Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine

In the world of Wilson’s darkly funny short stories, children and deer die, and unhappy, helpless people drink and do irresponsible things. Wilson (Perfect Little World) shows people managing as best they can: trying to survive video game zombies when the rest of their life is too horrible to fix (“Scroll Through the Weapons”), helping selfish grown children because no one else would love them enough to do so (“Housewarming” and the title story), and coping with the horror of adolescence by making horror movies (“The Horror We Made”). “No Joke, This Is Going to Be Painful” involves pariahs ice fighting, but its title would work for virtually every story in the collection. The exception is the one weak link, “The Lost Baby,” which taps into a pain so deep that neither humor nor the human ability to occasionally not be awful can redeem anything. The rest stick with the reader and show a terrible world made less so, sometimes, by human contact, even though humans were usually the problem in the first place. (Aug.)