The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel

First published in Spain in 2023; published in translation by Bloomsbury Publishing on April 29, 2025

Guadalupe Nettel is a Mexican writer best known for the novel Still Born. This is her third collection of short fiction. Most of the stories are set in Spanish-speaking countries. Characters are generally living with discontent or fear as they struggle to cope with the uncontrollable events that shape their lives and the secrets that burden their families.

My favorite entry is “Imprinting,” if only because it packs the surprise of an O. Henry story, albeit with a dark ending.  Antonia skips her college classes to accompany a friend who is visiting her sick mother in the hospital. As Antonia walks through the halls, she notices her uncle’s name on one of the doors. She has no clear memory of her uncle but knows that other family members refuse to talk about him. She drops into the room and, while growing close to him, begins to visit every day. The shocking ending allows the reader to deduce the reason why the family wants nothing to do with Frank.

A surprising revelation about family is also at the heart of “Playing with Fire.” The narrator asks herself “if I really knew these two boys who I had given birth to and raised so carefully for years.” When she goes on a camping trip with her disgruntled sons and angry husband, she learns that she doesn’t know any of them as well as she thought she did.

Another story that relies on surprise is “The Fellowship of Orphans.” An adult woman recalls her days in an orphanage, including the warnings the orphans were given about the risk of disappearing in Mexico City if they were to wander off. Walking through a park, she sees a poster with a photo of a missing man. After she spots the man, she calls the number on the poster and learns from the man’s mother that the man she saw is indeed the woman’s son. The woman says she will come to see him, but what happens next is not what the narrator expected. The story doesn’t pack the emotional punch that Nettel likely intended, but it sends a message about familial love — or the consequences of its absence.

“Life Elsewhere,” my second favorite in the collection, tells the story of a man who, after drama school, abandoned his hope for a theatrical career and settled into marriage. He disagreed with his wife about their choice of apartment — she preferred the one with better light, he liked the one in a more interesting building. His choice is rented before they can decide. He later finds that the apartment he wanted is inhabited by an actor he knew in school. Drawn to the apartment more than to his acquaintance, over the course of time and to his wife’s dismay he “began turning into just another member of the family.”

“The Pink Door” is a “be careful what you wish for” story. As is true of most such stories, it relies on something akin to magic to deliver its lesson. An aging man with a controlling wife enters what he believes to be a house of prostitution that suddenly appeared in his neighborhood. The business instead sells him sweets that change his life, making him realize that wished-for changes come with unanticipated consequences.

Three other stories are less appealing. A thousand-year-old monkey puzzle tree in a family’s yard was a source of pride until it became infected by a parasite and lost its leaves and branches. The father believed that the tree held the family together and despaired of the family’s future. “The Forest Under Earth” is built upon predictable comparisons of root systems to family connectedness, but the story goes nowhere.

“The Accidentals” compares the albatross to migrants who flee dictatorships but yearn to return home, an “accidental” being the name given to an albatross that strays from its usual migration route and ends up in an unfamiliar place, mating with an albatross it wouldn’t otherwise desire simply because it is the only available choice. Like “The Forest Under the Earth,” the author’s chosen metaphor is a bit too obvious.

“The Torpor” imagines a permanent pandemic. A couple fled from urban enforcement of social isolation restrictions to join a commune in the woods, then decided they needed the relative comfort of urban living when the woman became pregnant. The story has some imaginative touches of world building in a lasting pandemic but the woman’s vacillation between staying or leaving after returning to the city lacks an emotional punch.

Five of eight successful stories is a decent batting average for a collection. While the volume lacks a home run, it doesn’t have any strikeouts. Her sharp prose alone makes Nettel a writer worth reading.

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"Eleven Numbers" by Lee Child

Published by Amazon Original Stories on February 1, 2025

Reacher novels have become predictable. Some seem like parodies of the first novels in the series. I was happy to see Lee Child write something that wasn’t about a tough guy whose violent adventures are narrated in clipped sentences.

The premise of “Eleven Numbers” is simple. Nathan Tyler is a math professor. Tyler is among a handful of respected academics who have given intense thought to Kindansky numbers, a special subset of prime numbers that Child appears to have conjured from his imagination. At least, a quick Google search returned only this story and some references to Wassily Kindansky, a Russian artist whose abstract drawings were based on geometric patterns. My apologies to Kindansky and to Child if Kindansky numbers are real.

Tyler is invited to attend a math conference in Moscow at a time when Americans are being urged not to travel to Russia. He accepts the invitation at the urging of the president, who — with the help of a more renowned mathematician — explains that certain nine-digit Kindansky numbers were used by Russian mathematician Arkady Suslov when he designed a computer security algorithm. Enter the wrong password — a nine-digit Kindansky number — and the system will lock out the user and trigger a password reset. The algorithm is protecting Russia’s nuclear arsenal. America would love to get inside and monkey around with it.

