I started 2015 in the mood for short stories. Maybe welcoming a new year had my mind ready to consume as much as possible in so few pages, or, more likely, maybe with the prospect of a whole year ahead of me, I just wasn’t ready to commit to anything longer. Either way, I scanned through my “to read” list, bumped a few books in line on the shelf, and added a few more to suit my mind-state. One of the first to get its turn in my hands was a debut collection I remembered seeing in a Buzzfeed article: Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals.
In this collection, you can expect to encounter Ice Age animals brought to the Deep South and named after child stars, medical mysteries involving government conspiracies, and the difficulties of home invasion for those suffering short term memory loss. Yet, I hesitate to start describing these stories with the word “weird,” because as strange as some of them are, they are not stories about weird things. While many of Pierce’s stories contain an unrealistic element, the strange parts never seem to take center stage. It is hard to describe what goes on in some of them without getting hung up on extinct creatures returning to life or separate lives being lived while waking and while asleep, but these devices are only there as background noise for the relationships on display. Pierce is writing about people, their beliefs, their place in their own worlds, and their relationships. The fun, often very funny, part of reading these stories is witnessing (more or less) reasonable people in (mostly) unreasonable situations.
It was hard to choose a favorite among the stories in this collection, but the one that stayed with me the longest was itself a small collection of vignettes involving people falling down. In this story, Pierce quickly introduces a number of characters through incidents in which they each take a tumble. Increasingly funny as you read one character after another biting it harder than the last, I think this story exemplifies what Pierce set out to do with his collection. The falling characters become a spectacle, one that others find themselves drawn to watch in their moments of misfortune, ultimately because we can all relate to those most embarrassing, most human moments.
While none of the stories directly overlap, there are clues throughout that all those he has written about here inhabit the same universe. Partly because of this, reading Hall of Small Mammals is a lot like a visit to the zoo. Each story is contained in its own exhibit, and you wander from one to the next, expecting to peer through the glass and find something you don’t encounter every day. The downside to Pierce’s style is the separation he has created from the characters. Almost like a zoo spectator, I was content to watch the characters in their created environment, giggle from my side of the bars, then move on to the next without much significant connection. While entertaining, you don’t feel like you’re missing much because there are other cages to see, go ahead, and move along. This makes Hall of Small Mammals a quick read, one you can laugh over before passing to a friend.
Written by Matt
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