This was meant to be airline reading, but it's very poor. It's an uneasy mixture of escapism (more or less what I expected), literary pretensions, and selections from history (Hawthorne, Poe). The writing is often full of solecisms, awkward overstuffed tropes, and poorly managed anachronisms meant to sound ancient or portentous (Lovecraft is the model there).

Rick Moody's piece is accomplished and glib. I wonder how quickly the sense of accomplishment fades for a writer like that. Reading it is like watching a sparkler: it's ash in seconds.

Dennis Cooper's piece is a meditation on the asshole of a 13-year-old boy: it is harsh and strident, and reminds me of a critique of "The Exorcist": someone said it was like grain alcohol, very strong but probably not good for you. Is a single strong image really an effective critique?

The rest is often weakly imagined fluff, with the usual one-off lines that sprinkle postmodern fiction and make it seem worthwhile: the moment the President comes on TV and shows people it's OK to eat cockroaches; an apocalypse that happens suddenly at the end of a story, when "a torrent of blood comes crashing through the trees." (Robert Bradley) But Nietzsche's critique of Wagner's reliance on small-scale effects would be pertinent to much of contemporary North American postmodern fiction: it has no sense of larger architecture, it feels that emotions are tiny, sharp things that can only be captured haphazardly, in minute quantities, like pins found in a haystack. ( )

Mixed bag. ( )

An anthology of short stories concerning various ends of the world ... personal, political, religious, ecological. Though it was a Christmas gift from last year, it's been an especially timely read in late 2008, as the economy collapses and dire predictions surround me. The microfiction was less successful, in my opinion, than some of the extended narratives; some of the work here is decidedly experimental and inaccessible. Still, I welcomed the variety of styles and voices on display. Especially notable for me were pieces by Rick Moody, whose narrator is writing a term paper on the commonalities between himself and St. John, author of the Book of Revelation; Shelley Jackson's post-apocalyptic love story; Brian Evenson's hilarious account of his ascendancy to Messiah status, Lucy Corin's astonishing description of eating a salad; Ursula K. Le Guin's apocalyptic hypotheses; and a piece by Hawthorne that reads like satirical humor until the last page, when, as always, he has to be a moralist. ( )