Dear Dead Person and Other Stories (High Risk Books)

short fiction from "a uniquely wicked & wild mind"

Weissman gathers all that is ugly, vulgar, obscene, scary, disgusting, dangerous, sick, tragic, and sad to create a debut collection that offers a refreshing, nauseating, hilarious, deranged take on human nature. In these stories what at first seems average suddenly, or sometimes stealthily, turns perverse. A man returning home from a a job ``too bland and pitiful'' to name, dreams of the only thing in life he looks forward to--eating his favorite cherry-filled cookie; he breaks down when he discovers that his dog has beaten him to it. A woman who never wanted to be anything but a mother refuses to lose her son to his new wife, so she hires two hoodlums to decapitate her in order to get him back. A young boy gives a detailed account of his day, including church (``I want to go to hell because in hell the dead run around with no clothes on and I can spend all day staring'') and a trip to the museum, where he wanders away from his parents and has sex with a naked girl in a painting. A 16-year-old birthday girl seduces her older brother by talking dirty to him over breakfast. A serial killer who keeps favorite body parts (torsos and heads) in a valise for sexual release, explains how ``killing, cutting up little boys has made me a better person.'' A Christian Scientist reprimands his son for thinking that ``just because his mother is dead we should bury her.'' And a father thanks a dead person for having a car accident and enlivening his family's road trip. While these tales can be too much when read all at once, we come to understand when a man who kills his friends because he loves to eulogize them says ``no matter how pathetic I become it amazes me how there's always room to get worse.'' A blood-and-guts account of the real American Dream. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The last thing these violent, macabre, sad, fetid, and occasionally quite funny stories need is to be collected. Placed together, their disconnected narrators and formulaic structures create a numbing sameness. The weakest are the minimalist stories of violent murders. As hard as he tries-and he tries very hard-Weissman can't shock us. This is America, after all, and as soon as a severed head appears we all know the narrator is soon to have sex with it. Far better are the reports from the domestic front: the mom who takes out a contract on her son's wife rather than give him up, a teenaged girl who seduces her silent brother with a barrage of sex talk, the obese woman who punishes her child by sitting on him until he expires, the free-thinking Christian woman who creates a paean to fellatio, the dad who writes a letter to the victim of an auto accident, thanking him for cheering up his family's uneventful vacation. "'Please, Mommy,'" he said, 'I want to touch the dead people.'" In the best of these stories, we get to. For large public libraries.
Brian Kenney, Brooklyn
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.