A Magnet to a Flame

Cooke has titled his debut after a line from a particularly obscure They Might Be Giants song, and it serves as a content warning of sorts: his stories serve up the weird for weirdness’s sake, often with a dash of quirky charm. In these 31 works, written over 22 years, Cooke returns repeatedly to the preservation of bygone days, the nature of witches, and consciousness of scripts and instructions. The opener, “Video,” is a detailed manual of how to approach a strip mall video store and enter a stranger’s life during some year in the past. “Exit Interview” examines that most mundane setting, an office building, where the narrator finds “all of my stuff, starting with my first car”—as though one room could contain the past. Then, in “Not Even for an Hour,” a war widow has a job interview with a peer from 1,000 years in the past. It’s fun to connect such thematic dots. Like glitter, the stories catch the eye without profound substance. Cooke’s peculiar, sideways collection is both easy to pick up and easy to put down. (BookLife)