The problem is that Suslov is the only person who knows which of the eleven potential numbers is the correct password. The president wants Tyler to travel to Russia, meet with Suslov, and get a sense of which number he used.

Things go south for Tyler when he rents a car at the airport in Moscow, drives toward his hotel, and gets T-boned by a police car. He’s arrested and tossed into jail, making his mission look like a failure. In fact, his mission has only started.

The story is simple but interesting and at least modestly suspenseful. I liked it because Tyler isn’t a tough guy. He relies on his intelligence to perform his mission and on his instincts to smell a double-cross that the American government has probably planned for him.

I also liked Child’s resort to a conventional writing style. The short sentences and “Maybe this. Maybe that.” style of the Reacher novels has become iconic, but it doesn’t work well outside of the Reacher universe. It’s nice to know that Child can tell an engaging story that doesn’t rely on fistfights, shootouts, and two-word sentences that have grown a bit tired in the Reacher series.

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The Answer Is No by Fredrik Backman

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on December 1, 2024

Love is not for the selfish. Fortunately for Lucas, he is happy to be selfish and doesn’t care about being unloved. Lucas believes that “responsibility” and “commitment” are “two of the easiest ways of ruining any perfectly good day.” Lucas prefers to be free to do what he wants when he wants without considering the competing desires of other people. He also understands the danger of starting conversations. “If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and that’s how wars start.”

Narrating “The Answer Is No,” Lucas tells the reader that there is something perfect about not having to share a pint of ice cream. He recommends “being really content with your life and not immediately thinking: Wow, now everything is really perfect, maybe we should have a baby?” Because a baby introduces another person in your life, and other people are the source of all unhappiness.

It's not that Lucas dislikes other people. He just has no need to interact with them. He appreciates the people who cook his pad thai and those who deliver it to his door, but he is happier if he doesn’t need to speak with them. To those who maintain that humans are herd animals who need to be together, he counters that “humans have historically proved to be in-need-of-therapy animals,” the need for therapy being triggered by keeping company with other humans.

Lucas likes to be left alone so he can drink wine and play video games. He feels sorry for people who want something to happen in their lives. Lucas “lives in an apartment, which he would consider the perfect form of storage for people, were it not for the great virus of civilization: neighbors.” His default response when a neighbor wants something is to tell them no.

Some of Lucas’ neighbors want him to help solve the mystery of a frying pan that a tenant discarded outside — almost on the sidewalk! — and Lucas has just managed to talk them into going away when his downstairs neighbor appears. She’s upset that he changed his internet password and is affronted when he accuses her of stealing his internet. It isn’t stealing, after all, if she only takes the little bit of the internet that leaks into her apartment.

Craziness ensues, primarily in the form of a large and ever-growing junk pile that originated with the frying pan, a committee of three crazy residents who place Lucas in charge of the pile, and a group of men who worship Lucas because they are convinced he is an angel. Eccentric people are Fredrik Backman’s bread and butter, the kind of people who make random comments like “I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what I’m capable of!” Other characters, like a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband by pretending to be in a coma, are more poignant. Backman also pokes fun at official and unofficial bureaucrats, protestors, middle managers, Facebook groups, and self-help advice.

Lucas might not be a reader’s ideal neighbor, but he sometimes expresses wise thoughts, including his recognition that some people are more interested in blaming and punishing people for the problems they cause (like a discarded frying pan) than in solving the problems (by, for example, picking up the frying pan). When the lone frying pan turns into a pile of trash (it’s easier to break the rules when someone else has paved the way), everyone in the neighborhood tries to guess at the culprits’ identities, “which somehow always seem to be people who don’t look like the people who are doing the guessing.”

Naturally, Lucas will feel himself making connections as the story progresses. He might despise himself for behaving socially, he might feel feverish as he comes down with a case of empathy, but working together with neighbors helps him solve some problems (although yes, other people are always the problem). But that doesn’t mean that Lucas needs to change his entire philosophy of life. His final plan to avoid responsibility and commitment is fitting and funny.

This is a short story, but sufficiently long — and sufficiently entertaining — that readers in need of a laugh might not feel bad about paying a couple of bucks to enjoy it.

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Ushers by Joe Hill

Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 1, 2024

“Ushers” is a short story that Amazon is marketing to Kindle users. Non-Kindle readers might find it in an anthology at some point. With its supernatural focus, the story might fit broadly into the horror genre, although by that standard, the same might be said of the Bible. Unlike horror fiction of the slasher/monster variety, the story sends a message about life rather than encouraging readers to be frightened of death.

Martin Lorenson doesn’t see dead people, but his parents ran a hospice so he has seen many people die. Just before they die, he sees something else. The clue to what he sees is in the story’s title.

Marin has been fortunate to avoid his own death. In high school, he was home with diarrhea when a school shooter killed his classmates. At least, that’s the story he tells.

