It's only February but with the release of Dan Chaon's "Stay Awake," what could be the year's best story collection is already on the shelf.
Chaon's latest is a chilling collection of stories that straddle the gray line between literary and genre fiction.
Chaon, a Nebraska native who now teaches creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio, is the author of two acclaimed novels and two other story collections. His last collection, "Among the Missing," was a National Book Award finalist, and the 2009 literary thriller "Await Your Reply" made many critics' year-end best-novel lists.
"Stay Awake" revisits many of the same themes as his previous collections — alienation, grief and loss of self — and more than holds its own with Chaon's other titles.
The new stories feature men who have experienced great loss — often, like Chaon, the loss of a spouse. Chaon's wife, writer Sheila Schwartz, died in 2008.
The cast of characters ranges from deformed babies to suicidal parents to social misfits. In each story Chaon is able to create fully realized characters in mere pages, many as well drawn as those other writers need an entire novel to develop.
They experience emotional and often physical trauma. Sometimes things end badly. Other characters are able to escape the damage to try to rebuild their lives.
The stories feature people adrift, uncertain how to proceed in light of the direction their lives have taken.
Like Critter, a widowed electrician with a young daughter in the story "To Psychic Underworld." Critter moves in with his sister, for his own sake as well as his daughter's. Soon he is coming across cryptic, haunting notes everywhere. Are the notes something Critter is only aware of because of his grief, or are they messages from beyond?
There is a menacing air to each of the stories, a sense of dread and darkness ever present. In "Take This, Brother, May It Serve You Well," an alcoholic businessman bent on self-destruction gets his wish in a dark alley after meeting a fortune teller. Or does he? The story's ending is ambiguous though ominous.
Then there is the opener, "The Bees," a powerhouse of a horror story where a young father, haunted by the memory of the family he abandoned, tries to stay sane as his old life threatens to destroy his new one. It's a shocking story, one that clings to you long after reading its conclusion.
Even though the 12 stories in "Stay Awake" are unsettling and disturbing, they can be beautiful. This collection is further proof that Chaon is one of the best fiction writers working right now and a master of the short story form — but that's hardly news to his devoted readers.
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