If a Stranger Approaches You

December 24, 2012
In Kasischke’s moody first collection of stories (after eight novels and eight poetry collections, including the NBCC Award–winning Space in Chains), characters are ill equipped to handle anger and fear, and they find their old refuges lacking. In “Mona,” a mother makes a disturbing discovery while snooping in her teenage daughter’s room, a parent-child conflict motif that repeats, in the long-suffering daughter of “You’re Going to Die” relishing the nasty new power she has over her ailing father, and, in “The Flowering Staff,” when a man meets his fiancée’s creepy family. Other standouts, “The Barge” and “I Hope This Is Hell,” combine flashbulb memories of childhood trauma with a pulsing emotional immediacy. In “Search Continues for Elderly Man,” an old man’s mind is overtaken with a mad swirl when a boy and his dog ask him to “come out and play,” but Kasischke brings reality crashing back with an on-the-nose move that kills the spell. The disruption of families and neighborhoods is a particular theme, with the real-life dangers of poverty and foreclosure intertwining with unreal details and true-crime plots. The noxious, unforgettable narrative that unfolds in “Somebody’s Mistress, Somebody’s Wife” combines all of these, as an ex-mistress committed to a quiet life watches her neighborhood’s troubles with horrified fascination. A slim but winning collection.

Starred review from March 1, 2013

Highly acclaimed poet and novelist Kasischke's first collection is a surreal, sometimes shocking, and often humorous journey to the dark side of American domestic life. Kasischke (Space, in Chains) transports the reader to an alternate world where things are rarely what they seem, where violence and horror intermingle with beauty and absurdity, and the false idealism of human relationships is exposed. Her characters at first seem like no one we know, but we soon discover that they are we and we are they. In the timely title story, a woman confronts possible terrorism and (along with the reader) must answer the question, What would I do if this happened to me? These absorbing, disconcerting stories provide no easy answers and the author gives nothing away, often leaving readers to arrive at their own conclusions. VERDICT Written with her trademark lyrical prose and innovative use of narrative, this collection of intelligently crafted stories will satisfy Kasischke fans and short story lovers alike. Highly recommended.--Lisa Block, Atlanta

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
Kasischke's collection of stories, many previously published in literary magazines, spans the gamut between whip-thin and abstract to novella-length and aching, filled in between with the strange and unexpected and sometimes extraordinary. Opening with an eerie bang, Mona begins as a seemingly mild exercise in depicting a mother-daughter relationship and ends with the sort of creeped-out reaction one might have at a particularly disturbing horror flick. Somebody's Mistress, Somebody's Wife seems like a relatively benign telling of an ended love affair until the plot takes a decidedly bizarre turn. In the breath-catchingly cruel You're Going to Die, a family relationship is corralled in just a few devastating word choices. If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane supposes a plausible event, interjects a chance happening that pushes the plot trajectory off course, then serves a dangling ending left to the reader to pick up. The stories are all connected by their disconnection and dissonance, and the unsettling yet ultimately arresting mash-up of styles defies simple definition.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)