The Answer Is No by Fredrik Backman

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on December 1, 2024

Love is not for the selfish. Fortunately for Lucas, he is happy to be selfish and doesn’t care about being unloved. Lucas believes that “responsibility” and “commitment” are “two of the easiest ways of ruining any perfectly good day.” Lucas prefers to be free to do what he wants when he wants without considering the competing desires of other people. He also understands the danger of starting conversations. “If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and that’s how wars start.”

Narrating “The Answer Is No,” Lucas tells the reader that there is something perfect about not having to share a pint of ice cream. He recommends “being really content with your life and not immediately thinking: Wow, now everything is really perfect, maybe we should have a baby?” Because a baby introduces another person in your life, and other people are the source of all unhappiness.

It's not that Lucas dislikes other people. He just has no need to interact with them. He appreciates the people who cook his pad thai and those who deliver it to his door, but he is happier if he doesn’t need to speak with them. To those who maintain that humans are herd animals who need to be together, he counters that “humans have historically proved to be in-need-of-therapy animals,” the need for therapy being triggered by keeping company with other humans.

Lucas likes to be left alone so he can drink wine and play video games. He feels sorry for people who want something to happen in their lives. Lucas “lives in an apartment, which he would consider the perfect form of storage for people, were it not for the great virus of civilization: neighbors.” His default response when a neighbor wants something is to tell them no.

Some of Lucas’ neighbors want him to help solve the mystery of a frying pan that a tenant discarded outside — almost on the sidewalk! — and Lucas has just managed to talk them into going away when his downstairs neighbor appears. She’s upset that he changed his internet password and is affronted when he accuses her of stealing his internet. It isn’t stealing, after all, if she only takes the little bit of the internet that leaks into her apartment.

Craziness ensues, primarily in the form of a large and ever-growing junk pile that originated with the frying pan, a committee of three crazy residents who place Lucas in charge of the pile, and a group of men who worship Lucas because they are convinced he is an angel. Eccentric people are Fredrik Backman’s bread and butter, the kind of people who make random comments like “I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what I’m capable of!” Other characters, like a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband by pretending to be in a coma, are more poignant. Backman also pokes fun at official and unofficial bureaucrats, protestors, middle managers, Facebook groups, and self-help advice.

Lucas might not be a reader’s ideal neighbor, but he sometimes expresses wise thoughts, including his recognition that some people are more interested in blaming and punishing people for the problems they cause (like a discarded frying pan) than in solving the problems (by, for example, picking up the frying pan). When the lone frying pan turns into a pile of trash (it’s easier to break the rules when someone else has paved the way), everyone in the neighborhood tries to guess at the culprits’ identities, “which somehow always seem to be people who don’t look like the people who are doing the guessing.”

Naturally, Lucas will feel himself making connections as the story progresses. He might despise himself for behaving socially, he might feel feverish as he comes down with a case of empathy, but working together with neighbors helps him solve some problems (although yes, other people are always the problem). But that doesn’t mean that Lucas needs to change his entire philosophy of life. His final plan to avoid responsibility and commitment is fitting and funny.

This is a short story, but sufficiently long — and sufficiently entertaining — that readers in need of a laugh might not feel bad about paying a couple of bucks to enjoy it.

RECOMMENDED

Ushers by Joe Hill

Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 1, 2024

“Ushers” is a short story that Amazon is marketing to Kindle users. Non-Kindle readers might find it in an anthology at some point. With its supernatural focus, the story might fit broadly into the horror genre, although by that standard, the same might be said of the Bible. Unlike horror fiction of the slasher/monster variety, the story sends a message about life rather than encouraging readers to be frightened of death.

Martin Lorenson doesn’t see dead people, but his parents ran a hospice so he has seen many people die. Just before they die, he sees something else. The clue to what he sees is in the story’s title.

Marin has been fortunate to avoid his own death. In high school, he was home with diarrhea when a school shooter killed his classmates. At least, that’s the story he tells.

