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How Best to Avoid Dying, by Owen Egerton "Your word is ambrosial." From the first sentence, Owen Egerton’s new collection of stories is bizarre, humorous, and compelling. The book is eighteen stories long, and each story is a drop of chocolate syrup on a pine needle. The collection opens with ‘Spelling’, a witty reflection on the rigors we assign to children, and the political weight often assigned to trivialities. ‘Spelling’ opens the crescendo that ends with ‘Lish’, a story about a poet of stars and bubbles, sperm and death. The middle of the book provides us with a variety of fascinating pieces, such as ‘The Martyrs of Mountain Peak’, emphasizing the lengths people will go to indoctrinate and convert children, ‘Lord Baxter Ballsington’, in which a man has lengthy conversations with his genitalia, and ‘The Adventures of Stimp’, one man’s paranoid contemplation of what his life might be like, and how Pumpkin the hamster might save his life. While his outlandish and amusing plots provide a reason to pick up the book, it’s Egerton’s fanciful character development that makes the book into the fantastic piece of work that it is. Not once in 183 pages does Egerton create a character solely to be a prop. Each person lives and breathes on his or her pages, with their own quirks and fears, existing for their own ends and reasons. Every story is laced with humor and allegory, and every phrase is precisely what it needs to be to make this the awesome and laugh-out-loud book that it is. This is one book I enjoyed, one my friends enjoyed, and one that America will love. “and this” |
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| This Book is Available at Dalton Publishing |