One Way Donkey Ride

Mark E. Cull. Asylum Arts, $14 (131pp) ISBN 978-1-878580-22-1

A young man wakes up in a strange house that is later uprooted and towed away in the title story of Mark E. Cull's collection One Way Donkey Ride; his subsequent search for another home gives new meaning to the expression ""dream house."" ""Why I Hate Pets"" explains why a gerbil might be God, and ""The Red Notebook"" finds a kindergarten girl taking the place of a teacher who was probably killed in an accident. These odd stories owe a surface debt to Kafka and Beckett, but for the most part the conceits are too thin and the strangeness too self-conscious to satisfy.

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