If nothing else, this book really made me think. Maybe even over-think. This book invites it. There is a lot to mull over in each of these stories, and DFW is very rarely direct about anything, preferring to leave clues along the way. I think it’s interesting that each story has its own specific vocabulary and/or verbal tics from Mister Squishy's ad agency lingo to Oblivion’s strange use of latin/pace/'air-quotes' to Suffering Channel’s magazine-speak; it’s almost as if the characters in one story would find it impossible to cross over and talk with the characters of any other story--they live in a modern/urban world that is also strangely provincial, where everybody is cut off from everybody else because of the level of specialization and in-your-own-headedness. The only other thing I can say about this book as a collection is that DFW is very much concerned with the demoralizing aspects of modern society--from corporate culture’s obliteration of the personal (Mr. Squishy) to the reality-show aspect of pop culture and the vulture-like commercialization of every inch of genuine human feeling (Suffering Channel). What isn’t always consistent is how he sees a way out of this bleak view. In some stories I see brief moments of light, of transcendence despite the conditions, but mostly I feel oppressed and saddened by it. Not that DFW really has to provide solutions, but I wonder if he really did provide glimpses of ‘the answer’ but that it is so hidden in the complexities of each story that I have not been able to see it. These stories are filled with so much minutiae that it seems entirely too easy to just be buried by that alone, which is also similar to the lives many of these characters lead. They don’t reflect often because they are not allowed to. They are drowning in their own set of strange, often trivial particulars, and given no time to reflect. My apologies ahead of time for the amount of detail (on a story-by-story basis) that I’ve included. It goes almost without saying that SPOILERS is the name of the game from here on out, so consider yourself warned. Here goes:Mister Squishy 5/5: this story totally won me over. The way DFW progresses his story so organically as to be unnoticeable and the way he understands so clearly the sadness (and inherently, the dark humor also) of the inner workings of the modern corporate machine just devastates me. I have a friend who tells me of her days at work which reminds me of some of the passages in here (p44-45 in my hardback copy) and make me doubly glad that I work for the public library, and not the private sector. Just this whole thing about turning numbers around and not really doing anything concrete but fudging it so that it appears to be what the client wants... but work is work, right? no, it has consequences on a personal level: we see this corporate mentality affect the main character’s inner psyche: his current feeling of helplessness and disillusionment is contrasted with his younger self’s feeling of becoming someone important and making a change; this all really resonates but by resonates I mean devastates me. The story’s conclusion was so ambiguous that I still wasn’t sure what I was to make of certain things #1. who is the first person “I” character that pops up only twice that I can remember (once in a footnote) and #2 what exactly was the man scaling the skyscraper doing, (although later he inflates with a mask on, so I am guessing maybe he is the mr. squishy mascot? with an m-16?) and #3 the stuff about the two different types of poison that can be injected into the cakes... I suspect all of these things have something to do with manipulating the faciliators, but I’m not sure exactly the details, which is fine by me, but really makes me wonder if I’m a particularly dim reader or if it was meant to be ambiguous. The Soul is Not a Smithy 4/5: have you ever tried to read a short story and not think of it as a short story, but as a novel? It usually doesn’t work, because a short story is like an arrow traveling to its destination, very one-minded, distilling a moment in time... it’s pretty easy to tell from a few pages whether it’s from a short story or from a novel, usually, just by the way it is written and how the narrative unfolds. But DFW manages to make stories that read like novels, with endless digressions and parallel elements working at the same time. Also novel-like is the mutliple level of meanings you can put onto it. On the literal level it is a horrific event that happened in a classroom. But what is the story really about? One thing that was funny/odd was how shocked I became at the story within the story: the one the narrator was making up in his daydreams. I found myself being horrified by it and then I caught myself thinking “it’s okay, it’s just a story this kid daydreamed, it’s not even real.” then I caught myself thinking “wait a minute, NONE of this is real, even this kid is made up, in a story by DFW”. It was a very subtle way to be meta, I think, and one of the few times when some kinda ‘meta’ device by an author didn’t feel heavy handed, (though I’m not even sure if it’s a device, as that implies intention, whereas here it just feels like something weird I felt when I read it) partly because it arrives so organically. So on one level, I think this story is about the idea of fictions... this daydream and the movie (The Exorcist, interesting