A girl who has lost control of her tear ducts. A young boy driven to canicide by his mother. A suspect teacher-student friendship. Post-September 11, Washington DC. Off-colour Holocaust jokes and Asshole (the game) and Russian scientists. I could just keep on naming all these random elements of Emmett Stinson’s short stories but, well, that would be a pretty shit way to review such a short story collection. Amusing, perhaps, but shit.

[Also, just an aside, I did a very broad sweep of Googledom to gauge other people's reactions and possibly respond to. What I found was Stinson's own blog post, where he read and reviewed Irma Gold's review of his book for Overland's blog. That's confusing right? Authors reviewing reviews of their book? One sec, I'm dizzy.

But really, this should be done more. It might put us reviewers on their toes a bit more if we were faced with the undeniable fact that authors do actually read reviews of their books (especially the ones who vehemently deny that they do).]

I’m not particularly well read in Stinson’s writing, apart from having come across one of the “Known Unknowns” short stories (Clinching) previously in Issue 1 of “Kill Your Darlings”, and just yesterday reading his impressively numerical dissection of the digital book piracy market in the latest Overland journal. So for the most part I went into this without knowing what to expect.

To simply sweep over these stories as “Washington circa post-September 11″ stories would not be sufficient. Stinston’s stories are filled with dark humour and odd characters, some of whom reappear throughout. And a dead dog. Fourteen short stories make up “Known Unknowns”. The uncertainty of the people of America, and larger global shift that occurred in September 11’s aftermath, provide only a faint backdrop to the stories in here. Stories which stand independently and become almost beacons of the short story genre, a genre that is never appreciated enough in the reading community.

In one of the longer stories, Local Knowledge, a history teacher attempts to make sense of the moment his life broke into pieces. He reflects on the nobility he sees in teaching high schoolers American history, and has been injected with just the right balance of clever hindsight and denial to make him a breeze to sympathise with. Dry, written in the second person, was surprisingly not a pain in the arse to read. Every creative writing class tutor I’ve had has sternly informed us that stories in the second person are a crime against nature: It forces the circle reader into a square cutout of a character. It manipulates the reading experience. So what is it about Dry that makes it not suck? I have a theory, and it’s the details. You, the reader, find yourself in a bar, where “you open the door and feel briefly the chill of the air conditioning, which is good compared to the swampy humidity outside that makes your entire body feel clammy.” You had your first drink in five months because “you needed a beer. It was no question.” The incredible detail of your Mt Pleasant apartment, thumping ceilings (landlord’s kids) and all, shifts the focus. You’re no longer feeling like you’ve been sucked into the permanent, printed world (word) of the author, because you’re distracted by the detail.

My two standouts were The Sound of Fury and Visions.

Sound of Fury examines the somewhat disastrous combination of single parenthood and pop psychology. A mother who frets that her son never does anything naughty, unwittingly provides an army of inappropriate substitute role models for him.

Deprived of my father, my surrogates were Oprah, Maya Angelou, DeepaK Chopra, M Scott Peck and Della Reese — whatever faceless daytime-television authority the masses absorbed between ritual offerings of One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives. I was raised in an Orwellian nightmare of gooey self-esteem-boosting doublespeak. (p132)

In Visions, Celia’s childhood talent for turning her tears on and off on demand backfires later in life. She cries all the time. Tears run “down her cheeks in a faucet’s steady grip.” This story contains some of the best phrases, and contains a James Dean love affair. My prehistoric early readers and those who know me best may recall that I, too, suffer from a debilitating obsession with the man with the fast cars and the red leather jacket. And the connection of Jimmy Dean combined with the fantasy love affair is a PERFECTLY VALID reason to cite for loving Visions.

But seriously, hot dead actors aside, Visions had me from its first page:

At five, though, she learned how to open her tear ducts and coat her face in a red flush. Eyes blossomed into open sores. The lips unfurled in a perfect pantomime of spasm. (p155)

I mean, how many of us dreamed of being able to “extort our family with weeping”? Well, not me. *cough*

Okay I’m going off on tangent after tangent. One last thing. Each story has its own particular voice: almost alternating between sombre and irreverent, dark and just plain funny. Stinson writes as a history teacher who smells of failure, and then turns around and writes as a hyperchondriac brother about to do the unthinkable. And that’s a rare thing for a short story collection, I think.