Chuck Klosterman is back and he’s more Klosterman-y than ever in his first collection of short stories, Raised in Captivity! I’m a big fan of Chuck’s but this book was just... fine. There was one really good story called Of Course It Is about a man who’s self-aware enough to know he’s in a dream or a character in a story or in the afterlife but doesn’t seem to care. It was a fun, very compelling and subversive look at the short story format, particularly Twilight Zone-type stories.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the other stories but I noticed that, though there are cool and interesting aspects in some of them, they’re not as well rounded from start to finish – they start slowly or end abruptly just as you’re invested in what’s happening. Execute Again is about an unusual football coach who has his team run one play only all season long but it proves to be mega-successful and then he suddenly retires; afterwards every member in the team becomes hugely successful professionally, though in jobs not sports-related.
Not That Kind of Person is about a woman who wants to kill her husband so she hires the “ultimate assassin” who talks exactly like Chuck Klosterman and presents her with an amusingly effective, if time-consuming, method of assassination. Rhinoceros is about a man reconnecting with an old friend who’s become a digital outlaw who’s found a way of permanently deleting Wikipedia entries. The Secret is about a secret government experiment where scores of people are flipping coins all day repeatedly – apparently tails comes up 51% of the time instead of 50% which means the universe is unravelling! That one had the best ending.
They’re well-written stories though occasionally you can tell Chuck used to be a music critic. In Never Look At Your Phone - where a dad playing with his kid in the park is asked by the other mothers there, as he’s the only man in the park, to tell a weirdo in a bright orange jumpsuit sat on a nearby bench eating fruit and talking to the kids to leave – the weirdo is described as “unshaven and a bit slovenly, but not to the level of Aqualung.” It’s not the simile most would make!
Toxic Actuality is a wry look at the current state of hyper-PC college campuses; Blizzard of Summer is about a band whose latest innocuous song has become a surprising hit with white supremacists; Slang of Ages is about some producers commissioning ideas for a TV show/podcast; the Dave Eggers-esque titled To Live in the Hearts of Those We Leave Behind Is Not to Die, Except That It Actually Is is about a dying CIA agent spilling the beans on state secrets.
I won’t go through them all but there’s a bunch of imaginative stories here I liked with lots of great dialogue and funny moments and ideas. That said, there’s about as many I haven’t mentioned that were dull, unimpressive and instantly forgettable! Obviously your mileage may vary – you may love some of the ones I didn’t mention and hate the ones I liked – but I think Kloster-fans, as well as fans of short fiction, will find enough here to enjoy.
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