Intimations

Following her excellent debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Kleeman brings her twisted, evocative style to a thought-provoking collection of stories. In “Fairy Tale,” Kleeman creates a dreamlike scene: a woman sits at a banquet table that feels “sorely, mortally dangerous.” A man appears and provides “assurances that I love you, that I think of you deeply,” and then says, “Also, I came here to kill you.” Barbarism and the perils of intimacy continue as themes throughout the collection. “The Weather” is an atmospheric, metaphysical examination of a family (“We study the weather from within this house, and we are the weather within this house”). The stories in the second section of the book have a more realistic but no less unsettling tone. “Choking Victim,” about a lonely young mother, stands out as an exploration of the lurking danger of the everyday. In the third and final section, Kleeman explores death and endings: “Fake Blood” is about a party that turns dark and violent while “Hylomorphosis” is about what, exactly, angels are made of. These stories, absurdist, bleak, and funny, defy straightforward interpretation and instead linger long afterward, to be reinterpreted as they mutate in the reader’s mind. [em]Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Sept.) [/em]