The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

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Christopher Merkner is a Shirley Jackson for the contemporary Midwest, where the ties of family and community intersect darkly with suburban American life. In these stories, an enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers and a young man delays a impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother's pet pig. Sharp and uneasy, for these inheritors of tradition, that which binds them most closely--offering stability and identity and comfort--are precisely the qualities that set them back, pull them down, burden, limit, and ruin them. Christopher Merkner teaches creative writing at West Chester University. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, and Best American Mystery Stories. He and his wife and kids live in West Chester, Pensylvannia. Review"The true beauty of these tales lies in their delicate endings, which manage to both tie up loose ends and leave everything hanging, so that they are simultaneously satisfying and mysterious. Such complexity makes great reading for lovers of short fiction, and for all who wish to witness a new master at work."—Booklist "Merkner's narratives pulsate with confidence, mixing the weird (a five-year-old the size of a 15-year-old, a couple that paints an entire house one color) with moments of earnestness, and the result is a memorable book."—Publishers Weekly "Sharing the seemingly ordinary setting of the Midwest, these short stories turn simple and normal into weird, melancholy, and wonderful. . . . The stories range from darkly comic to genuinely sad, to more than a bit unsettling. But all share a strong voice . . . and they all exhibit the author's ability to keep his work in the realm of plausibility."—ForeWord Reviews "These earnest and darkly surreal vignettes hold a magnifying glass over Midwestern suburbia."—Modern Midwest “Christopher Merkner is the happiest, most disturbed—certainly the most happily disturbed—writer I know.”—Padgett Powell “Christopher Merkner’s chillingly funny stories are a substantial reminder that the two weirdest and most disturbing places in the galaxy are the mind and the home. They also demonstrate repeatedly that it is possible for the skilled artist to draw laughter though a wince. This is my favorite kind of comic writing.”—Chris Bachelder “With hilarious, biting prose, Merkner establishes himself as a masterful new voice of modern satire. These brilliant stories lay bear our greatest follies with a precision that leaves the reader humbled and breathless: here we have a must-read indictment of moral defect that could not be more saturated with importance and entertainment.”—Alissa Nutting “Donald Barthelme and Tove Jansson did not have a child, as far as any of us know, but if they did, then that child would have been Christopher Merkner, and Christopher Merkner has written a book worthy of his genius would-be parents. The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic is wild, it is wonderful, it is animated by its author's unfailingly expansive treatment of his restless, covetous, striving, limited, dangerous, endearing characters. One of those characters in one of these stories notices that ‘The sun blazes at an odd angle.’ This is one of this book's gifts to its lucky reader: its sun blazes at an odd angle so that we might see how strange and marvelous the old tired world can be.”—Brock Clarke, author of* Exley and An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England* “Christopher Merkner's Midwestern fabulism makes him the Grant Wood of short fiction. Rare are writers with the gift to mash up domestic and gothic in ways uncanny and heartbreaking, and Merkner's one of the gifted. No one's better at defamiliarizing a family meal, a kiddie birthday party, Grandma's funeral, or the well-meaning, exhausted ways we reprimand our three-year-olds when they smack their siblings: 'We ask her if she would like to be hit in the face with a book. We ask her if she would like to be injured. She says she would not.' Trust me, you would like to be hit in the face with The Rise and Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic. It's that good.”—Josh Russell About the AuthorChristopher Merkner teaches creative writing at West Chester University. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, and Best American Mystery Stories. He and his wife and kids live in West Chester, PA.