Stone Gods

These 15 stories from Golaski (Worse Than Myself) combine horror and dadaist sensibilities evocative of Haruki Murakami and David Lynch. In “Stone Head,” a man expecting to come home to his wife and daughter instead discovers the huge head of a statue in his backyard. “The Great Blind God Passed Through Us” concerns a child whose uncle scares her with tales of a horrific being called Kari Kari, and who begins seeing Kari Kari in unexpected places as she gets older. In “Unfinished Houses,” a young boy grapples with sleepwalking, bed-wetting, and visions of a wooden castle that haunt his dreams. “Holy Ghost” follows an audiophile who comes into possession of what may or may not be a cursed record by the underground band Holy Ghost. Golaski’s jerky, angular prose does a fine job of leading the reader through nightmare visions and half-imagined memories, and the shortness of the stories helps to prevent the reader’s patience from wavering as Golaski jumps from one image to the next. Without a strong narrative center, however, many of the tales’ more interesting excesses get lost in the mix. It’s difficult to execute this style of surrealism in prose, but when Golaski is able to pull it off, the results are fresh and thought-provoking. (Dec.)