Justice Done by Jan Burke

Published digitally by Pocket Star on September 15, 2014

Justice Done is the fifth of six short collections of Jan Burke's crime stories. Although the collection is uneven, the stories are representative of Burke's unusual and engaging approach to crime fiction.

Boniface "Bunny" Slye, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, stars in "The Quarry," a murder mystery narrated by his friend Dr. Max Tyndale. They are sort of a Holmes/Watson duo who are featured in other stories by Burke. The story is reasonably entertaining although it goes on a bit too long.

A party on the Queen Mary provides the setting for "Miscalculation." A nerdy girl named Sarah confronts the mystery of a death that occurred two generations earlier, when the Queen Mary was used as a troop carrier during World War II. The story is unconvincing and its ending is disappointingly uneventful.

"Two Bits" is a quiet story of a boy who was kidnapped while his brother roamed through a store in a strange town with the shiny new quarter the kidnappers gave him. Not a conventional crime story, "Two Bits" is an affecting examination of the crime's impact on the brother who was duped.

Written from the perspective of a man living in horse-and-carriage days, "An Unsuspected Condition of the Heart" tells of a man who married for money, whose in-laws openly plot each other's murders, and whose new wife finds herself in an unhappy situation. The story fits within the book's title and reveals the charm with which Burke often writes.

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Mystery, Inc. by Joyce Carol Oates

Published by MysteriousPress.com on April 7, 2015

"Mystery, Inc." is Joyce Carol Oates' contribution to the Bibliomysteries series from Mysterious Press. Each short story is the creation of a crime writer. The stories are blurbed as "short tales about deadly books" but they more broadly address deadly authors, deadly bookstores, deadly libraries, and other deadly aspects of the literary world.

The owner of several mystery bookstores would love to acquire Mystery, Inc. in Seabrook, New Hampshire, the finest example of a mystery bookstore he has ever seen. To obtain the store at a good price, however, the current owner will have to die. How unfortunate.

"Mystery Inc." is as much an homage to mystery bookstores and mystery booksellers as it is a mystery story. Atmosphere is everything in a narrative that takes us for a loving stroll past cabinets filled with first editions of Poe and Doyle, pulp magazines filled with Hammett and Chandler, and a variety of art and memorabilia relating to death and crime.

Oates also delves into the philosophy of the mystery story and its relationship to the mystery of life. Mystery books, a character opines, allow us to see the many mysteries of life more clearly, from perspectives that are not our own.

Of course, a reader expects to encounter murderous perspectives in a murder mystery. Oates does not disappoint; the bookstore has a dark history. And of course, good mysteries deliver plot twists. Oates does that, and if the twist is not unexpected, it is nevertheless satisfying. "Mystery Inc." lacks the depth of Oates' best work but her stories never fail to entertain.

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Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

Published by Random House on February 3, 2015

There's something a little out of whack about the worlds in which Kelly Link's characters live. Babies are born without shadows or with an extra shadow. Superheroes have useless powers like the ability to know the correct time without looking at a clock. Strangeness is the background but never the focus of Link's stories. Well, almost never. Instead, Link's characters are strange in perfectly normal ways. They are motivated by the same jealousies and insecurities and resentments as people who live in more familiar environments.

The genre-bending stories collected in Get in Trouble are wildly inventive. They are invariably witty. Link's economical language has deeper meaning than is apparent on the surface although some observations, like telling us there is there is "a fine line between being cuddled and squeezed like a juice box," are just funny.

"When he wasn't getting right with God, Fran's daddy got up to all kinds of trouble." Fran has her own trouble as she carries on the family tradition of serving "The Summer People," my favorite story in the collection.

Lame superheroes lurk in the background of two stories. In "Secret Identity," the author of a letter to someone she met in an online game tries to explain why she is not the person she appears to be. The story's moral is that you can learn a lot about yourself by pretending to be someone else, but you can learn even more by being yourself. "Origin Story" is apparently set in the same universe as "Secret Identity," but I found "Origin Story to be less appealing.

Ghosts provide the theme for two stories. "Two Houses" is a ghost story about astronauts on a spaceship who tell ghost stories. "I Can See Right Through You" is about the lives of two actors who once kissed in a popular vampire movie. The kiss, portending a real-life relationship, is the male actor's defining moment -- unless you count the sex tape or a version of Ghost Hunters that searches for a lost nudist colony. This is my second favorite, thanks to a neat twist at the end that forces the reader to reinterpret much of what has gone before.

Is it better to have something that is perfect but fake or imperfect but real? A girl in "The New Boyfriend" gets a fake boyfriend for her birthday -- a ghost vampire boyfriend that has been recalled by the manufacturer. But what happens when her friend falls in love with her fake boyfriend? Just like having a fake identity can help you learn about yourself, it seems that having a fake boyfriend can help you learn about real relationships.

Mummies, pyramids, pool parties, Raves on the moon, and Faces programmed to replace children so parents can avoid public embarrassment all appear in "Valley of the Girls," a tragic love story that might be a futuristic version of Romeo & Juliet if Shakespeare had been dropping acid. Even stranger is the background of "Light" -- pocket universes, warehouses full of sleeping people -- a domestic drama about a woman, her missing husband, and her gay brother. "Light" is my least favorite in the collection, primarily because I don't know what to make of it, but none of the entries in this odd collection of light-but-serious fantasy stories are bad.

