Absolute Disaster: Fiction from Los Angeles

The 25 tales that make up this collection deal with the spiritual, natural, political and automotive disasters that allegedly differentiate Los Angeles from the rest of the world. The truth is that the subject matter of most of these stories would work just as well in other settings, but the sense of rootlessness, shallowness and keeping up appearances in many of the pieces give the collection a definite L.A. spin. Montgomery, who is both editor of the Santa Monica Review and an editor at Dove Books, has chosen some intriguing pieces by such writers as T.C. Boyle, Jim Krusoe, Sandra Tsing Loh and Harlan Ellison. The weather and landscape are important players in Robert Crais's fine noir tale ""The Man who Knew Dick Bong."" ""It was cooler than I had expected, though,"" says his 1950s gumshoe. ""Only about a hundred and fifteen."" Nature is viewed through smog, traffic and tinted windows in most of the contemporary stories until the final story of the collection, Carolyn See's ""Light Ages,"" in which the ultimate disaster-an atomic bomb-is required to return survivors' attention to the land around them. Absolute Disaster is unsettling: Some of the stories are broken up into such small bits that the authors seem to be clicking mental TV remotes. Others deal with people so disengaged and shallow they might be from another planet. The air is murky, things change constantly, the earth rolls and fire comes down from the hills. This book is full of ideas packaged in strange ways. It is the reader's challenge to pick them out. (Jan.)