How Animals Mate: Short Stories

This impressive, grimly humorous debut collection, winner of the 1998 Sewanee Fiction Prize, shows how the grotesque and the normal have so merged in American culture that moving from one to another is as easy as changing a channel. In the title story, arguably the best of the eight, Rich Revelle's family has recently moved to a small Minnesota town, where the sexually frustrated 15-year-old voyeur bears witness to the subtly cast psychoses and eventual dissolution of the neighborhood's unhappy families--including his own. Mueller's ingenuous narrator is the picture of normal middle American helplessness. In two other stories, the author also focuses on male, suburban adolescence, but his penchant for the grotesque goes over the top. The overweight boy in ""Torturing Creatures at Night,"" wields a furtive authority over his neighbors when he hides by their windows and changes their TV channels with his remote control; the drugged-out teenage protagonist's behavior in ""P.M.R.C."" is decidedly more grisly--and lethal. Mueller changes territory in ""The Night My Brother Worked the Header,"" vividly establishing his characters in a polyvocal tale set in an Alaskan fish factory in which a teenage Aleut girl has a brief affair with a college boy that reveals the underlying violence in her relationship with her brother. ""Birds"" is set in Albuquerque, where a lesbian poet/stripper who needs surgery returns to her old job at a strip joint. After a disturbing incident, presented with knife-edge keenness, she disposes of her life with sudden and traumatic clarity. Not for the faint-hearted, Mueller's stories shimmer from the unique combination of the sensitivities displayed by each of his alienated protagonists as they try to negotiate between their own painful inadequacies and their limited, poignant, ability to affect their fates. (Mar.) FYI: How Animals Mate is a volume in the Sewanee Writers' Series. It has been chosen for Borders' Original Voices Program.