The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

Running the gamut from weird to outright creepy, these 13 stories shed sympathetic light on the unseemly, the ungainly and the unrefined. The first story, "Mechanical Men," about animal testing and chimpanzee murder, mixes George Saunders's brand of bureaucratic absurdity with Raymond Chandler's lean prose. "Abduction" sends a jaded tabloid reporter to a filthy motel room on a tip about a girl who gave birth to an alien baby. In "Pulp Life," a girl is sentenced to carry a dead man's photo for 14 years after she kills him in a drunk driving accident. The industrial mayhem of "Breaker" is set on a small African island where ships are disassembled (inspired, the author notes in his acknowledgments, by an Atlantic piece by William Langewiesche), and "Cutters" follows journalists on an assignment that drags them over the edge in a "hillbilly dumping ground in the mountains" populated by snake-handling religious fanatics. Reading not unlike literary dispatches from The Twilight Zone , Nelson's collection won the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction, and it's not difficult to pick up on O'Connor's influence: strange and damaged characters mired in strange and damaging situations. (Oct.)