choice considering the idea that the substitute teacher in the real story seems to be possessed) happening side by side, and later: the narrator’s Kafka-esque nightmares about adult life based on his father’s ennui. Secondly, I think the story is about adult life more than about a child’s life, as the narrator is already grown up and is retelling it from memory: also the details about the father and the parents in the daydream provide such a complete picture of adult frustration, so that the incomprehensible event of the substitute teacher’s behavior (even though it is never explained or given the empathy of a backstory into the substitute teacher’s inner life) seems to be totally understandable by conjecture. I feel like DFW is constantly revolving around the theme that modern life, with all its conveniences, makes the practical problems of being alive and staying alive increasingly easy, but makes feeling alive increasingly difficult. Emotionally, spiritually, we are demoralized, made to act like machines, our passions, individuality, quirks ignored or pushed to the background as distractions or, worse, undesirable traits. That said, I did have a small problem with this story in that I had a hard time believing a 9 year old boy, however observant he is about his father’s somber behavior at home, can come up with such a Kafka-esque vision of bureaucracy without ever having visited his father’s workplace or having any frame of reference in the adult world. The terror of this world being something completely foreign to children (I believe) makes it seem all the more out of place, and because the story of the father is so central to the big message of the story, I felt it was less subtle, less organic than I expected it to be, especially since the first story was developed so organically. Then again, it really is a small flaw, not even a flaw in the story perhaps, but maybe a flaw in my ability to believe in the power of the subconscious mind of a 9 year old. Like any good novel, this short story leaves me with questions: 1. what is this story’s relationship to the future grown-up adult lives of the pupils, referenced throughout, particularly the armed services 2. why does DFW choose to end on a less-than-climactic passage, essentially about a school play, was it to make you feel like things are going back to normal in the school? 3. or was it to slyly name-drop Ruth Simmons in the last paragraph thus making you wonder if the daydream was real or not; also, wtf? this seems like a cheap move...Incarnations of Burned Children 3/5: very short, intense; escalating language; made me breathe faster.Another Pioneer 3/5: In the beginning you have art that mirrored reality, taking as its goal to reproduce likenesses in a literal sense. Science also believed in absolute answers, with Newton’s formulas supposedly being able to be drawn out into infinity to predict anything so far as we had the formula and the computational power. But ah, Modernism comes along and now instead of straight answers we have questions, we have doubt, we have art that tries to attack the viewer’s own assumptions. We have discursive rants (a la DFW). We have stories with ambiguous endings. Likewise in science we know that there are things we cannot know. We know that an electron can seemingly be at two places at the same time. Chaos theory tells us that it is impossible to predict things past a certain level. Is this story an allegory for modernism? It’s a fun allegory, and it was enjoyable beyond an intellectual exercise. But it didn’t go far beyond that enjoyable-ness into a kind of emotional connection as some of the other stories in this collection do.Good Old Neon 2/5: This story didn’t work for me, mostly because I found the voice annoying (and perhaps it was intentionally so). But it didn’t help that I’ve thought most of these same thoughts before, so it made me annoyed with myself (or that part of myself), most of all. I think everyone probably has these thoughts to some level, i.e. am I a fraud? It comes out of not only life being hard but also out of our increasingly web 2.0 sharing your life/everything is a performance/appearances count more than what’s actually there/what should I write in the ABOUT ME section of my profile?/oh, i’m gonna give this book 4 stars so everyone will think I ‘get’ DFW but then I’m gonna say I hate people who jump on the DFW bandwagon therefore people will think I’m smarter than the average DFW fanboy. I really don’t think like this as often as the narrator of the story, but there is an element of it that is unavoidable for me, being an innate overthinker living in the year 2011. I find that thinking about it just makes me more crazy though, it’s SO CIRCULAR. So should I think about it more, in the hopes of figuring out a way out of it? The whole problem, though, is overthinking, so thinking about overthinking is only going to compound the problem. The opposite problem: ignoring it, isn’t going to work either because then it could come out unexpectedly and devastate you. Perhaps the answer is to acknowledge that it’s true, that appearances are a huge part of your life, and that despite this, it does not make you a complete fraud, and that everybody feels like a fraud, and that perhaps just keeping up appearances will somehow make the act itself genuine, not completely genuine (what is?), but something within the