The Gnome Stories
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An unsettling, wildly imaginative collection of stories
The Gnome Stories focuses on characters who are loners in the truest sense; who are in the process of recovering from mental, physical, or emotional trauma; and who find solace—or at least a sense of purpose—in peculiar jobs and pursuits.
A man whose wife has left him is robbed, so he decides to start doing his own breaking and entering, into his neighbors’ homes. When another man’s girlfriend is cryogenically frozen by her family after a car accident, he becomes a maintenance worker at the cryogenic facility, eavesdropping on visitors as they whisper secrets to their frozen loved ones. A woman serves as an assistant to the Starvationist, whose methods to help clients lose large amounts of weight are unorthodox, sadistic—and utterly failproof. Another woman and her robot assistant have been hired to tinker with the troubling memories inside a celebrity’s brain.
With The Gnome Stories, Ander Monson presents eleven unforgettable stories about oddly American situations: as surreal as an urban legend and at the same time perfectly mundane.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This offbeat collection from Monson (Letter to a Future Lover) touches on suburbs, relationships, and, yes, gnomes. The titular gnome first appears in "The Reassurances," in which a man adopts a stretch of highway to propose to his girlfriend, Sharon, who turns him down right before she gets into a fatal car accident. The man remembers a story he heard from Sharon, in which a pair of campers on hallucinogens come across what they think is a live gnome in the woods and bring it back to their campsite; the next morning, they discover they'd actually found a human child. This kind of unexpected yet mundane horror is prevalent in all of Monson's stories. The outward ordinariness of the characters always belies something deeper and darker, as in "Weep No More over This Event," in which a man whose wife has recently left him gradually displays a penchant for violence that may have contributed to his wife's decision. "Our Song" is about a man whose job it is to delve into and embody other people's memories in order to help parse or preserve them; the narrator's attempts to fix past wrongs ends in tragedy. Monson shines in his longer stories, where he's able to work the magic of his sleight of hand shorter, more experimental pieces like "In a Structure Simulating an Owl," which finds inspiration in a patent application, are a little harder to land. Nevertheless, this is a strange, unnerving, and intelligent collection.
