Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine

June 1, 2018
Ten familial short fictions from the fertile mind of Wilson (Perfect Little World, 2017, etc.).Wilson triumphantly returns to short stories, the medium of his first book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009), ruminating once more on grief, adolescence, and what it means to be a family. The opener, "Scrolling Through the Weapons," finds a guy and his girlfriend looking after some nearly feral nieces and nephews. The tricky bond between father and son is revisited in the stark "Housewarming." A wife and mother who returns to her childhood home after her 82-year-old mother is assaulted makes a plethora of bad decisions in "A Visit." Grief and regret run hand in hand in "Sanders for a Night," in which a boy wants to cosplay as his dead brother, and the title story, in which a failing rock star takes advantage of his mother's generous nature. There's a rare misfire in the collection-ending "The Lost Baby," which plays out as advertised, including a puzzling, ambiguous ending. But the book's three portraits of young people are mesmerizing. In the collection's best story, "Wildfire Johnny," Wilson counterintuitively explores the nature of male maturity, cloaked in a horror story about a mystical razor that allows the user to travel back in time--if they slash their own throat. In "No Joke, This Is Going to Be Painful," a restless young woman stuck in her small town finds redemption in pain: "We called them ice fights. They made things weird for a little while." Finally, Wilson captures the insanity of adolescence in "The Horror We Made," in which a bunch of teenage girls jacked up on Adderall, weed, and diet pills make a horror movie during a sleepover. One true confession within: "Every time I think I might not be friends with you guys anymore...I remember that I love shit like this and no one else would do it with me."Evocative, compassionate, and exquisitely composed stories about the human condition.

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June 11, 2018
In the world of Wilson’s darkly funny short stories, children and deer die, and unhappy, helpless people drink and do irresponsible things. Wilson (Perfect Little World) shows people managing as best they can: trying to survive video game zombies when the rest of their life is too horrible to fix (“Scroll Through the Weapons”), helping selfish grown children because no one else would love them enough to do so (“Housewarming” and the title story), and coping with the horror of adolescence by making horror movies (“The Horror We Made”). “No Joke, This Is Going to Be Painful” involves pariahs ice fighting, but its title would work for virtually every story in the collection. The exception is the one weak link, “The Lost Baby,” which taps into a pain so deep that neither humor nor the human ability to occasionally not be awful can redeem anything. The rest stick with the reader and show a terrible world made less so, sometimes, by human contact, even though humans were usually the problem in the first place.

Starred review from July 1, 2018
After two dazzling realistic satires, The Family Fang (2011) and Perfect Little World (2016), Wilson proffers his second story collection. Saying it's as good as Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009) doesn't do it justice. Wilson specializes in possible weirdness; only one story here, Wildfire Johnny, depends on anything fantastic, and then it's to tell a tale of saving not the world but only the protagonist's love life. Typically, Wilson presents the aftermath of an outlandish but not impossible event. A woman stabs her husband at a cookout, and her sister and her boyfriend, who tell us about it, must take care of the dysfunctional couple's virtually feral children ( Scroll Through the Weapons ). Aged parents have to help broken adult children in both Housewarming and the title story, while in A Visit, a broken daughter flies to help her injured mother. Third-grader Greg wants to be his older brother for Halloween; his stressed mother, Marta, is appalled, for their first son's death drove her and Naton to divorce ( Sanders for a Night ). In the heart-wrenching The Lost Baby, an infant just vanishes, and that keeps his estranging parents tenuously together. Wilson never moralizes, much less sensationalizes, any predicament he sketches; rather, he makes us feel and wonder at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2018

As evidenced by his debut novel, The Family Fang, and now this second affecting story collection, Wilson expertly limns fraught family relations and especially the trouble many adults have growing up. In the title story, a self-absorbed rock star quits music and moves home, then rejoins his band after a successful turnaround; what's heartening is not his smug delight but his mother's reaction at story's close as she watches a video of his singing: "But Gina knew what was in his heart. Her son." Similarly, in "Housewarming," a long-suffering father intervenes yet again to help a helpless adult son who can't control his emotions, this time dragging a dead deer from a pond near where the son and his wife live; the result is pitch perfect and absolutely wrenching. Elsewhere, a young man assists his girlfriend with the feral, neglected children of her sister, who's just stabbed her husband with a kebab skewer, and a teenage boy finds a magical razor that allows him to go back in time and redo bad days. Gruesomely, he's got to cut his throat with the razor for its magic to work, but he uses it repeatedly into adulthood to avoid truly reckoning with life. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/26/18.]

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2018

Author of The Family Fang, a spot-on New York Times best seller and multi-best-booked title made into a film, and the TV-optioned Perfect Little World, Wilson launched his career with the Alex and Shirley Jackson Award-winning collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. Starting with the title piece, about a self-absorbed rock star compelled to move home, Wilson again has his way with the story form. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.