Book 25: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales
Continuing with the
book_it_2006 project...
Book 25: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales
Editor: Michael Chabon
Genre: Short story anthology
Number of pages: 480
Pages Read This Year: 7617
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best]: B+
Short description/summary of the book: from Amazon.com
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Chabon teams up with the editors of Dave Eggers's McSweeney's magazine to create a fiction anthology with an innovative, simple concept: the stories are driven by adventurous plots and narrative action, in contrast to the current trend toward stories that are "plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew," as Chabon writes in his introduction. The roster includes such heavyweights as Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Nick Hornby and Harlan Ellison. As the retro title might suggest, the collection is heavy on sci-fi and detective stories, often updated with contemporary twists. Crichton offers a detective yarn called "Blood Doesn't Come Out," in which a disgruntled PI takes out his frustration on his wife in a cheeky spin on the domestic violence that punctuates the pulp fiction of Jim Thompson and James A. Cain. Hornby's contribution is an entertaining sci-fi story called "Otherwise Pandemonium," about a man who buys a VCR that fast-forwards into an apocalyptic future. In Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes," a debilitating drug called Albertine wreaks havoc by sending users back in time to relive their memories. Dave Eggers's "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" is a thoughtful story in which a woman climbs Kilimanjaro to bolster her self-confidence after experiencing a personal crisis, but proves oblivious to the deaths of three porters when the weather on the mountain turns ugly. Half a dozen or so stories are markedly slight, but overall this is a strong collection.
My Thoughts: Any collection of short stories, especially those anthologizing the works of various authors, will by its nature be a hit-or-miss proposition. Some of the stories will be better than others, some could be excellent, some could be outright duds. This collection, put together by Michael Chabon, has a much better average than most such books -- very few of the stories in this collection disappointed.
Elmore Leonard's "How Carlos Webster Changes his Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman" stands out as one of the best in the book, although Gaiman's "Closing Time" and Moody's "The Albertine Notes" are also standouts. Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium" is something of a departure for him, a sci-fi short that's quite unlike his more famous works, and Sherman Alexie's "Ghost Dance" is a really good little horror tale. Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick" is entertaining in and of itself, although his hardcore fans have already read the story, which is actually an excerpt from his (at the time of this volume) not-yet-published Dark Tower novel, "Wolves of the Calla." Chabon closes off the collection with a story of his own, but "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance" is not a complete story, but the beginning of a serial (and if anyone can tell me if or where the rest has been published, please do so -- it's not in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories as I expected).
Chabon's goal, he says in the introduction, was to put together an anthology of that endangered species, the plot-driven short story. He succeeded by leaps and bounds. The collection showcases a lot of different voices and a lot of different kinds of stories, but all in all, it's far more entertaining than most short story anthologies.
In the Queue: Magic Street by Orson Scott Card, The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle