If your busy lifestyle is leaving you with little time to enjoy the speculative fiction that you love, allow me to suggest a remedy: short story collections and anthologies. Such books require a low time commitment, and if a few days — or weeks — go by between the moments you manage to carve out for reading, recalling details isn’t a struggle. Reading shorts, though, can still tease the imagination, challenge a preconception, and let you explore a tiny slice of another life — maybe even another life form.
And in that realm, you could do far, far worse than treating yourself to Rob Dircks’ Listen to the Signal: Short Stories, Vol 1. Collecting work from the author’s short fiction podcast of the same name, Listen to the Signal is a delightful bounty of fun ideas, clever twists, and endings that leave just enough to the reader’s own imagination to beguile a tedious wait for a doctor or car wash or turn at the DMV — or, my personal choice for short fiction, as bedtime stories for grown ups. Although, let me add, there is nothing here that, say, a mother should hesitate to let a young’un read, especially in her attempts to cultivate in the kid a love for her favorite genre (i.e. this is a precocious and kid-friendly collection).
The stories of Listen to the Signal are all fairly breezy in tone with a light touch on both the humor and the pathos, but that doesn’t make them lightweight. If anything, they’re heavy on ideas. And though one or two may seem to partake of the low-hanging fruit of the idea tree, Dircks has made the effort to combine it all in ways that demonstrate an awareness of this and a commitment to at least do them one better.
A case in point is “Purgatory,” which combines It’s a Wonderful Life and Communion in a way I don’t think anyone else would while subverting the expectations evoked by both tropes (though, yes, trigger warning for suicide, including an intense description of the bridge the protagonist plans to jump from, complete with signs pleading against the act). The alien we get instead of It’s a Wonderful Life’s Clarence is no angel, and the tone he imparts turns George Bailey’s tale into a bit of a dark comedy rather than a sentimental journey (a discussion about pooping is especially goofy and only a little gross). This would be a good enough twist on the wonderful life, but here we also get the not-angel’s perspective, too. He’s a bureaucrat, coming to question the ethics and actual need for his role and now confronted with his toughest ever challenge: winning token consent for all the alien-abduction-y things from a conscious and aware subject. It’s tough to say who comes out of the encounter more changed.
In other stories, an autistic young hero has a surprising impact on a presidential election as learns to better understand his childhood frenemy/bully (“November 8, 2016”). In still others, a businessman who has put his entire life on hold in pursuit of One Big Deal has his plans waylaid in a gross and hilarious fashion that scratches that body horror itch while also treating us to scenes of pure slapstick (“Tick Tick Tick”). And then there’s “Rose,” which takes the reader on a bit of an emotional ride that is very hard to discuss without spoilers. It involves a lonely old woman, bogus “natural” medicine that bizarrely works in unintended ways, daring naked adventuring, and true love. In his introduction to this story, Dircks confesses that it’s his favorite. It’s mine, too.
Other gifts these stories offer include a smartphone camera roll that seems to predict the future (but also creates it) in “Red Parka,” a sexy close encounter near Roswell in “Christmas at Silverlake,” and, in “Quick Fix,” a sketch on the perils of complexity when viewed through a simple lens as seemingly unrelated malfunctions on a spaceship reveal a daunting greater whole. With cantaloupes.
So I think we have, in Mr. Dircks, a friend to pass some time with most agreeably. The kind to make you smile, maybe laugh, occasionally do a spit-take. The kind to always make you wonder. It’s a good thing we still can have friends like that in this world.
Be back later. I have to go subscribe to his podcast now!
Listen to the Signal is available via the author’s website and where all good books are sold.
One Response
Kate, what a wonderful review! Thank you!