Binge: 60 Stories To Make Your Brain Feel Different by Douglas Coupland Review

Binge is Douglas Coupland’s first work of fiction since his excellent 2013 novel Worst. Person. Ever (I gather he’s been busy focusing on his visual artwork in the interim). So, even though as a fan I’m glad to see him publishing again, it’s a shame that it’s not particularly good.

The subtitle is “60 Short Stories to Make Your Brain Feel Different” which they don’t though the stories are all really short - 3-4 pages on average. That’s one of the biggest problems - because they’re so short, they make little to no impression if they’re not particularly brilliant, and most aren’t, so they’re nearly all instantly forgettable.

A number of them are connected though so you’ll notice small storylines developing over the course of the collection. Like the story of a dude who beats up his high school coach for molesting him when he was a kid, or the woman who hires a hitman to off her husband, and the story of how a young teen couple meet and their journey together.

Some of the dialogue doesn’t feel real - like in Tinder and Botox - and I’m not totally convinced that “dad-dancing” (a lame dad dances and his video goes viral - one of the dances is Courteney Cox’s in Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark video, hence the cover) would be quite so profitable. Didn’t The Cleveland Show do something similar too?

Coupland’s writing is fine so the stories aren’t difficult to read and some are fun. Like the kid working at a supermarket who comes up with a winning marketing strategy, the shut-in who’s secretly a millionaire, the Rubbermaid Tubs survivalist dreaming of leaving for New Zealand, and the hoarder who discovers the benefits of Adderall.

The saga of the guy who finds a message in a years-old bottle of Dasani is clever and I laughed at the Team Building story where a woman is repeatedly brought birthday pancakes for each of her meals while on her company’s team building retreat.

But there aren’t many great stories here amidst the 60 to recommend it, even if you’re a Douglas Coupland fan. Maybe if some of the stories were more developed and that number was brought down, this would be a better collection. On the whole though, I found the majority of the stories to be all-too-brief, uninteresting and unmemorable.

I don’t think the short story form is for Coupland - here’s hoping we don’t have to wait nearly so long for his next work of fiction and that it’s a novel rather than another underwhelming short story collection.