As the story begins, two police detectives want to know why Martin purchased a ticket for a passenger train that he didn’t board. The train derailed and killed a bunch of people. The detectives (Duvall and Oates, not to be confused with the 1970s singing duo who gained fame by performing insipid music) think Martin’s avoidance of death is suspicious, so they interview him.

Although the story is too short to permit much character development, Duvall is more interesting than your average fictional police detective. He has an adult daughter who, in the age of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, feels conflicted about being a Black woman whose father works in law enforcement. Duvall’s position is that cops can’t all be white or the nation would descend into apartheid. God knows there are Americans who would welcome that outcome.

Anyway, how is Martin so lucky that he twice avoided catastrophe? Joe Hill channels the creepy gene that he must have inherited from his father to provide an explanation that will appeal to fans of the supernatural.

The story’s ending has an unexpected twist, although its message — appreciate being alive while you still can — is far from original. As a short story (and this one is shorter than most of those in the Amazon Original Stories series), the story’s focus is tight, but Hill balances its focus on death with moments of humor and a message suggesting that something better awaits us on the other side. Religious readers (or those who believe in an afterlife for nonreligious reasons) might find the story comforting. I found it entertaining.

RECOMMENDED

Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2024

Mark Haddon has to be my favorite living writer of short non-genre fiction. The eight stories gathered in this collection are nearly all gems.

Haddon often grounds stories in ancient history or mythology, finding new ways to make them relevant to a modern reader. The longest and — to me — the most interesting story is “The Quiet Limit of the World.” This story follows Tithonus who has been granted eternal life but not eternal youth by Eos. He ages slowly and discovers the curse of immortality; “what might have begun as grounds for envy or congratulations is tipping into something more sinister.” He leaves home because he does not want to endure the guilt of living when he will eventually bury his wives and children. Tithonus fights wars in the ancient world, survives the plague in the Middle Ages, is astonished by the destructive power of the twentieth century. Only Eos keeps him tethered to the world after he can no longer read or hear. The story is sad and touching.

Another favorite, “The Mother’s Story,” is the oddest entry, if only because it contains the sentence “My wife has given birth to a mooncalf.” Haddon explains that the story is “a reworking of the myth of Pasiphaë and her son Asterion, otherwise known as the Minotaur.” The woman must pretend to have been made pregnant by a bull to spare her husband the shame of fathering a repellant child. A scheme to use the child to terrorize (and thus control) the kingdom depends on a simple truth: “There is nothing more terrifying than the monster that squats behind the door you dare not open.” Followed years later by another truth that explains why people allow themselves to be ruled by leaders who hold power by making them afraid of others: “I sometimes think people get a great deal of unaccountable pleasure from being absolute fools.”

“D.O.G.Z.” retells Ovid’s version of the ancient myth of Actaeon. To punish him for viewing her mysteries as she was frolicking with other naked women in the woods, Diana turns Actaeon into a stag. The scene in which Actaeon is ripped apart by his hunting dogs is fittingly gruesome. The story has barely ended before the narrator begins to dissect it, comparing it to Acusilaus’s version and asking whether the story isn’t really about the dogs before exploring other dogs of literary fame as well as offering a poignant salute to Russian doggy astronauts. This is the only story in which it seemed to me that Haddon lost the plot.

“The Wilderness” is a tense story with the feel of a thriller. A woman is bicycling around the world to avoid coping with the loss of her brother. She has an accident while riding her bike in a remote area. Her rescuer saves her from death but brings her to a fenced-in place where she stumbles upon scientists experimenting with genetic editing. After a time, she wonders whether the scientists are turning her into an animal or whether she has she always been one. A daring escape leads to an encounter with other escaped women who are primed for revenge.

“The Bunker” might be an allegorical story. The protagonist is a nurse who finds herself from time to time transported to a bunker (a repurposed Cold War fallout shelter) in a postapocalyptic world. Is she losing her mind? The answer is unclear, although an exorcist who promises to lead her home apparently leads her to a terrifying new reality.

Also high on the strangeness scale is “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” The saint resists all the usual temptations that the devil puts in front of him before abandoning his solitary life to preach, only to realize that the devil is tempting him with a new trap.

