Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me

Weir (The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket) returns with a searing collection of stories about death from the perspective of a gay man who survived the AIDS epidemic. The unnamed narrator recounts a series of memories from both his childhood and adult life. In “Neorealism at the Infiniplex,” he describes the prolonged death from AIDS in 1994 of his best friend, who became so mean-spirited in his dying days that by the late ’90s, the narrator has forgotten everything he had ever liked about him. “It Gets Worse” covers the narrator’s high school days, when he was relentlessly bullied by the other boys and invisible to the faculty. In “American Graffiti,” he gets high and his best friend abandons him. In “Humoresque,” his quick-witted mother, “a movie star without a movie to star in,” recovers from a brain hemorrhage. The narrator’s savagely funny voice breathes life into the tragic stories, with poignant observations on loneliness and loss (friends stop calling when someone’s on their deathbed because “no one wants to say goodbye twice”) embedded between film references and crackling dialogue. This raw, unflinching work has a lot to offer. (Apr.)