Human Oddities

In her stark, startling first book, Jablonski gestures toward the abject and the sublime. These nine stories hinge on the damaged contemporary body—battered, conjoined, disfigured by plastic surgery, abandoned, intoxicated, in drag or rendered uninhabitable by obesity, desire or deformity. With freak-show imagery tempered by sympathy, Jablonski conjures outcast protagonists, from the overweight orderly Andy who collects ventriloquist dolls in "Big Guy" to the cancer patient in "Wanting Out," arrested at the Canadian border with pepper spray and prescription drugs while fleeing her disease and her failed marriage. The first three stories follow one family's history, from a woman's obsession with her abusive ex-husband in "Pam Calls Her Mother on Five-Cent Sundays" to the forces that create that situation in "The Good Life." The other stories, at their best with the quiet hope and surreal flotsam of "The Monkey's Paw," wander from raw victimhood in "Big Guy" into histrionic camp and alcoholic relapse in "The End of Everything." Like some of Jablonski's characters, these compelling but overreaching stories sometimes can't bear the weight of their own existence, too elusive and voraciously complex to allow for traction. But the book, by articulating violence, loss, suffering and self, does maintain a powerful voice and forward motion throughout. Agent, Henry Dunow . (Oct.)