doing or the intending to do. You just have to trust yourself, that you are capable of being genuine despite what any of the crazy thoughts in your head lead you to believe; it comes down to self esteem. I’m not sure how much this applies to anyone else, especially for a case like the narrator in this story, who seems to be concerned with appearances to an exponentially scary degree (it seemed a little overexagerated). Another thing: this story doesn’t seem to go anywhere, the problem is defined, and then it is defined some more, etc. etc. until he kills himself. I feel like I could’ve written this story, given the nature of the narrator’s problem and how I’ve thought about all this before. It didn’t really provide any new insight for me. As for the meta quality at the end, I’m not sure what to think, other than maybe it was a stab at providing hope at the end of the story: that hope being that some brilliant writer out there named David Wallace (if he hadn’t killed himself yet) would be capable of supreme empathy, at a level which makes it able for him to inhabit the mind of someone hopeless and see things from that bleak perspective=that there is still genuine empathy out in the world. But perhaps it is DFW showing us how empathetic he is that is the problem, perhaps it is DFW’s own wish to convince us, the readers, of how empathetic he is that is a mirror to the narrator’s own problems, and perhaps this is why DFW ended up killing himself in the end also. I don’t really believe this, (the thinking in this story is too simplistic for DFW to have followed himself when he killed himself, and also, I don’t believe he would write this story if it was really himself, it seems too personal) but this is the kind of conclusion overthinking leads to.Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 2/5: I’m not sure what this story is about. I might have to read it again. It seems like he is doing what he does in other stories like Mister Squishy where he alternates between several different storylines within the same paragraph, so that the current sentence may have nothing to do with the last one. But whereas the other stories made sense, this strategy seems to lead to confusion in this particular case. I did, however, find the mother whose face was plastic surgeried into a constant state of shock to be both hilarious and somewhat poignant.Oblivion 2/5: wha? really? I thought DFW was ‘above’ the whole ‘it-was-all-a-dream’ sham ‘ending’ so popular with Creative Writing 101 students or perhaps he thought this was ‘acceptable’ in this case because the ‘story’ was explicitly about sleep, so the conceit/form was justified by how it folded back into the ‘content’ of the story, but no, just no. I thought about the possible ‘excuses’ that would make this shit-move alright but it still didn’t work for me, it was awful and quite tacky. The story before the shit-ending was alright although at times its tedium and repetitiveness reminded me of a less funny and more ‘boring’ Bernhard. I wonder if DFW read Bernhard or what he thought of him. That asshole’s influence was far-reaching, man.The Suffering Channel 3.5/5: Perhaps it was appropriate that, while I was reading this story in my backyard one sunny day, I was suddenly shat on by a bird. The shit hit my left shoulder and it was the first time I had ever been bird-shat on. This story is about shit, but beyond that, it is about (I think) art, commercialization of art, suffering (of course), and spectacle... the spectacle of art and the spectacle of suffering, both. It is also interesting that the story was set in the WTC a few months before 9/11. It’s almost like that Chekhov saying about the gun in the first act... You can see the shadows of the planes looming over this story, but it is never explicitly written into the story, just implied. The last line of this story (and also of this book) should warrant further attention. Let’s set the scene here first. They are trying to film an ‘artist’ while he shits. They, being the media (for all intents and purposes). One camera is on his face and one is coming up from under him to show his shit as it emerges (he is a shit-artist, in that shit comes out of him fully formed as sculptural art). Furthermore, the artist is set up so that he will be watching the live-feed of his own shit as it comes out, hopefully in the form of Winged Victory of Samothrace. Here is the sentence:There’s some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare--the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.There is so much packed in here, so much... dare I say it: Symbolism! Strangely enough, DFW uses symbolism, but it is so fucked up you’re not sure what it represents and how it works together exactly. We have the artist caught between these two, in-essence, mirrors. We have the artist’s work which is either shit or a masterpiece (Victory!). Or both! We have a feedback loop between the camera and the monitor, which is essentially a not-so-veiled reference to self-reference. Self-reference being both a writing trick/device DFW (the artist, in this case) uses often as well as the basis of our whole conception of ourselves (I Am a Strange Loop). The former is sometimes a cynical, self-defeating, downward spiral (as in the story ‘Good Old Neon’ in this collection) whereas the latter is often seen as a searing and amorphous light known as consciousness.