“My Old School” is a boarding school story. The protagonist saves himself from bullying by betraying a school chum’s secret. Years later, the protagonist realizes how the betrayal affected the other student’s life.

Haddon explains that the shortest entry, “St. Brides Bay,” is written to accompany Virginia Woolf’s story, “The Mark on the Wall.” I probably should have read Woolf’s story to get more out of this one, which consists of an aging woman’s rambling thoughts as she attends a lesbian wedding. She contemplates progress and her mother and a woman named Lucy with whom she had a three-month fling when same-sex love was forbidden.

Haddon is a gifted storyteller and a prose master. Readers who love a carefully constructed sentence that is driven by original thought are a good audience for Haddon’s short stories.

RECOMMENDED

Safe Enough by Lee Child

Published by Mysterious Press on September 3, 2024

Safe Enough is a collection of Lee Child’s short fiction, excluding Reacher stories. In a forward, Child admits that he is a novelist who hasn’t mastered the art of writing a short story. I would agree that he often swings and misses, but enough stories in this collection count as base hits that Child has a decent batting average.

Many of the stories collected in Safe Enough set up a mildly interesting scenario before Child tries to deliver an O. Henry ending. The assassin in “The .50 Solution” is hired to kill a racehorse but makes a predictable departure from the plan. The journalist who narrates “Public Transportation” talks to a cop about a murder case that was closed for the sake of convenience, not because the crime was solved correctly. The true killer’s identity is predictable.

In other stories, Lee makes the formula work. “Ten Keys,” about a man who stole money and product from a drug distribution organization, telegraphs part of the surprise in its ending but manages a final unexpected twist. “Me & Mr. Rafferty” is narrated by a killer who leaves clues for Mr. Rafferty to find. The ending is genuinely surprising.

“My First Drug Trial” benefits from an ending that surprised me, but I’m ranking it as one of my favorites because of a weed smoker’s internal monologue as he talks himself into getting high before court.

A snobby FBI agent tells a Metropolitan Police inspector to read a Sherlock Holmes story as the source of clues to a murder. The murder turns out to be a misdirection. The element of surprise makes “The Bone-Headed League” a fun story.

I enjoyed a few others, as well:

For an assassin, “The Greatest Trick of All” is getting paid by a husband to kill his wife and getting paid by the wife to kill her husband — a trick that has disastrous consequences when it doesn’t work as intended. “Pierre, Lucien & Me” is an interesting take on an art forgery story that begins immediately after Renoir’s death.

One of my favorites, “Normal in Every Way,” is about an autistic file clerk in San Francisco in the 1950s who solves crimes by reading files and seeing connections that others miss. In “New Blank Document,” a reporter tells the story of a Black jazz musician who stayed in France after World War II, a place that allowed him to escape the racist place where his brother was murdered.

“The Snake Eater by the Numbers” is narrated by a rookie London cop who is tutored by a corrupt cop in the importance of clearance rates. When the corrupt cop fits up a mentally unwell Londoner who believes himself to be an American Marine, the rookie learns the meaning of street justice.

“Safe Enough” is written in a more literary style than is common for Child. The story of a disintegrating marriage, after the wife apparently killed her last husband, has some insightful thoughts about marriage but ends predictably.

“Addicted to Sweetness” benefits from interesting dialog about punishment inflicted in the West Indies upon people who stole sugar from their employers. The dialog enhances this story about the leader of a criminal organization who learns the downside of imposing tough punishments.

And I was unimpressed by several:

“The Bodyguard” is interesting only because the bodyguard fails at his job. “Section 7(A) Operational” begins with an intriguing story of an operative assembling a team for a dangerous covert operation. The story’s ending renders the setup pointless.

Another five or six stories don’t merit comment. Since I enjoyed more than half, I regard the good stories as outweighing their forgettable companions, but it’s a close balance.

RECOMMENDED

Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 13, 2024

The stories in Highway Thirteen are linked by Paul Biga, a (fictional) serial killer who abducted and kidnapped a dozen girls he found walking on an Australian highway between 1990 and 1997. The stories take place at different times over the last fifty years, apart from one set in 1950 and another in 2028. Taken together, they examine the impact that a single criminal had on multiple lives across time and continents.

