Tales of Falling and Flying

July 24, 2017
Life and death are treated with equal gravity and levity in this nimble, refreshing collection of shorts from Loory (Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day). Each of these stories is a deceptively small bite, its depth of flavor often growing and lingering. Divided into four sections, the first three each 13 yarns long and the last a single story, the book engages both the profound and the frivolous. Reality flirts with and sometimes gives way to the bizarre, the economy and style of language making a man with disappearing body parts (“Missing”) and a sloth seeking work in the city (“The Sloth”) equally vivid. Each of these microcosms, whether involving well-known people and places or anonymous characters and locales, carries the appropriate emotional weight to enchant without overwhelming. Loory is at his best in worlds tilted slightly from reality involving quests tinged with mystery and heartache, such as the man seeking a woman who vanished after falling from a cliff in “The Fall” and the treasure-hunting crew that meets a different kind of siren in “The Island.”

Starred review from July 1, 2017
A triptych of exquisitely crafted fables from miniaturist Loory (The Baseball Player and the Walrus, 2015, etc.)For dedicated fans of Loory's delicately constructed vignettes, this may be a perfect follow-up to his starred debut. Here, he's divided the collection into three sections of 13 stories each, plus a final, slightly longer tribute, "Elmore Leonard." His stories always begin simply enough: a person, sometimes an animal, and occasionally a personified element of nature, does something, and consequently something else happens. But then Loory makes some unexpected move that twists the story, often wryly. A man inherits a sword, and six pages later his wife shoots a man on their front lawn. A child has a very civil discussion with the monster that lives in his closet. We learn that War and Peace have a terrible domestic relationship. An older woman strikes up a casual relationship with Death in one story. Elsewhere, we meet a man who lives in a field of doors and a woman intermittently lost in a maze. Sometimes there's anthropomorphism in stories that recall David Sedaris' Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (2010). A dodo, long thought extinct, stands up for his true character in the opener, while a squid falls in love with the sun at the start of the next section. That's without even getting into the hilarious encounter between a slightly stupid ostrich and some confused aliens Even when Loory attacks tropes, he manages to undermine them, as in "Zombies": "The zombies are slaughtered--they're a bunch of idiots. The whole thing's pretty anticlimactic." Often, he hits just the right beat at the right moment, as in the story about a man who wants to learn to write. "You lie, he whispered. And the writer smiled. And that, he said, is exactly how it goes." Delightfully disarming stories for readers seeking a plunge down the rabbit hole.

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