Blair's Reviews > White Dialogues

It’s difficult to assign a star rating to this; at points I felt it was giving me exactly what I’m always looking for in a short story collection, but at other points my interest collapsed and/or the stories weren’t to my taste at all. Opening story ‘House-sitting’, about a man increasingly gripped by creeping paranoia as he stays in a forest cabin, is excellent, as is the closer, ‘White Dialogues’, a sort of ontological horror story in which horrible significance is assigned to the words mouthed by background extras in scenes from films by Hitchcock. Naturally, I also loved a story called ‘Ekphrases’, describing numerous imaginary works created ‘at the edge of death’; and also ‘The Bookcase’, about a man who destroys his own reputation and relationship by retelling a ‘funny’ personal story on a podcast.

The language is surprising and playful, often explicitly so (in ‘House-sitting’, the protagonist rearranges the letters of the titular word until he gets an apparent statement of intention: I unghost site). The book plays with recurring themes: broadly, a person being consumed by events in their imagination; more specifically, the idea of horror of one’s own reflection is repeatedly revisited, and two separate stories (including another standout, ‘Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute’) seem to retell the tale of a boy with a debilitating fear of dogs. A few of the others, especially ‘Destroy All Monsters’ and ‘Radical Closure’, take a particular approach – a Nicholson Baker-esque attention to the minutest detail of a situation – which I personally find soporific. At these points I found myself skimming over whole passages. I also found a few jaunts into fantasy, such as ‘City of Wolfmen’, unsatisfying.

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