cover image Kingdom of the Young

Kingdom of the Young

Edie Meidav. Sarabande (Consortium, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-941411-41-4

With her first collection of stories, Meidav (Lola, California) offers an uneven but charged series of character portraits. The most remarkable are of an aging "educational consultant" who ogles a young woman in a hot tub in "The King of Bubbles," and, in "Beef," a veteran who works as a shady door-to-door meat salesman and insists that his tactics aren't evil: "if it were evil, I'd be a liar or someone would've stopped me already." These eccentric highlights are unfortunately surrounded by stories in which Meidav's arresting prose is applied to more forgettable subjects. In "Dog's Journey," a Cuban boxing prodigy becomes "a shame to the nation" after escaping to Florida, and in "Koi," an interracial childhood friendship proves to be impossible to sustain. A more startling revelation is that the woman in "The King of Bubbles" has two glass eyes; when she removes them to swim, she exposes "two gouged slits no monster could envy." It's an effect akin to what's imagined in "Modern Parables #1: Theft," about a young man who has turned kleptomania into performance art in which "you enter the show as a viewer and don't notice when or how your pocket is picked." This is an experience based on shock and surprise, not a slow procession to an obvious conclusion. "A person," Meidav's narrator observes, "could be freed by such magic." (Apr.)