For we die every day; oblivion thrivesNot on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.- from Nabokov's Pale FireOkay! So here’s some music to listen to while you read this review :) But it’s not really a review, as always.I have this picture in my head of what a review would constitute, and it’s not this.Also, in the interest of improving my own writing, all “I think”s are removed from the below (…I think) but are obvs implied.Anyways, The Field’s music is repetitious, precise, and quite boring to listen to at first, near repulsively so maybe. But if you trust in it and lend it your ears, you can enter a kind of lucid trance. This principle is one DFW was aware of, the humanity within expanded repetitious blandness. Chekhovian grey language; stories told ”the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice." In Oblivion we find the universal fury of Notes from Underground, the omnipresent tedium of A Boring Story, but thrown under a steamroller, exclamation points removed, freshened up for a modern American audience. “The poet’s job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place.”But why sit and read such sad bullshit? That’s what I thought when I first picked this up last summer. And to be fair, I hadn’t been in the white collar working world for very long, but now I am all-too accustomed to days of meetings and people that leave you near mesmerised by how bored the days would make you if you weren’t so mesmerised by how boring they are! Have you ever stared at someone’s stupid face and thought, ‘Of all the many things we could be doing with our time, you chose to use it for this, so relentlessly so that I now feel paralysed’, but it’s kinda funny, too, because, oh my god, how is this happening? How are such levels of boredom possible?So I left this book last summer confused, then I came back after reading a bit and looked at the puzzle with new eyes, and now I can tell you why we should sit and read such sad bullshit.The reason horror films are enjoyed by teens is it's the worst thing they can think of: monsters under beds; violent unlikely death. High class literature + cinema+ art shows maturer folk that real horror is a life of pointless tedium, the grind of which will kill you before you meet the grave. It could happen to anyone after any significant degree of pure meaninglessness, which life is all too happy to provide. What will drive you mad is not a life in which so much tedium occurs, as this is near inevitable: what will drive you mad is if nobody talks about it but you know everyone knows it. That’s why books like this exist. Books that make you slap the pages with the back of your hand and say, out loud, alone: ‘Yes! Thank you!’On top of that, there is this lucid trance idea I mentioned: the sheer volume of details Wallace could find in an “empty” room, how he could use those details to tell you what they revealed about the people associated with it, reveals to the reader the tools they need to cope with people and scenarios apparently devoid of content.I devour all art related to this whole tedium schtick because I fear it so much and am so increasingly immersed in it in life. Simulated reality is the best we get to make us feel better by telling us "Even if your worst fears are real, you'll see it's not so bad" before, or if, it happens one day (comfort disturbed) or it will shock you awake again (disturb comfortable). It keeps everything in flux. If I understand the principle of the book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (a title of a story within this book), it is similar to when Kundera said that the novelist's job is to show the reader that life is a question (can't find exact quote). It's been a big learning of mine that a writer's job is not necessarily to tell readers something they didn't already know. The hackiest writers will think they need to teach you something as if there was anything about human nature left to teach (is there?) when astute observations will do. The best writers show the reader things they already knew in a new way, as Wallace consistently does by recognising his job as refreshing the power of aphorisms and discouraging cynicism about their cliched nature by doing everything in his power to convince you they're more than bromides. Like a teenager watching the Evil Dead remake (pretty damn good!), we observe the horrors we are presented with through literature as if they are a reality.DFW is a decidedly American writer, and these stories are as much an indictment of American culture as explorations of universal human truths.Is Oblivion easy to read? If you push through the wall of repulsion, yes, it is: it becomes its own addiction. But I didn’t manage the first time and had to toss it aside, thinking it without value, as there is a stark difference in Wallace’s writing from this book onwards. There are NO jokes: I’ll stand my ground on that. There are few big words. There are many details and even sparser plots as he pushes closer to a truer representation of life. And I think there is debt to be paid by that other favourite writer of mine whom I mention nearly every review now: Charlie Kaufman, whose masterpiece I won’t write the name of another fucking time evokes a similar first-time repulsion, and contains a