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Heroes and villains
Hip-lit heavies and best-selling behemoths rally to save the story
BY MIKE MILIARD

McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales
Edited by Michael Chabon. Vintage, 480 pages, $13.95.


"As late as 1950," Michael Chabon writes in the introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (Vintage), "if I referred to ‘short fiction,’ I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: 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. Stories, in other words, with plots."

Compare those rip-roaring yarns with the "quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory" stories that seem to be the rule these days — measured, detached, marked by solipsism and wan introspection, "sparkling with epiphanic dew" — and it’s clear that a return to the vigorous populism of an earlier era was in order. So Chabon imposed on Dave Eggers to let him helm the 10th installment of Eggers’s McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. It’s something of a departure for the imprint: a paperback (a formal allusion to the pulps of the past?), stripped of the lavish packaging that usually marks McSweeney’s books and put out by — gasp! — a big publisher. Moreover, its 20 tales come not just from McSweeney’s habitués like Rick Moody, Nick Hornby, and Aimee Bender but from pop-lit heavy hitters like Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Elmore Leonard. It’s a quirky concept: a collection of plot-driven genre pieces, some penned by writers who’ve hewed a more self-consciously "literary" path, others by authors who’ve sold millions of genre-specific, plot-driven books.

Chabon tells of writers reporting, "via giddy e-mails, that they had forgotten how much fun writing a short story could be." But are these stabs at reviving the corkers of yore any fun to read? Whereas some scribes relish the chance to tuck in to mysteries and horror stories, others have trouble reconciling their usual arty literary conceits with a well-told, propulsive plot. A few are flummoxed by the genre exercise, handing in stories that are either too slight or just plain weird. A handful simply phone it in.

Consider Chabon’s own story, "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance," a sporadically gripping picaresque that’s long on style and short on substance. Chabon must have had a blast fabricating this antiquated Jules Verne contraption of a fable, twisting history (it’s set in a 19th-century American frontier that’s still under the redcoat boot), writing of lucifer matches and "land sloops." But what of his ostensible commitment to a dynamite plot? For all the lengthy crafted exposition, there’s hardly any payoff.

Harlan Ellison’s "Goodbye to All That" is a crass joke masquerading as a mountaineering story cum existential/consumerist parable. Sherman Alexie’s "Ghost Dance" is also a headscratcher, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with a horror story. But his weird, darkly funny danse macabre — the resurrected corpses of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry stage a cannibalistic rampage — is just crazy enough to work. Hornby’s "Otherwise Pandemonium," about a kid who buys a used VCR that fast-forwards network TV and foretells apocalypse, is interesting at least for his take on a callow American suburbanite’s speech patterns. But its smallish narrative does little to fulfill the collection’s stated purpose.

Then there are the genre masters, who mostly seem to be slumming. Stephen King’s "The Tale of Gray Dick" is an excerpt from his forthcoming "Dark Tower" book Wolves of the Calla; its spare story line is practically a cipher. Crichton’s "Blood Doesn’t Come Out" puts on a manly Philip Marlowe swagger, but it’s similarly slight, and marred by a perfunctory, gratuitous ending. Of the big guns, only Elmore Leonard’s pulpy, punchy "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman" seems willing to play the game: it’s a substantive, evocative Western noir.

The best of the bunch remind us that, Chabon’s demarcations notwithstanding, plot and epiphany aren’t mutually exclusive. In "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," which tells of a woman in crisis who seeks solace by climbing Kilimanjaro, Eggers trades his usual wordy excess for a terse, Hemingwayesque voice that suits his personal, portentous story. Jim Shepard’s "Tedford and the Megalodon" is likewise a tale well told, a Jack London–like man-against-nature saga that follows a solitary Australian’s quest for a primordial leviathan.

True to form, Rick Moody’s melancholy "The Albertine Notes" is the collection’s longest, most verbose piece. It may also be its best. But this dreary-dreamy phantasm, about a drug that helps damaged denizens of a post-apocalyptic New York relive their good memories, is told through a tortuous, slow-burning narrative, all temporal-spatial distortion and postmodern trickery. So what’s it doing here? Isn’t that what the regular old McSweeney’s books are for?

Issue Date: May 9 - 15, 2003
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