Bad Houses
-
- USD 9.99
-
- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humorous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Alice Munro
From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.
In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humorous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.
Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.
Featuring Stintzi's own expressive ink illustrations, Bad Houses is a book that feels like it was penned by a trans Alice Munro mixed with a bubblier Franz Kafka. Enter if you dare.
This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. This book is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This adventurous and offbeat collection from Stintzi (My Volcano) blends fantastical motifs and myths with comic stories of contemporary life. In "Dumb House," the narrator is alarmed by his roommate's severe shift in attitude and appearance when she becomes a mime, acting out invisible walls within their apartment to box herself in. Other entries are more eerie, like "Blueness," in which the narrator is distraught by mysterious noises in their apartment and learns their landlord's daughter had recently attempted suicide. A little girl tries to befriend a band of pumpkin patch trolls in "The Troll Patch," and the orphaned boy at the center of "Grampa's Bag of Bubonic's Brood" hopes the Jesus action figure he carries with him will absolve his and his grandfather's serious wrongdoings. In "Midas's Hairdresser," a queer chain-smoking stylist for the mythical King Midas savors the gold she earns in exchange for keeping his innermost secrets. Stintzi exhibits a flair for fearlessly bizarre character sketches and macabre scenes. Fans of Kelly Link ought to snatch this up. Correction: A previous version of this review misdescribed the plot of the story "Blueness."
