![]() ![]() I feel the relief of a debtor releasing coins from his fist – a weight lifted, no longer beholden. I have been kept almost entirely away from pain and violence, from complex sensation, from ordinary people who I now imagine will tear me apart like dogs. ![]() In “The Doll,” a group of friends find an abandoned doll in the yard of a family whose members all tragically died in “In This Fantasy,” a narrator takes us through the kinds of lives she imagines having and the personas that come with them in “June Bugs,” a woman running away from an abusive relationship finds her house inexplicably overrun with june bugs. In some stories, what is unsettling is elusive, hard to put your finger on in others, it is very much front and center, obvious though not necessarily comprehensible. ![]() ![]() The stories in this collection vary in genre: some skew more speculative or magical realist, while others are firmly set in the “real world.” Regardless of how they lean in terms of genre, though, all these stories are characterized by a sense of disquietude: there is always something that’s unsettling, not quite right. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century was a little inconsistent as a collection for me, but on the whole I feel like its stronger stories really helped elevate it in the end. ![]()
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