This was a bit of a pleasant surprise, actually.... I really love Open City as a magazine, which makes it so frustrating that their books often disappoint me, feeling more like gratitude to hipster friends than really good reading. This was a lot better than that, thankfully-- the stories here are "linguistically active," which is to say a good part of the pleasure of reading them is the way the sentences sound, the way they structure themselves into these sentences that you read two and three times aloud to yourself because they do things they ought not to do, in ways that you've never seen before. Shklovsky talks about deceleration, and this is an extreme example of what he meant.

The stories themselves: lots of stuff about sadsacks, a more than passing familiarity with people living on some familiar but no less real edges: punk rock musicians, small town sadnesses, eating disorders, kids not well cared for by their parents. I think in some ways this is where the book is weakest, because the territory, while well-presented, is kind of familiar, and I'm not sure Zumas has much new to say about it... The last story, told from the POV of a B'lyn gargoyle is sort of a poetics for the collection-- the goal of the stories is to scare us into a place of doing something. I'm not sure that, by itself, is enough, though.

I really did like this. It just feels a little lopsided.