As the story begins, two police detectives want to know why Martin purchased a ticket for a passenger train that he didn’t board. The train derailed and killed a bunch of people. The detectives (Duvall and Oates, not to be confused with the 1970s singing duo who gained fame by performing insipid music) think Martin’s avoidance of death is suspicious, so they interview him.

Although the story is too short to permit much character development, Duvall is more interesting than your average fictional police detective. He has an adult daughter who, in the age of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, feels conflicted about being a Black woman whose father works in law enforcement. Duvall’s position is that cops can’t all be white or the nation would descend into apartheid. God knows there are Americans who would welcome that outcome.

Anyway, how is Martin so lucky that he twice avoided catastrophe? Joe Hill channels the creepy gene that he must have inherited from his father to provide an explanation that will appeal to fans of the supernatural.

The story’s ending has an unexpected twist, although its message — appreciate being alive while you still can — is far from original. As a short story (and this one is shorter than most of those in the Amazon Original Stories series), the story’s focus is tight, but Hill balances its focus on death with moments of humor and a message suggesting that something better awaits us on the other side. Religious readers (or those who believe in an afterlife for nonreligious reasons) might find the story comforting. I found it entertaining.

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Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2024

Mark Haddon has to be my favorite living writer of short non-genre fiction. The eight stories gathered in this collection are nearly all gems.

Haddon often grounds stories in ancient history or mythology, finding new ways to make them relevant to a modern reader. The longest and — to me — the most interesting story is “The Quiet Limit of the World.” This story follows Tithonus who has been granted eternal life but not eternal youth by Eos. He ages slowly and discovers the curse of immortality; “what might have begun as grounds for envy or congratulations is tipping into something more sinister.” He leaves home because he does not want to endure the guilt of living when he will eventually bury his wives and children. Tithonus fights wars in the ancient world, survives the plague in the Middle Ages, is astonished by the destructive power of the twentieth century. Only Eos keeps him tethered to the world after he can no longer read or hear. The story is sad and touching.

Another favorite, “The Mother’s Story,” is the oddest entry, if only because it contains the sentence “My wife has given birth to a mooncalf.” Haddon explains that the story is “a reworking of the myth of Pasiphaë and her son Asterion, otherwise known as the Minotaur.” The woman must pretend to have been made pregnant by a bull to spare her husband the shame of fathering a repellant child. A scheme to use the child to terrorize (and thus control) the kingdom depends on a simple truth: “There is nothing more terrifying than the monster that squats behind the door you dare not open.” Followed years later by another truth that explains why people allow themselves to be ruled by leaders who hold power by making them afraid of others: “I sometimes think people get a great deal of unaccountable pleasure from being absolute fools.”

“D.O.G.Z.” retells Ovid’s version of the ancient myth of Actaeon. To punish him for viewing her mysteries as she was frolicking with other naked women in the woods, Diana turns Actaeon into a stag. The scene in which Actaeon is ripped apart by his hunting dogs is fittingly gruesome. The story has barely ended before the narrator begins to dissect it, comparing it to Acusilaus’s version and asking whether the story isn’t really about the dogs before exploring other dogs of literary fame as well as offering a poignant salute to Russian doggy astronauts. This is the only story in which it seemed to me that Haddon lost the plot.

“The Wilderness” is a tense story with the feel of a thriller. A woman is bicycling around the world to avoid coping with the loss of her brother. She has an accident while riding her bike in a remote area. Her rescuer saves her from death but brings her to a fenced-in place where she stumbles upon scientists experimenting with genetic editing. After a time, she wonders whether the scientists are turning her into an animal or whether she has she always been one. A daring escape leads to an encounter with other escaped women who are primed for revenge.

“The Bunker” might be an allegorical story. The protagonist is a nurse who finds herself from time to time transported to a bunker (a repurposed Cold War fallout shelter) in a postapocalyptic world. Is she losing her mind? The answer is unclear, although an exorcist who promises to lead her home apparently leads her to a terrifying new reality.

Also high on the strangeness scale is “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” The saint resists all the usual temptations that the devil puts in front of him before abandoning his solitary life to preach, only to realize that the devil is tempting him with a new trap.

“My Old School” is a boarding school story. The protagonist saves himself from bullying by betraying a school chum’s secret. Years later, the protagonist realizes how the betrayal affected the other student’s life.

Haddon explains that the shortest entry, “St. Brides Bay,” is written to accompany Virginia Woolf’s story, “The Mark on the Wall.” I probably should have read Woolf’s story to get more out of this one, which consists of an aging woman’s rambling thoughts as she attends a lesbian wedding. She contemplates progress and her mother and a woman named Lucy with whom she had a three-month fling when same-sex love was forbidden.

Haddon is a gifted storyteller and a prose master. Readers who love a carefully constructed sentence that is driven by original thought are a good audience for Haddon’s short stories.

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