By Joe Meno (B.A. ’97, M.F.A. ’00)
[Akashic Books, 2008.
272 pages, $24.95 hardcover]
Reviewed by Chay Lawrence

The thing that strikes you first about Demons in the Spring: it’s a pretty book that would look really nice on your coffee table. Luckily, Joe Meno has provided 20 of his short stories to fill the yawning white expanse between the embossed cloth cover and the color illustrations contained therein. Demons in the Spring continues in the vein of Meno’s past short fiction, where brutal situations bump shoulders with magical realism, often within the same story.

Meno’s work embodies the millennial condition in which 50 percent of the U.S. population will, at some point in their lives, develop a form of mental illness. The other half, of course, must suffer the heartache of being close to the former. Hence, these detours into the realms of the fantastic are not just quirky asides, they’re simply addressing the half of the readership who, at one point or another, have inhabited these strange shores. In what is perhaps the centerpiece of the collection, “The Unabomber and My Brother,” the narrator compares the life of Theodore Kaczynski with that of his own elder brother, once a bullying jock now succumbing to the unraveling of his own mind: one raging against the dehumanizing effects of life in a postindustrial society, the other falling victim to it.

Meno’s protagonists live out lives at the end of their tethers, quiet and imbalanced, as the world around them unravels. In “The Architecture of the Moon,” a son tries his best to make maps for his father, who gets lost returning from work after the city is bathed in darkness when the moon and stars fail to shine. Often the characters’ only solace is through medication, and the consequences of unchecked neuroses lead to bizarre phenomena: one character turns into a cloud when excited; another develops a “tumor with the properties of a city.” This knack of imbuing the darkest narrative with brief glimpses into a magical netherworld recalls the kitchen-sink fantasies of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Joe Meno is the best-selling author of the novels Hairstyles of the Damned, The Boy Detective Fails, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender as Hellfire, as well as the short-story collection Bluebirds Used to Sing in the Choir. He teaches creative writing at Columbia.