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Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem

Published by Doubleday on February 24, 2015

Jonathan Lethem pushes the boundaries of the short story in this innovative collection. Some stories take a conventional form, others are more experimental. Many are quite funny. Not all the stories are successful but I admire Lethem's vivid imagination and his willingness to take chances.

Two conventional stories are the least interesting in the collection. "Lucky Alan" is about the growth and decline of a New York friendship and its impact on a director's ability to stage manage his life. An empty room in his parents' house is the focal point of "The Empty Room" as a young man returns home with his girlfriend for a visit. While both stories are weaker than others in the collection, the characters are sharply drawn.

"Procedure in Plain Air" is a story only Lethem could write -- other than, maybe, Franz Kafka. Workers dig a hole, drop a bound man into it, cover the hole loosely with boards, and give an umbrella to the narrator with instructions to keep the man in the hole dry if it rains. This wonderfully absurd story suggests that people behave ridiculously because "someone has to step up" and, in stepping up, feel compelled to defend the indefensible.

"The King of Sentences" is an ode to books and the "astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences" they contain. Lethem write plenty of those, including "I saw him the other day in the pharmacy, buying one of those inflatable doughnuts for sitting on when you've got anal discomfort."

Two stories in particular made me smile. The narrator of "Pending Vegan" is "pending" because he fears his children will accuse him of "childlike moral absolutism" if he commits. That's part of the biting humor in this very funny story about a man bewildered by life and the dog he once abandoned. "The Porn Critic" is about a porn shop clerk whose apartment is cluttered with the movies he reviews for the shop's newsletter. The story's humor comes from the reaction that women have to his living environment and reputation, "his life a site where others came to test their readiness for what they feared were their disallowed yearnings."

The narrator of "The Salivating Ear" killed a man at the entrance to his blog. The story suggests that bloggers will take extreme measures to protect their blog and its one or two readers from haters. It is a charming look at lonely bloggers who dream of the day when busloads of tourists will visit their blogs.

Two other stories didn't quite work for me. "Traveler Home" is written as an internal monologue (despite its third person voice) in an abbreviated style, stripped of definite articles and other nonessential words. The story, of wolves that deliver a baby in a basket, is interesting although I'm not quite sure that I caught the point of it. Similarly, I don't know what to make of "The Back Pages," a tale of characters "who live on the margins of cartoon lore." Their plane has crashed on an island, stranding them. The story is told in panels, journal entries, notes to the artist, silly songs and poems, and traditional narrative. It's sort of Lost meets Lord of the Flies meets Pogo and Prince Valiant. I like the concept but I think it works better as a concept than it does as an actual story.

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Mr. Tall by Tony Earley

Published by Little, Brown and Company on August 26, 2014

Generally set in Appalachia (primarily in Tennessee and North Carolina), the stories collected in Mr. Tall are surprising, funny, and moving. Protagonists have rich personalities while eccentric background characters contribute to the sense of realism that each story (except the last) conveys.

My favorite in the collection, "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands," is a sly domestic drama. Daryl is no longer tolerant of his wife and doesn't understand why his sweet clingy daughter, now in college, is no longer sweet or clingy. I particularly enjoyed Daryl's contemplation of his marital duties: "Find me a Hardee's. Find me a room. Stay with me until I die. It was all the same thing, really." Daryl's wife, on the other hand, makes it clear during the couple's weekend away that her first husband was infinitely superior to Daryl. The story is both an amusing and a biting look at a marriage gone sour that invites an obvious question: How do couples stay together when the only glue that binds them is mutual animosity? The answer turns out to be unexpectedly practical.

"Mr. Tall" is a wit-driven story about a young woman who bears the guilt of abandoning her family when she allows the only boy who ever chased her to catch her. Her introduction to marriage, sex, mules, and hillbilly living is hilarious. Even funnier is her adventure with her neighbor, Mr. Tall, although the humor is ultimately overtaken by an intense scene that explains why Mr. Tall is a recluse.

The background characters in "The Cryptozoologist" are a fugitive who bombed an abortion clinic and a skunk ape (a version of Bigfoot) but the protagonist is a woman who only begins to understand her husband years after he dies. The poignant story illuminates the importance of appreciating one's life partner as a unique person, rather than appreciating a shared lifestyle.

"Yard Art" is an achingly heartfelt story about the importance of the ordinary -- because what is ordinary to everyone else can be extraordinary to one person. "Have You Seen the Stolen Girl," a good story that is nevertheless weaker than the others, tells of an aging woman's reaction to news that a girl disappeared on her block.

"Just Married" consists of four compact descriptions of aging, sometimes damaged people who are or once were married, and of the memories they carry of their younger lives. The last of the four ties the first three together, neatly and sweetly.

The final story is quite different from the others. The Jack in "Jack and the Mad Dog" is the Appalachian version of the once-famed Giant Killer, but his best days are behind him. He fears he has come to the end of his final story, "his mind free from the embarrassment of exposition, the regret of flashback, the dread of foreshadow." He's in pretty much the same boat (albeit a magic boat) as his rival, Tom Dooley, who also lacks cultural currency. After so many stories mired in self-indulgence with no regard for the farmer's daughters who surround him, can Jack develop a new narrative? The story is a contemplation of the slow death of Appalachian storytelling and a reminder of the power stories have to teach us about life (and death). We are, after all, characters in our own stories, just like Jack ... at least until the book is closed.

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