therapist whose shoes are so tight they hurt her, just as all of DFW’s therapists make cages or circles with their hands, or have eating disorders or repressed sexualities. Therapists who need to therapise themselves (this is SO true of some therapists I know- jeezo! I wouldn’t trust them to operate heavy machinery any time of day.)I went to a therapist once but she was super pregnant so I didn’t want to tell her sad stuff in case the baby heard me- how unfair would that be? (True, I likely would have found some other excuse!) It’s exactly the same as me moving to Oslo now, and all the people in work who have lived there before are like “Oslo’s not that great” and I’m all “Dude, would you tell me something nice about this place since I’m committed to going there?” That’s what that therapist’s baby would have said to me RE: life if he/she could even communicate, you know? So disadvantaged. And also, as I so convincingly played the part of well-together chap, therapist gave me clean bill (I’m about as okay as people generally get now btw) Shame Beckett isn’t alive any more to look at your form and go ‘You’re on earth: there’s no cure for that.’ Maybe I’m being flippant and I’m about to digress some, but that’s always seemed to be a taboo about therapy or anti-depressants or any mental health issue, is that the things mental health problems get you hung up on are typically the helplessness in the face of the unknowable universal questions about whether or not there is any meaning to life, living in the face of knowing you’re going to die and so on, and that was apparent to me that one time I went to a therapist as I get the impression it was for Wallace (it certainly is for his characters) is that notion of ‘Well, how much of my worries do you really expect to alleviate, here? Exactly what of what I worry about can anyone prevent from being true, and how much are you really able to interpret what I’m telling you any more than I can anyway?’ That’s the permanent sour taste in the mouths of many people who seek psychiatric help I imagine, is, well, you stopped me thinking about it, but for how long? Therapists love to therapise, but do they do it well? The psychology-adjacent folk I know throw mental health conditions at the day-to-day people in my anecdotes like a game of Jeopardy: “So my boss is not a very talkative guy-“ “WHAT IS ASPERGER’S FOR 500 LEO” (I’ve never seen Jeopardy also doubt Asperger's counts as a "mental health condition"... somehow I feel you'll get what I'm going for, though!) Like, when I was an ESL teacher, I was like, you guys could do this with a book: you don’t need me. But what students needed in that case was more the routine of a person checking up on them to force them to study, as I imagine therapists can be a breathing space for people, like, yes, you are here because you want something fixed, so let’s spend some time reflecting on it. But I was cheap, though: that’s the difference… I don’t think it’s gonna make you sad to think that there’s some things about life you’re never gonna be okay with; rather, expecting to be okay with them despite any indication you should is what will lead to bigger disappointment, a paradox of acknowledging disappointment in order to feel more satisfied.The best art (ie. therapy) says the following: look at this; I don't know the answer, but you're not alone. That’s all I need from it. But I need it a lot and in as many forms as are available! Ebert quote: “An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.” Some notes on the stories (well, two of them):First story: Mr Squishy. Teaches you how to read it and rewards your attention with badass corporate slamming. You leave it feeling like you have the tools to defeat boredom (and the rest of the stories!) Again, first time I tried this, I wasn't ready.Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Overlapping thoughts as in The Pale King section 2. (TPK was really a bunch more short stories, and the best Oblivion-like story is the novella in the middle, which could well have been part of this set.)Some conclusions:Generally: none of these stories will leave you satisfied. It’s the Hamlet-esque yawn-that-won’t-yawn-properly feeling you’ll be left with instead, which you will accept with reluctance because of its verisimilitude. These are stories about facets of the human condition that are inextricable no matter our efforts. The incapturability of all thought, inability to recognise which thoughts are important etc. A life that feels blown open, without Coupland-esque Safety net-ism. You're on your own and there's no guarantee you'll spend your years well. This fear being true of anyone, advertisers are really honing in on it to promise you individualism via capitalism, a fantasy they know you will always nurture because you need it to survive. In all the ways that really matter, it doesn't appear that we're individual in the slightest. How could we possibly be? There have been 100 billion of us: our ideas are not that great. You'll notice as I say this that this isn't the medium at all for it: art is. All the toughest things are best said through art. Otherwise it sounds didactic and reductive and is met with a kind of “yeah, I know” as it isn’t a fully expanded argument, and this is big hard truths