Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

December 1, 2008
Wilson's captivating debut collection paints an everyday world filled with characters obsessed by weird impulses. Whether it's Guster, the narrator of “The Shooting Man,” who goes to great lengths to discover the secret of a sideshow performer whose trick is to shoot himself in the face, or the three bored college grads of the title story who compulsively dig a tunnel beneath their town, Wilson creates a lively landscape with rich and twisted storytelling. A few stories satirize the odd ways families react to tragedy, for example, “Grand Stand-in,” which revolves around an elderly woman hired by families who wish to avoid telling their children about an unforeseen death. Two of the best stories involve teens: in “Mortal Kombat,” two unpopular quiz bowl stars become enamored of a video game and each other, while “Go, Fight, Win,” features a cheerleader who prefers building model cars to the company of her schoolmates. While Wilson has trouble wrapping up a few stories (“Blowing Up on the Spot,” “The Museum of Whatnot”), most are fresh and darkly comedic in a Sam Lipsyte way.

Starred review from February 15, 2009
A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything you've read before.

Wilson (English/Univ. of the South) displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity. One of the more resonant entries,"Grand Stand-In," concerns a woman who joins a blossoming industry, playing grandmother to fractured families. Other stories sensitively document the emotional trials of adolescence: In"Mortal Kombat," two teenaged boys do battle with their budding, bewildering sexuality, and in"Go, Fight, Win," a reluctant young cheerleader muses that"sex seemed like chicken pox, inevitable and scarring." Hints of Southern Gothicism may be found among these pages. One story,"Birds in the House," details a bizarre ritualistic contest whose winner will inherit an antebellum estate, while another,"The Shooting Man," finds a young man named Guster obsessed with that most rural of spectacles, the traveling sideshow. More often, though, the author tells stories that ring true, and that feature innovative plots and the wit of indie comedy. The best of the lot,"Blowing Up on the Spot," concerns a man, Leonard, who works as a sorter at a Scrabble factory when he's not coping with his suicidal brother, crushing on the girl who works in the candy shop and, well, worrying about what is, for him, the very real danger of spontaneous combustion.

Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2009
Four mutually loathing brothers fold hundreds of paper cranes for a contest to determine who will own the family plantation house. A young man counts every step to and from a factory in which he winnows the Qs from heaps of new-minted Scrabble tiles. Three new BAs spend months after graduation tunneling beneath the hometown of one of them. A professional substitute grandmother gets queasy about her new family when she discovers they also retain a faux child. That last story, Grand Stand-In, is the creepiest in the book, though the bad-dream pulp-noir exercise, The Shooting Man, is a close, gritty runner-up. Two stories of teens and sex, Mortal Kombat and Go, Fight, Winthe only third-person narratives hereexpress great though measured sympathy. Wildly imaginative in the manner of new weirdness fiction (see Feeling Very Strange, 2006), Wilsons work is also warmly compassionate in tenor. He creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical. Watch him closely.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)