Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
Four mutually loathing brothers fold hundreds of paper cranes for a contest to determine who will own the family plantation house. A young man counts every step to and from a factory in which he winnows the Qs from heaps of new-minted Scrabble tiles. Three new BAs spend months after graduation tunneling beneath the hometown of one of them. A professional substitute grandmother gets queasy about her new family when she discovers they also retain a faux child. That last story, &#x201C;Grand Stand-In,&#x201D; is the creepiest in the book, though the bad-dream pulp-noir exercise, &#x201C;The Shooting Man,&#x201D; is a close, gritty runner-up. Two stories of teens and sex, &#x201C;Mortal Kombat&#x201D; and &#x201C;Go, Fight, Win&#x201D;&#x2014;the only third-person narratives here&#x2014;express great though measured sympathy. Wildly imaginative in the manner of new weirdness fiction (see Feeling Very Strange, 2006), Wilson&#x2019;s work is also warmly compassionate in tenor. He creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical. Watch him closely. --Ray Olson