we’re talking here: Oblivion, The Pale King, Something Happened, the stories of Chekhov, Oblomov apparently (cheers Tracy!) Wonderboy (whatever that is- I looked up the Norsk copy of Oblivion and it was compared this Norsk novel), Notes from Underground, Wilder's The Apartment…It is Wallace's opinion that the soul is not a smithy; that there is no Proustian fountain of youth obtainable by having new eyes, as what our eyes see of the exterior is but a pinhole, and those other eyes we desire are but pinholes in our pinhole, and so we lack so much companionship almost by the definition of being human, a Heisenbergian uncertainty principle of love. Mummy can't keep you safe and she never could. And in the face of that, you are so, so brave. And in the face of that, use your fucking pinhole! And in the face of that, fuck it; let's dance. To what? If you followed my instruction, you're listening to it right now! In life we are alone, but today, we dance as one!!Additional unstitchable thoughts:DFW loved cinema. Said to Charlie Rose he wouldn’t be happy writing a screenplay because someone could come in and change it. But as the Brief Interviews film showed, Wallace’s power is in the written word (this should be self-evident: man can that guy write!) Enjoy here what I imagine would be a single line of DFW screenplay dialogue from a 5-hour film about a man and his wife having a conversation about how many times he takes his boat out, and how much this disturbs them both, also their toddler’s eyebrows are constantly raised for some reason.Pop culture is catching up to the importance of the universal incurables eg. through Wallace-fan-and-also-genius Tina Fey, whose latest series Kimmy Schmidt is pointedly dark beneath the glaze of jokes. My cultural tastes summed up in one pic:(Pic of Oblivion and a Burger King meal. Pretend it uploaded properly)
What do You think about Oblivion (2005)?
Oblivion is far and away DFW's best story collection. The stories here, for the most part, showcase DFW's most disciplined and complete writing, and his most mature. The Pale King is more like Oblivion than any of DFW's other writing, but it doesn't match the sophistication of these stories. This stuff is razor-sharp, and distills DFW's finest traits as a writer, and most of the thematic concerns broadly found in his work. There's a literary sensitivity and profoundly incisive attention to human and social realities in Oblivion that marks, in some ways, the most consistently complete achievement of what DFW was striving toward his entire career. For one thing, his concern with mediated narratives and the nature of language is finally entirely integrated into his fictional narratives. The result is that these stories are all that much more emotionally exhausting and sincere and communicative and important. "Another Pioneer" and "Good Old Neon" are my favourites from this collection, but they're pretty much all great. "The Suffering Channel" really grew on me this second reading.
—Adam
I am putting this book on the "read" shelf, despite the fact I could not get through it. I started the first essay and finally realized, after having not been able to get my head around a point in the book, that the "sentence" I was reading was, ohhh, about a page and a half long. I mean, call me old school, but for the love of christ, put a fucking period in there somewhere so I can tell my brain the thought is complete. I felt like a crazy person trying to get through this book. I stopped reading the first essay and thought maybe it was just that style of writing in the first one that was turning me off. So, I started in the second story and after giving it a good try, I said fuck it - I just don't like the way this guy writes. After having read some reviews here, I may yet give it another try and read some essays that were recommended reads. Maybe I just ain't shhmart and can't unnerstan the golsh darn thing.
—Marjorie
Oh, man. Do you see how I couldn't really recommend this book to anybody, despite the fact that I voted it five stars? That's because I genuinely felt haunted by some of the enclosed stories. Now, let's think about that for a second: "haunted." What that means, basically, is that I felt like the stories were inside of me and that I really, really wished that they weren't there. Especially the title story, which is hands down the most powerful piece of written-word language ever to wrack my psyche. So recommending this to people really feels a lot like recommending that movie from _The Ring_, or whatever, except not a bad rip-off of a questionably good Japanese source. And besides, with all the psychological depth available to a gifted writer like Wallace, his epiphanies (and each story in here is a wonderfully fresh take on the epiphanic story structure; most are brilliantly successful) deliver way more immediacy and power than the vast, vast majority of films I have ever seen. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are stories of horror and terror that not only shame Hollywood, but also shame our own Hollywood-ed ideas about horror and terror.If I could offer an honest -- if not exactly humble -- prediction, it would be that this will be recognized for the finest post-9/11 material published, fiction and non-fiction.
—Pete
