sea Bass"). A mother visits her veteran son in prison, eventually carrying there a box of letters he wrote to the father of the man he killed in a "drunken scrap" two months after being discharged ("Visitors"). Mogelson, who served in the National Guard without being deployed, spent almost three years as a freelance journalist in Afghanistan. The stories in this debut have the hard edge and sharp dialogue of well-observed reporting. In "A Human Cry," in which Mogelson draws a link between Army-supplied dentures and a death by farm mower, a brief scene captures a "big girl" in fishnet stockings, "little flesh diamonds pushing through the webbing like string-tied ham." Like the mower, other common items--a chef's knife, a car, a table saw--can cause mayhem stateside for the vet accustomed to military weapons. Only one story ("Kids") is fully engaged in combat, and it hangs on whether the action of a local boy is meant to warn or harm U.S. soldiers. All the stories rely on some measure of ambiguity and indirectness (unlike the hammering anti-war irony of the e.e. cummings poem from which the book's title is drawn). The fallout from PTSD may be everywhere, but the term and discussions thereon are MIA--and the stories as a result are broader and better. Mogelson shows impressive range and restraint in an area--war-related fiction--in which physical and emotional extremes have been too readily deployed and exploited.

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March 15, 2016
This subtly interrelated and frequently gory collection of Afghan War tales packs a wallop. Mogelson, who writes for the New York Times Magazine and other periodicals, captures the grim realities of war and, even more, its aftermath in these raw and deceptively simple stories. His experience as a correspondent and his feel for the horrors of the countrychildren faking seizures to attract the attention of unsuspecting civilians, as in Total Solar lends credibility to the action. Some of the stories Visitors, for exampletake place in domestic settings (e.g., the Idaho state prison) in which the landscape seems every bit as threatening as the Afghan countryside. The technique of having soldiers from the early stories appearing later in the book as scarred civilians works particularly well, especially in A Human Cry. This is hard stuff to read, definitely worth it, but be prepared.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)