All Over

Roy Kesey’s characters often find themselves in situations well beyond the pale of everyday experience. The short story “Hat,” which first appeared in McSweeney’s, relates the improbable experiences of a man who is given the MacGuyver-ian task of building a working airplane out of a single paperclip. He is given this project by a band of inscrutable captors, and—after several failures—completes the plane and secures his freedom some nine years later (several decades after his release, the man returns and claims to have acquired the ability to fashion a submarine out of a thumbtack). In “Martin,” a doctor treats a man who fervently believes he’s a guitar string. “Wait”—which also appears in The Best American Short Stories 2007—chronicles the monstrous monotony of a group of people doomed to wait around in an airport for a flight that never arrives.

While these stories initially appear to randomly skew toward Aimee Bender–style bizarreness, Kesey’s collection has an air of conviction that—by the end of the final story—will have the reader wondering why they ever questioned it. Of course Martin is a guitar string! Of course that painter created a mural of a mountain range that’s nine miles long! Occasionally, the risk-taking that makes some of his stuff so refreshing leaves other surreal forays foundering and overwrought; “Exeunt,” a flat tale about a dead actor and his asshole director, comes to mind. But even when Kesey falters, his bald inventiveness is enough to prod the reader into wanting more of his pervasive weirdness.

—Drew Toal