Freaks are everywhere in Suzanne Burn’s collection of short stories, Misfits and Other Heroes. Burns, whose characters are obsessed with food, offers readers a feast of funky characters from Alano with a third, miniature hand, to Tiny Ron, who is so tiny that his wife carries him around in a birdcage, to a wax statue of Robert Wadlow, the world’s tallest man. And then there are the freaks.

Burns lures readers with her sideshow. At first glance, she appears to be standing outside the circus tent, calling, “come one, come all! Watch the humans interact! Watch them hurt one another! See how they wound, scar, and debilitate! ” But what seems initially like gimmicky fodder for a circus sideshow is all just smoke and mirrors. In fact, Burns is not perched outside of the tent at all: she is hovering, observing from above, commenting on our stupid human tricks and seriousness. Burns’ women are food obsessed; her men are deformed; the relationships are—well—dysfunctional is a gentle word. Readers may not understand her tactics at the onset, but when they play along for a story or two, this strange, meandering path of suspended reality becomes irresistable. Burns unabashedly parades oddities before her readers, who are transported to an alien planet where the language is universal.

Burns’ oddballs work because they are not alien at all.  They are our own reflections. In “Triad,” a waspy rich girl, Merilee, who recognizes that “nature creates beasts on both sides of the curtain,” and whose father doesn’t see her, loves the third hand of a Hispanic Catholic young man, but not the man himself. She wonders if she might learn to love the sum of his parts. Here Burns poses questions about love, specifically whether we can ever really love a whole person or be loved in that way.

“Domestic Arts” offers Viv, a character that embodies the tension between The Bettys Freidan and Crocker, who quits her job to become a homemaker and take care of her husband, an idea he rejects. Burns concocts a gourmet feast of marital tension, blended with equal parts normalcy and insanity:

“Viv stirred the food coloring with urgency. ‘See,’ she showed the frosting to John, ‘I made purple.’”

And there was no way she could make caring about the color purple sound any less crazy.

The marriage disintegrates as Viv whips up a cake, which she leaves in the oven to burn as she simultaneously leaves her life behind. The story culminates with Viv, clad in an apple print apron, breaking into a stranger’s home to cook dinner for the occupant she assumes at first is a man due to the home’s state of disarray, but who ends up being a woman, wearing a tailored suit, one who ultimately welcomes the nurturing Viv offers. In many of these stories, Burns’ women find comfort in food, offering it to men who either reject it, or accept it without giving anything in return.

These are only the peaks of the whipped-cream frosting, but within the pages of Misfits and Other Heroes, there is plenty more sweet pain, waiting like confections left in the hall. Readers will rubberneck these derailing characters: not because they are odd, but because they are familiar. We are the freaks, and Burns reveals our antics in this collection with humor and with empathy.

Martha McKay Canter is a professor of English at USF St. Pete.  Her reviews have been published on The Rumpus and the Oxford journal Isle.

A book for anyone who has ever been in love or hate with the idea (or actuality) of Hollywood, HiStory of Santa Monica is one of this year’s best collections about the Golden State. Written by Michael J. Atwood and published by Aqueous Books, HiStory tackles themes of men supporting crumbling families with careers in teaching or screenwriting, reprehensible behavior, and an East versus West coast war that turns typical debates upside down.

Atwood’s collection of twelve stories is full of beautiful details so elegantly picked—like Californian grapes themselves, the author’s intricate attention to the facets of life in Los Angeles is intoxicating. He makes any ex-Californians hungry for the taste of home—details down to In and Out Burger make for a collection of mouth-wateringly real stories. Atwood captures the diversity of California’s terrain and shows a love for his home state: “A traffic light held red and swayed gently in the breeze coming off the sea. I stopped for a moment and strained and heard the ocean just a mile away. To the north, I heard a coyote howling in the canyon.”

Atwood’s is a refreshingly fresh voice, rolling to the rhythm of the Pacific Ocean, but with the edge of a salty Boston harbor, and readers can’t help but have their own debate about what coast to call home. The author may shift tenses and points of view throughout the collection, but his colloquially poetic voice stays. While juxtaposing East and West, Atwood also compares beach and desert; this duplicity sways through his writing like picture frames during an earthquake.

“The road behind us is dark and quiet,” Atwood writes in the story “Windmills.” “I look in my rearview mirror but see only a long empty path of tar leading back through the desert to Palm Springs—our promised land. It’s illuminated by the orange sun, which is burning out brilliantly.” Atwood’s attention to the moment brings readers back to a time before the instant gratification of flash literature, and lets the reader sink into his beautiful language.

While Atwood writes about families, not a single family in the work is functional or even communicating well—but within the brokenness hide real relationships and flawed, but heart-throbbing, characters. The interconnectivity within the book could confuse readers, specifically when two stories in the novel contain the same character, Gabriel. It seems Gabriel bookends the collection—we start with him, nervous at his uncle’s funeral, and end with him, nervous at his nephew’s baptism. However, Gabriel seems to grow out of his nervousness—on the last page of the collection, after running away from his nephew’s baptism, he takes the initiative to answer his enraged sister’s call. One could argue every character is a reflection, or shadow, of Gabriel in a way, even the one story in which Atwood conquers the female perspective. This mono-character is not droning, however, but more refreshing—in this way, readers realize how many people have the same thoughts, concerns, problems. After reading HiStory of Santa Monica, there is left a feeling of connectedness, a satisfied need for good literature, and a craving for Mexican food.

J. Bradley, author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books) and The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot (Safety Third Enterprises) will be rocking New York City once again at the InDigest 1207 reading series.  If you’ve missed this talented peformer’s readings the last time we were in town, catch him now before he transitions into fiction forever.