Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
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, Win”—the only third-person narratives here—express great though measured sympathy. Wildly imaginative in the manner of new weirdness fiction (see Feeling Very Strange, 2006), Wilson’s 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. --Ray Olson