Hall of Small Mammals
Stories
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4.4 • 9 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A wild, inventive ride of a short story collection from a distinctive new American storyteller. The author of the forthcoming novel, The Afterlives.
The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world.
In “Shirley Temple Three,” a mother must shoulder her son’s burden—a cloned and resurrected wooly mammoth who wreaks havoc on her house, sanity, and faith. In “The Real Alan Gass,” a physicist in search of a mysterious particle called the “daisy” spends her days with her boyfriend, Walker, and her nights with the husband who only exists in the world of her dreams, Alan Gass. Like the daisy particle itself—“forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two”—the stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals are exquisite, mysterious, and inextricably connected.
From this enchanting primordial soup, Pierce’s voice emerges—a distinct and charming testament of the New South, melding contemporary concerns with their prehistoric roots to create a hilarious, deeply moving symphony of stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pierce's first short story collection is full of compulsively addictive and delightfully strange fare. Some of the 12 offerings are new, others are culled from the New Yorker, the Oxford American, and elsewhere; each takes a mundane experience and adds an element of the extra weird. In "Shirley Temple Three," the opening, a mother begrudgingly agrees to hide a cloned prehistoric miniature woolly mammoth in her laundry room as a favor to her son, who is a reality show host. The protagonist of "The Real Alan Gass" becomes jealous when his girlfriend reveals that she's happily married to another man in her dreams. "Videos of People Falling Down," which is about just that, is a funny, yet quietly poignant interconnected series of vignettes that showcase characters at their most vulnerable. Echoing an old ghost story, the wicked "Saint Possy" shuttles a couple to their wits end as the skull of a dead possum (maybe) simultaneously haunts and taunts them. In "More Soon," a dead man, quarantined and shipped around the world on a barge following a highly contagious infection, prompts his brother to contemplate where the soul resides. Pierce's menagerie of colorful characters equally inspires and amuses. The book is expertly paced (there isn't a dud in this eclectic bunch) and many of the stories' endings some sinister, some melancholic, others heartfelt prompt momentary reflection, though thankfully not always in ways that are expected.
