The Safety of Objects: Stories (First Edition)

A collection of disturbing, surreal stories explores the murky underworld of the emotions, with tales of an abducted boy, a teenager who is seduced by his sister's doll, and a child kept alive by machines

In each of these 10 stories by the author of Jack , characters' thoughts and deeds veer far beyond ordinary boundaries. The couple in "Adults Alone," whose children have been left with a grandmother for a few days, descend into mindless torpor and crack-smoking. Reality returns with the news that their boys are coming home early. In "Jim Train," a character whose office is unexpectedly closed also finds himself slipping off the edge of self-definition. Homes's characters need to hang on to the safety of their everyday lives, and the point that reverberates through these fictions is how tenuous a hold they actually have. In "A Real Doll," a teenage boy has a series of erotic encounters with his little sister's Barbie doll: "I'm Tropical, she said, the same way a person might say I'm Catholic or I'm Jewish."stet punctuation.eed Ken, she complains, "Is not what you'd call well-endowed. . . . All he's got is a little plastic bump." After an even more bizarre sexual liaison with Ken, the narrator becomes disenchanted with Barbie, who has been mutilated by her owner. Though occasionally given to straining for shocking effect, Homes has here demonstrated a quirky and original flair. QPB selection.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

If it is Homes's aim to capture our attention by shocking us with her outrageousness, then she surely succeeds. But shock and outrage eventually wear off and leave us feeling manipulated. This is a collection of puerile sexual fantasies disguised as short stories, and Homes seems to expect us to explode (or, like Pavlov's dogs, at least to salivate) at her explicit descriptions of juvenile sexual exploration. "A Real Doll" is a young boy's fantasy about his affair with his sister's Barbie doll. "Chunky in Heat" is about a very fat young girl having sexual fantasies on a lawn chair in her backyard. "The I of It" is about a young man who is obsessed by, and furious at, his penis. Homes has the talent to pull us into her quirky world, but that world is full of nothing but sex: fear of it, desire for it, revulsion from it, and endless, endless fantasy about it. If Homes would stop doing her outrageous act, she could use her considerable talent to capture our attention quietly and with some depth.
- Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.