Review by New York Times Review
Although few of the weird, darkly funny stories in Michel's debut are explicitly futuristic, they do all take place in the same strange moral future, in which humanity's appetites have outstripped the failing systems put in place to control them. In the opening story, a school's students go "Lord of the Flies" without even leaving campus: "The teachers are all dead. Or else they are disintegrated. Or in hiding (but from whom? From us?). All that is known is that the teachers have disappeared, and the teachers' lounge is barricaded from the inside." In another story, a suburban husband becomes obsessed with surveilling his neighbors to guard his home's property value, deploying spy drones and posting ominous signs around town that read: "You Are Seen." Michel ably handles modes from lyrical to ironic, but he is most comfortable in a purposefully flat style that reads something like translated Kafka. As one narrator, the superintendent of a building full of would-be suicides, pleads to a tenant: "No Earl, you can't do this! Think of your family. Think of the butcher and the barber who depend on your patronage. Think of your dogs, the happy wagging of their tails."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
As one of the founding editors of Gigantic, a periodical devoted to avant-garde fiction and artwork, Michel has vetted his fair share of unusual ideas for publication. Now, in this first collection of his own offbeat tales, Michel offers an assortment of 25 literary experiments that embrace a wide range of quirky themes and stylistic flavors. Many of the pieces fit into the category of flash fiction. No more than a few pages long, they consist of brief, fanciful character snapshots, such as that of a mayor who whimsically distributes keys to the city to all of its residents, or of an uncommon child who grows up in the bellies of miscellaneous animals. In the best of his longer stories, Michel drolly satirizes contemporary societal trends, as in Our New Neighborhood, which follows an obsessive neighborhood-watch committee chairman who resorts to using drones to track his neighbors' activities. Sometimes hysterically funny and sometimes quietly disturbing, Michel's visions will appeal to readers looking for a few hours of purposefully unorthodox but refreshingly creative entertainment.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The world presented in Michel's admirable debut collection is similar to our own, yet twisted just enough to feel strange. Here, so-called Apartment Wellness workers wander hallways to prevent suicides, children grow up in environs reminiscent of Russian nesting dolls (a room inside a room inside a room), and weather vanes set off neighborhood warfare. Schools play a role in two tales: the excellent "Our Education" presents a Lord of the Flies-esque narrative, with children surviving inside a school after an unexplained apocalyptic event wipes out adults; "Almost Recess" finds a teacher corralling students who play-act hangings in her classroom. Other stories feature a secretive artists' colony ("Colony") and a mysterious death ("Things Left Outside"). Some of his longer tales lose momentum: "Our New Neighborhood" pushes quirkiness to a cloying extreme, and "Dark Air," the collection's longest story, full of backwoods aliens, mutations, and giant creatures, feels like an undercooked B movie. But most of these stories are quite short, and Michel frequently knocks his brief bursts of prose out of the park. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Michel, an editor at Gigantic and Electric Literature, makes his fiction debut with a collection of storiesall restrained, all strange. In this book, you get 25 stories in 216 pagesnot a bad deal. Michel opens with "Our Education," which has this offhanded mention on its second page: "There is an ongoing fire in the back corner of the cafeteria." The surrealism is introduced without any underlining, setting the tone for not only this story, but for the book as a whole. Soon, it becomes clear that the teachers have vanished, but Michel is interested in mystery, not answers. The word "elliptical" was invented for tales like these, most of which are set in mundane suburban spaces in which people "feel detached from their surroundings." Some of the stories are remarkableand no surprise, they tend to be the longer ones: "Some Notes on My Brother's Brief Travels" leaves an impression with its dancing man dressed like a chicken, an image both absurd and lonely. "Things Left Outside" feels like an update of Carver's "So Much Water So Close to Home," with violence creeping into domesticity. "Halfway Home to Somewhere Else," the best story here, involves a grown man's conflicts with a group of teenagers at a swimming hole. Michel knows the right authors to mimic, and his stories take cues from Barthelme and Aimee Bender in addition to Carverbut then, what stories by an emerging writer don't these days? For all the book's quirkiness, the cumulative effect is somewhat familiar, like a piece of boxy IKEA furniture anyone can build as long as they follow the instructions, and too many of Michel's shorter pieces are forgettable, lacking enough substance to become truly haunting; they feel as lightweight as paper airplanes, taken away by the wind before reaching any destination. A strong debut despite its unevenness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
