Jim Henry's stories defy convention. There are no easy answers, no quick fixes. Although the plots vary鈥攆rom a corpse returning to visit his family weeks after his burial, to the musings of a congressman grappling with the weight of history, to a wealthy family's elaborate plot to cheer their mysteriously wounded mother鈥攁ll express a sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the absurd in the everyday.
Henry's characters are for the most part misfits, outsiders looking in on a world whose seemingly natural order is turned upside down. In a throw-away culture obsessed with sex and drugs, money and God, they struggle to connect with what is real while trying to convince themselves that anything is. And yet in the midst of their existential searching there remains always Henry's quirky sense of humor. As one character says, 鈥淎nything is possible,鈥 and in this collection anything and everything happens.
鈥溾n enough occasions to make Jim Henry's stories worth reading, the close focus he brings to bear on his characters reveals surprising truths about people despairingly clinging to one another and their illusions.鈥濃New York Times Book Review
鈥淭here is present a small speck of Donald Barthelme's alacrity, so that we often see throughout the narrator's eye during a moment of amused irritation. [Henry's] characters struggle with private dreams and demons and with public versus private realities. I think 'Congressman Spoonbender' is a wonderful story, and鈥攁s with so many of the stories鈥攊t's difficult not to feel uneasily, and perhaps a bit exhilaratingly, implicated.鈥濃擜nn Beattie
Winner of the 1997 海角乱伦社区Short Fiction Award
