How did I miss this? I love Jonathan Carroll – he is one of my favorite authors. How did this collection of short stories escape my notice until now?

The reasons he is one of my favorite writers are found throughout this book. He has a way of describing even the most mundane of things in a way that, while not making them less humdrum, make the reader want to smack his/her hand down on the table and shout, “YES! That’s exactly it!” As in the story, “The Sadness of a Detail”: “Arguing with the children, a trip to the dentist, then endless shopping for invisible things – toilet paper, glue, salt. Things no one ever knows are there until they’re gone and are then needed desperately. An invisible day where you exhaust yourself running around, doing thankless errands that are necessary but meaningless: the housewife’s oxymoron.”

Housewife or not, we’ve all had that kind of a day, some more than most, and yet it is as if Carroll has taken all of our collective frustration/exhaustion and distilled it down into its purest form.

In the story, “Mr. Fiddlehead”, one of the characters expresses beautifully the “before” picture of her life. “But before him, I had never thrown anything away, caution included. I’d been a careful reader of timetables, made the bed tight and straight first thing every morning, and hated dishes in the sink. My life at forty was comfortably narrow and ordered. Going haywire or off the deep end wasn’t in my repertoire, and normally people who did made me squint.” All, if not almost all, of Carroll’s stories have a “before” section. The part of the story where the reader is allowed to settle in a bit. Have a look around, start to get a sense of the place. And just when the reader starts to get comfortable, a sentence sneaks by where something is just a bit off. Something happens or a character says something that doesn’t quite fit. That first subtle tilt of the picture that the reader is still trying to make sense of when the whole thing starts to move and change in a way that is delightful and disturbing and that makes Carroll’s work one of a kind.

“If he could never know what it was like to be truly human, at least he could be as kind as a human being and give this woman something they desired.”

These stories are just as much about errands as they are about Hell. Characters complain about being unable to meet the right man just as they fall in love with imaginary childhood friends. They mourn the loss of a great love with equal weight as they rejoice a friend’s soul turning up in another person’s body.

In this collection of stories, the loss of a loved one in the strongest theme. As is the desire to find a great love. “How do I say without words: I’ve been looking for you all my life but didn’t know it until five minutes ago? How do I tell her everything when I can’t tell her anything? The face is a very bad linguist. How many words are in a smile?”

While so often in our mundane word, the only solution for such a loss is time. In the fantastical worlds of Jonathan Carroll, time, space, emotions, reality, and humanity – all are up for grabs. Anything is possible.
The delicate blending of these worlds is fascinating to me. Now that I’ve read so much of his works, I always try to peek around the next corner – try and predict when the “AHA!” moment is coming. But he is a master at drawing the reader so fully into the story – say with snarky (and oh so true) social commentary such as, “She constantly wondered why people volunteered their skin as a billboard to tell the world they were clichés, unoriginal, or worst of all – they just wanted to be like everyone else.” – that guards come down and the reader is surprised once again.

This collection of stories was delicious. Maybe a longer collection that I might have chosen – only because I never want to grow tired of these mystical realities – never want them to start to blur together – but delicious nonetheless. ( )