Einstein's Beach House: Pleasurable off kilter stories

Somehow Jacob Appel managed to provide stories in his collection that kept me from fashioning a shiv out of office supplies and taking out my frustration on office mates.
Einstein's Beach House (Jacob Appel)
188 pages
Pressgang
ISBN-10: 0984940588
ISBN-13: 978-0984940585

Short stories drive me nuts. I do not care for them, as a rule. Between 5 and 40 pages of character development, I get invested and find myself totally involved. I want to learn the deep history and horrible details of the character lives. I often find myself frustrated, throwing down a book in disappointment when it leaves me hanging. I always pick them back up and finish them, but there is a grudging nature to their completion.

Einstein's Beach House is a pleasurable collection of stories. Each of them are a little off kilter. Whether it be about an extramarital affair with one's daughter's imaginary friend's father, or breaking into the basement of your local sex offender's home to locate dirt on the guy, Beach House holds it's own.

Where most authors drop off in a failed attempt at literary poetry, Appel has edited these tales down to the perfect/the right moment. The only poetry is the wind that whistles in the cracked door he leaves open, uncomfortably numbing you and making your nipples hard enough to cut glass. Each of the eight stories are perfectly crafted to leave a reader strangely satisfied, and yet wondering how. If somewhere in the world these characters exist, they have been flash frozen just at the right moment where their faces are dead pan stuck in "WTF".

Reading this book is like taking a pill that carves out your gut and fills it with the precise moments when people will tell their therapists "This is why I am who I am". There is not a single 'happy' story in the lot, though I would not refer to them as unhappy. They are just..

Just.. Strongly suggested reading, even for folks who hate short stories.

FYI- I believe the weakest story in the collection was pertaining to a turtle under court orders to have shared custody for divorcees and the eclectic and F*ed up owners, but only because someone needed to own a firearm to bring true closure to that story.

Strongest? Every other story ;)

---

Disclosure- This review is based off a free copy provided by the author. The author was kind enough to write a book that deserved a great review. Had it been crap, rest assured, I would be vocal about it. I kinda can't help it. It is human nature to complain more than we praise. Glass half empty, please add coffee.