McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales is a decidedly uneven collection of short stories edited by the supremely gifted Michael Chabon. In his oft-cited introduction to the collection, Chabon criticizes the modern trend toward "quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory stor[ies]" and thinks nostalgically back to the glory days where "ripping yarns" ("[s]tories, in other words, with plots") were respectable in refined literary circles. Chabon's view of these "ripping yarns" is decidedly pulp: "the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story." As a result, most of the stories in this collection are genre tales. Perhaps things would have been better if he had encouraged these generally non-genre writers to make the stories in their own milieu more exciting.

At any rate, we're stuck with the stories Chabon solicited. Some of them are phenomenal; others are just decent; and some are decidedly bad. Let's start at the top.

An early story in the collection is Glen David Gold's wonderfully weird "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter." It's a macabre tale of a traveling circus, a clown, and a murderous elephant. Its central image--an elephant in the gallows--is so vividly drawn that it dominates the afterthought of a story that surrounds it; but somehow Gold still manages to push all the right emotional buttons on his way to an actual, honest-to-goodness resolution. (Squonk's dance is one of the saddest moments in this entire book.) Very good stuff.

Similarly good, but even more weird: Kelly Link's "Catskin," which is an even more macabre fairy tale about a witch, her children, and her revenge. The story accurately captures how strange and violent most fairy tales really are, when you see them in their raw, non-Disney forms. And it's told with a completely straight face--thankfully no meta-fiction here.

At the other end of the weirdness spectrum is Dave Eggers's "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly...." At first glance it is an utterly plain story: a woman takes part in a hiking trip up a mountain, and faces basically some ordinary problems. This is decidedly not a genre story, and in fact comes perilously close to being a "moment-of-truth revelatory story." But it is strangely compelling. Eggers is a wonderful writer, and has an amazing ear for utterly mundane details that humanize his schlubby characters.

The final truly phenomenal story is Michael Moorcock's "The Case of the Nazi Canary." It's a strange sort of alternate history story: a famous detective is hired by the Nazis to solve a strange mystery. There are Nazis, afternoon tea, gentlemanly investigations; Hitler shows up and is utterly pathetic, and deviant as well; and of course, as with so many alternate histories, there are majestic dirigibles. The story is very British; it's very genre (mystery, in this case--and a fiendishly convoluted one at that); and it's very good.

Next, for the decent stories. I confess that I had a soft spot for the collection's opener, Jim Shepard's "Tedford and the Megalodon." I realize it's not a very good story, but I'm putting it here anyway. Basically, Tedford goes searching for a big frickin' fish. Boy do I love big fish stories. And Shepard absolutely nails the atmosphere of a lonely fisherman sitting in the middle of a very alien ocean, wondering what kind of behemoth is circling beneath him.

A curiously good story is Elmore Leonard's "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman." The story is fairly mediocre, but Leonard has this wonderfully charismatic storytelling voice that sucks you right in. Very Mark Twain-like. In a similar vein, Sherman Alexie sustains his bloody "Ghost Dance" with his own seductive style, even though the story--and especially its resolution--is pretty ho-hum. (It's a zombie flick.)

The collection's closer, Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent: A Planetary Romance," showcases Chabon's strong writing ability but is relegated to "decent" because it's only the first part of a proposed serial novel, and as such is woefully incomplete.

I'm leaving some space at the end of this section to talk about Rick Moody's maddeningly confusing "The Albertine Notes." I think that a large minority of people who read this collection think Moody's story is the single best one in here. And it is, indeed, quite good. If I understand the premise of the story correctly, there is a drug (known as Albertine) that at least temporarily makes you relive one of your memories in all of its tactile intensity. The conceit of this story is that when you take Albertine and escape into the past, you can't distinguish between the real world and the memory you're reliving. Then Moody suggests that Albertine also occasionally allows people to experience unrealized future events with equal intensity. In the hands of a lesser writer, Albertine the drug would be just a fun toy. In Moody's hands, however, Albertine becomes an excuse to totally screw up the temporal structure of his story. You see, the narrator takes Albertine compulsively. What that means is he can no longer distinguish between past, present, and future. Events unfold with maddening obscurity. He will remember somebody; then meet them for the first time; then forget them; then remember forgetting them. At one point I think that he takes Albertine within an Albertine flashback, and gets flashed to the future (or past) where he takes Albertine again, and is again shuffled through time. You get the idea. But it gets worse: if time is confused, then so is reality, and Moody suggests (I think) that Albertine allows people to affect the "real" world by, er, messing with the collective consciousness, or something like that. Did I mention that there are also conspirators/terrorists/scientists who want to prevent something or other by screwing with the distribution of Albertine?

It's all very lusciously confusing, and clearly a virtuoso display of writing on Moody's part. I found it just a bit too needlessly obscure. I don't mind confusion so long as I'm convinced that there is some underlying order, however well hidden, but I think that large parts of the story are just sort of random, and don't fit cohesively together. So here's just a note to say that "The Albertine Notes" is very good, but may not be to everybody's tastes. (It's also incredibly experimental, which is not the appropriate style for a "ripping yarn," as Chabon represented.)

Now we come to the bad: everything else in the collection. Dan Chaon's "The Bees" starts off well, with a genuinely creepy atmosphere, and ends very disappointingly. Carol Emshwiller's "The General" is too abstract and sketchy to be interesting. Neil Gaiman's "Closing Time," which is effectively a ghost story, is written very well but seems much more significant than it really is; it has a "twist" that I think is basically just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium" has a neat premise--a VCR that shows the future--but an utterly mundane story (the kid with the VCR deals with it). I also don't like Hornby's writing style; I realize the narrator is an adolescent kid, but that kind of disjointed Holden Caulfield crap still pisses me off.

Stephen King's "The Tale of Grey Dick" is ripped from his Dark Tower series and is hard to appreciate on its own, or even in context. Michael Crichton's "Blood Doesn't Come Out" is an extremely slight vignette that feels like a random page from one of his novels. Laurie King's "Weaving the Dark" is about a lesbian thrill seeker with an ill partner who gets glaucoma, yet the story manages to become really dumb. Chris Offtutt's "Chuck's Bucket" is boringly and pointlessly meta, and seemingly written because he had no better idea upon being solicited by Chabon. Aimee Bender's "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers" is a mystery that lays on the salt-and-pepper analogy a bit thick, then doesn't resolve the mystery. Harlan Ellison's "Goodbye to All That" is deliberately weird and narratively lazy. And finally, Karen Jay Fowler's "Private Grave 9" is well written, but seems like one of those modern pointless short stories that Chabon was supposed to have kept out of this book.

So what's my verdict overall? Although most of the stories in this collection aren't worth reading, I don't think it says anything about whether Chabon's mission to encourage "ripping yarns" is a success or failure. I think most of this book's failings come from the fact that Chabon had to solicit these pieces, and the authors were therefore writing under deadline with a sort of external inspiration driving them. If they had all written from their guts, the collection would have been much better--perhaps spectularly so, if some of the better stories are any indicaton.

[Note: James Grimmelmann has written a much better (and shorter) review of this collection on his blog; he's one of those who really liked "The Albertine Notes." He mostly agrees with me otherwise, except for his appreciation of Hornby's style.]

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu