β Scribed by Christopher Merkner
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Christopher Merkner is a Shirley Jackson for the contemporary Midwest, where the ties of family and community intersect darkly with suburban American life. In these stories, an enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers and a young man delays a impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother's pet pig. Sharp and uneasy, for these inheritors of tradition, that which binds them most closely--offering stability and identity and comfort--are precisely the qualities that set them back, pull them down, burden, limit, and ruin them.
"Merkner's first short story collection provides a voyeuristic vantage point on fractured lives. He has the striking ability to turn the familiar into the uncanny and morph the comfortable into the weird, and, clearly,
he's at home in that strange realm. In most of the stories, we witness lives at the moment an individual's identity begins to fray, sometimes slowly and sometimes swiftly. These changes are both...
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