I was impressed by nine of the twelve stories, a higher average than is typical for a short story collection. A couple of stories are about secret thoughts. In “Tourists,” a walk in a forest where a serial killer buried his victims might spark an office romance — or a rejection. During the walk, the woman senses evil, while the man envisions himself killing his walking companion.

Also based on hidden thoughts, “Hunter on the Highway” (my favorite story in the book) takes place after a female hitchhiker is attacked. The victim’s description of her attacker matches May’s boyfriend. He’s an uncomplicated, likable bar band musician but does she really know him? Will she talk herself into believing that he’s a killer and calling a hotline to report her suspicion? The story has something important to say about how media hype associated with crime pollutes the heads of people who begin to see criminals everywhere.

“Demolition” builds on familiar news interviews of neighbors who say that the serial killer next door kept to himself and was “just a little off.” Paul Biga lived across the street from Eva. When he was a child, he helped her with gardening. As a retired teacher who taught Biga, she knows that all adolescents are strange and bewildered. Paul did not seem unusually strange, although she didn’t tell the journalist who interviewed her (for the second time, on the occasion of Biga’s home’s demolition) about the disturbing letter he wrote her.

A couple of other stories are also based on memories. The Englishman in “Abroad” attempts to cope with Halloween in America, a celebration of the supernatural that forces him to acknowledge memories of his sister’s unexplained disappearance in Australia when he was a child and how it changed his father’s life. In “Hostess,” a retired flight attendant reflects with melancholy upon the time he shared a home, and sometimes a bed, with another retired flight attendant and her faithful dog. The connection to Biga comes from the female flight attendant’s attempt to persuade her sister to end her engagement to an older man who (in the flight attendant’s opinion) is creepy.

“Fat Suit” is about an Australian actor whose Hollywood marriage is breaking up just as he begins filming a movie in which he plays the famous serial killer (he got fat after years in jail). The story illustrates how one thought sparks another as the actor contemplates his father’s death, his failed marriage, his relationship with his stepchildren, and whales.

While a majority of the stories are serious, some are infused with dark humor. The narrator of “Hostel” tells the story of Mandy and Roy, who like to tell the story of the Swiss backpacker they found weeping outside a hostel — a girl who later was murdered. The narrator imagines herself in the Swiss girl’s position as she entertains fantasies about Roy. “Hostel” uses humor to capture the truth of its characters: “It’s not that Mandy was vain; she just liked to be good at everything she did. So she liked to be good at having a body.”

Fiona McFarlane’s humor is fully displayed in “Democracy Sausage.” A political candidate named Biga isn’t sure whether he is related to the infamous serial killer, but he questions whether voters will disassociate him from his “blackened” name. While Biga is hosting a backyard barbeque, a dog “came springing out from the underbrush of a local riverside path with, between his teeth, a large rubber dildo, the colour of fair flesh but streaked with silty mud, resembling nothing so much as a poorly barbequed sausage.”

Set in 2028, “Podcast” is written in the form of a transcript of a very funny true crime podcast. A recently discovered body that might be linked to Biga (now eight years dead) is the podcast’s subject, although the discussion is quickly diverted to a gossipy account of a podcaster’s gay marriage (his husband doesn’t understand the true crime obsession) and speculation about life in Australia, a country the podcasters have never visited. The podcast tangentially addresses the concept of murder as entertainment, which is an apt description of true crime books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts.

The way in which McFarlane links such diverse stories is dazzling. Biga is in the background of each story, sometimes so tangentially that it takes a bit of effort to understand how he relates to the story’s characters, yet the stories shy away from the gruesome details of murder. They touch instead on the lives of people who feel the impact of Biga’s crimes, sometimes without even knowing that a crime occurred. Many of the individual stories are memorable. Collectively, they gain additional power. Highway Thirteen might be a good choice for a crime fiction book club in search of an offbeat offering that moves beyond the genre's cliches.

RECOMMENDED